Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part IV: A Theory of Copyright and Games
This is Part IV of my 3-part series on Hasbro's suit against the creators of Scrabulous. See Part I ("The Complaint"), Part II ("The Mystery of Alfred Mosher Butts"), and Part III ("The Question of the Copyrightability of Games").
In my last post, I asked what the purpose of the traditional blackletter rule that "games are not copyrightable" is. That's the rule that has Hasbro pointing to registrations in the game board, the rules, the player's dictionary -- everywhere except Scrabble itself. One common response is that the traditional rule reflects the exclusions from copyrightability contained in § 102(b) of the Copyright Act -- four or five of which delineate the boundary between patents and copyrights. In Part III, I questioned that common assumption; it is not apparent to me that games per se fall within any of the exclusions, unless the exclusions are made so broad that clearly copyrightable works such as music and plays fall within the exception. (I've received some fascinating feedback on that issue on and offline.)
Indeed, I ended by noting the various similarities between games, music, and plays. All are "played" by "players" following the instructions -- "rules," if you will -- they are given. What's the justification for a rule that says that one of these forms of entertainment is not copyrightable, but the other two are? The answer is to move away from the exclusions of § 102(b) and focus instead on the scope of copyright in § 102(a). Games are not copyrightable because the nature of the transmission of information from creator to audience is importantly different compared to music and plays. Copyright does not reach the core of the gaming experience in the same way it reaches the core of the musical or play-watching experience.
Continue reading "Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part IV: A Theory of Copyright and Games"
Posted by Bruce Boyden on August 6, 2008 at 06:40 PM in Intellectual Property | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
Finnis on Endorsing Religious Discrimination
John Finnis has written a short, strange essay defending the charming position that Western countries should exclude and expel Muslim immigrants through a “humane” combination of incentives and compensation (I assume for forced removal). There are at least four strange things about Finnis’s defense. The first is that Finnis does not seek to justify the position he seeks to defend, but rather to show that others are implicitly committed to the factual claim underlying it: that Islam and its adherents are inherently hostile to the human rights of others. This is because Finnis is not responding to the criticism that his position is wrong, but rather to the criticism that his position is a form of “extreme” or “hate speech.” Now, a position is extreme in a normative sense if it is unjustified by or is an overreaction to the situation it is meant to address, if it is an excessive or disproportionate response to a given problem. A position is extreme in a sociological sense if it falls far outside of the mainstream of public opinion, if it is not widely held by ordinary or reputable or reasonable people. Finnis makes no effort to show that his position is not extreme in the normative sense; he is only concerned with showing that it is not extreme in the sociological sense.
The second strange thing about Finnis’s paper is that he argues that his position follows, not from facts about the world, but from claims about the world to which certain courts have committed themselves in three controversial cases. Finnis references Begum v. Denbigh High School, a U.K. case upholding a school dress code that permitted the hijab but not the jilbab; Sahin v. Turkey, a E.Ct.H.R. case upholding the decision of the Turkish Constitutional Court to strike down a law permitting the hijab in universities; and Refah Partisi v. Turkey, another E.Ct.H.R. case upholding the decision of the Turkish Constitutional Court to ban the ruling Welfare Party for undermining Turkish secularism. We’re all used to legal arguments resting on court opinions, but it’s unusual to see a public policy argument defended in this way. Still more strangely, Finnis cites Begum not as persuasive authority but precisely because he finds its reasoning unpersuasive: he does not rely on Begum for what it says about the world, but rather on what would have to be true about the world for the decision to be legally correct. The Begum Court actually says that Denbigh High “had decided that a uniform policy was in the general interests of the school and then tried to devise a uniform which satisfied as many people as possible and took into account their different religions,” and that this was a proportionate response deserving of judicial deference. Finnis says the result “seems right” but thinks that U.K. law permits a restriction on religious freedom only where strictly necessary to protect public order or the religious freedom of others. Since, Finnis reasons, the jilbab ban could only be necessary to protect the freedom of others if the jilbab manifests a “religious culture” that is inherently hostile to such freedoms, the U.K. Court is implicitly committed to the claim that Islam is such a religious culture. Three quick points here: (i) maybe the law requiring strict necessity is wrong and the U.K. Court was right to (explicitly) endorse the view that restrictions on religious expression in public schools should be reviewed under a more relaxed standard; (ii) that someone is implicitly committed to something doesn’t make it true, so Finnis hasn’t defended his position from the charge of normative extremism; and (iii) it’s not clear to me that Finnis has even defeated the charge of sociological extremism, because the fact that someone is implicitly committed to a proposition doesn’t mean that, once presented with that proposition, they would endorse it rather than modify their other views to preserve overall coherence among their beliefs.
Continue reading "Finnis on Endorsing Religious Discrimination "
Posted by Adil Haque on August 6, 2008 at 09:06 AM in Law and Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Exercise in a Pill
It's a pleasure to be back for another guest stint at Prawfs. I bring to your attention an article in last week's NYT. It describes recently published research on drugs that seem to mimic or augment the beneficial effects of exercise with little or no actual exercise required:
Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.
A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.
If such drugs are safe and effective in humans, they hold out the promise that we may be able to get the positive health effects of exercise without much exercise. Millions of people who go to the gym every morning could instead spend their limited time doing something else. Yet, one detects from the article a hesitation to embrace that possibility. People seem much more eager to play up the possibility that the drug will "help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems like diabetes that are improved with exercise."
There are probably many reasons for this. For example, researchers may focus on drugs that treat the sorts of medical conditions for which the FDA is likely to grant approval. Similarly, perhaps it is easier (ironically) to get research grants to treat specific medical diseases rather than conditions that affect the entire population of healthy people. I suspect though, that there is a general discomfort in supporting drugs that are meant to enhance human performance rather than serve as a therapy for some disorder. Aside from concerns about safety, though, it's hard to see why. People seem to take too seriously the adage, "No pain, no gain." Sure, if you like the positive psychological effects of actual exercise, go ahead and exercise. But if you don't, feel free to embrace the possibility that, some day in the still distant future, you won't have to.
Posted by Adam Kolber on August 6, 2008 at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Questions on Paper Assignments
I’m teaching an advanced criminal procedure course this Spring. This course is not subject to our school’s usual grading curve, so I’m planning to require an academic paper instead of giving an exam. I haven’t assigned an academic paper in a course previously, but I believe I have seen other professors set schedules in paper courses, where students must propose paper topics and submit drafts before the final paper is due at the end of the semester. I should have 24 students in my course. Any advice out there on how to structure this paper assignment throughout the semester for a class of this size? For instance, how early in the semester do people require paper topics to be identified, since students may not know whether they want to choose a topic we won’t cover until later in the semester? How many drafts do you require students to submit prior to the final draft? Do some people grade one or more drafts during the semester in addition to the final draft? Does anyone simply provide adequate instructions for the paper assignment and a due date, and leave students to their own initiative from there?
Posted by Brooks Holland on August 5, 2008 at 05:55 PM in Teaching Law | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part III: The Question of the Copyrightability of Games
In Part I of this series, "The Complaint," I considered Hasbro's complaint in its suit against the creators of Scrabulous, with a particular focus on the copyright claim. In Part II, "The Mystery of Alfred Mosher Butts," I discussed a potential historical problem with that claim, namely that it is not clear that the board was published by Butts, the original author, with the required copyright notice, which would invalidate the copyright in at least the game board (Hasbro's strongest claim).
Today I want to focus on the rule that's forcing Hasbro to locate its copyright in the game board, rules, tile set, Scrabble dictionary, etc. -- everywhere except the Scrabble game itself. To wit: "Games are not copyrightable." See Nimmer on Copyright, § 2.18[H][3][a] (citing sources). Why is that the rule, and does it make any sense?
Posted by Bruce Boyden on August 5, 2008 at 05:55 PM in Intellectual Property | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Boycott at AALS?
I'm vacationing in British Columbia (beautiful!) and was, for much of the last week, camping and climbing on Mt. Rainier (I am disappointed to say that I failed to summit this year), so I've been for a while under the closest thing one can get these days to a news blackout. I recently emerged, though, to learn that "[o]rganizations representing thousands of legal educators say they will boycott the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in January if it is held at a San Diego hotel owned by a foe of same-sex marriage." (Go here and here for some Mirror of Justice posts on the issue.)
It appears that the concern animating the threatened boycott is not that the hotel discriminates against gays and lesbians; it is, instead, that the hotel's owner -- described by the National Law Journal as a "devout Catholic" -- donated money to support California's Proposition 8. In the Journal story, Villanova's Louis Sirico, "chairman of the AALS Section on Legal Writing, Research and Reasoning, said that if the AALS does not move the meeting, his group will not attend events at the hotel. 'It's a matter of principle,' he said. 'We just don't believe in this kind of discrimination.'"
Continue reading "Boycott at AALS?"
Posted by Rick Garnett on August 5, 2008 at 05:16 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (1)
"I'm bored."
Whenever I have heard these words from my older daughter, I dutifully have responded by trying to motivate her to find productive ways not to be bored. Apparently, though, I instead could respond, "That's OK, sweetheart, it's just your internal SPAM filter kicking in." Ah, if only my own parents could have understood ...
Posted by Brooks Holland on August 5, 2008 at 03:51 PM in Culture, Odd World | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Auctioning Airport Access
Anyone who has flown into a New York airport knows that getting stuck in a traffic jam is not just a problem for ground transportation. Moreover, the ripple effects of New York delays make them a national concern. In response, the Department of Transportation has proposed auctioning slots for landing and take-off at some of the country's busiest airports, as a recent New York Times article reports. Port Authority, the owner and operator of the airports, just made a proposal to block these auctions by excluding airlines that use an auctioned slot.
I'm intrigued by this story in part because auctions seem to be touted as the free market solution to sometimes intractable problems. I wonder if the romance with auctions sometimes masks thornier issues of allocation and, in this case, agency power. As I suggested in my post last week, "Markets for Space in Law School Classes", sometimes auctions are just one of several possible market solutions or even an alternative to an existing market. In the NYU law students case, students generated an informal market in classroom slots. The reason to replace it with an auction system was not because the auction was the only market solution. Instead, it was likely because of concerns with fair access and a law school's policing of student activity. In the airline case, some market in slots may already exist: the Port Authority talks about slots that airlines acquire from each other by "sale, trade, lease or transfer transaction." So the question is not what is the one market solution. The big underlying question may simply be who gets the money.
It's also worth keeping an eye out for litigation, which will likely raise messy questions about the relative powers of these agencies. The list of players (and potential litigants) is large, and includes the airline carriers, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Congress, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration. Some directions for litigation are suggested by the Port Authority's notice of proposed action, which sometimes reads like a legal brief. It considers the auction plan illegal absent congressional authority and claims "proprietary right and responsibility to allocate gate and terminal facilities." The Senate has also stepped in, with a provision of the transportation appropriations bill that would ban slot auctions. Keep tuned.
Posted by Verity Winship on August 5, 2008 at 01:18 PM in Corporate | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
Two Conceptions of Proportionality
George Fletcher and Jens David Ohlin have co-authored a new book arguing that the international law regulating the use of force by states should be informed by domestic criminal law regulating the use of force by individuals. Their central argument is that the U.N. Charter should be read to incorporate the French criminal law doctrine of “legitimate defense”, which encompasses both self-defense and defense of others, in part because such a reading permits the defense of other states as well as national groups within other states without Security Council authorization. They also argue that international law should follow the MPC and allow the use of force if “immediately necessary on the present occasion” to eliminate a threat that is inevitable but not imminent. These positions are debatable but I want to focus on one area regarding which I think the authors misapply domestic criminal law concepts to the international context.
Fletcher and Ohlin observe that in domestic criminal law self-defense and necessity involve two very different conceptions of proportionality. The permissive conception of proportionality which derives from the law of self-defense allows one to inflict a greater harm on an attacker to avoid a lesser harm to a victim so long as the two harms do not differ too much in relative seriousness (for instance, we may kill to prevent a rape). The restrictive conception of proportionality which derives from the law of necessity requires an impartial balancing of the wrong to an innocent person that one proposes to commit against the harm to others that one would thereby prevent. Fletcher and Ohlin argue that the more permissive conception of proportionality should govern the killing of civilians (p.100) as necessary side-effects of direct attacks on legitimate military targets. But this seems badly wrong since the permissive conception was designed to govern the use of defensive force against attackers while the more restrictive conception was designed to govern the infringement of the rights of the innocent.
The authors write that “the action should be regarded as privileged because of the legitimacy of the dominant purpose” but it is hard to know what this could mean. A soldier’s actions are privileged in the sense of being immune from prosecution if and only if they are legal, so this conception of privilege can’t be used to establish the legality of an action. If the authors mean that the attack on the military target is privileged in the sense of being presumptively legal then this may be true, but only as true as saying that the use of defensive force against a wrongful aggressor is presumptively legal. By contrast, damage to civilians is presumptively illegal and in need of further justification just as infringements of the domestic law rights of the innocent are presumptively illegal and in need of further justification. The strange parallel the authors wish to draw, between criminal aggressors and innocent civilians, simply does not materialize.
Continue reading "Two Conceptions of Proportionality "
Posted by Adil Haque on August 5, 2008 at 09:21 AM in International Law | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
A Patent Lie
Paul Goldstein is a distinguished intellectual property scholar and author of both Copyright’s Highway, perhaps the best layman’s introduction to copyright law there is, and Goldstein on Copyright, one of the essential treatises for copyright experts. He’s also a mad prolific casebook author, and, if you believe the wrong sources, a crackerjack tennis player. But did you know he’s also a mystery novelist?
In fact, he writes—get this—intellectual property thrillers. His first novel, Errors and Omissions, managed to make Copyright Office paperwork the stuff of high drama. I enjoy a good murder mystery thriller as much as the next guy, but reading one in which my own area of the law plays such a prominent role is a special treat. In Errors and Omissions, New York City litigator Michael Seeley’s personal and professional lives are close to bottoming out when he reluctantly accepts an offer to go to Los Angeles and make some easy money certifiying the chain of title in the copyrights for a blockbuster movie series. As Seeley discovers, however, there’s something off about the sequence of assignments, and someone is more than willing to kill to clear up any clouds on the title.
Well, Michael Seeley is back, and the title of A Patent Lie tells you we’re not in copyright country anymore. (May I suggest “Naked License” as the title of the inevitable trademark thriller to follow?) Seeley has retreated to his hometown of Buffalo to lick his wounds; he’s calmly, if not happily, scratching out a two-bit practice when his estranged brother Leonard walks in the door with an offer Michael ultimately can’t refuse. Leonard’s biotech startup is suing a multinational Big Pharm for patent infringement on a potential blockbuster AIDS drug, the trial counsel has just jumped in front of a train, and someone needs to take his place. Once Michael arrives in San Francisco, however, he finds that nothing is right about this patent infringement case. He’ll need to deal with a second chair who seems to be trying to undermine his case, a client who won’t tell him key facts, an unlikely pretrial stipulation of priority, and, quite possibly, a murderer on the loose. How Seeley fits the pieces of the puzzle together is only half as interesting as how this seasoned litigator starts digging his way out of the hole he’s landed in.
A Patent Lie is not a perfect book. I generally like my mysteries to have at least two major conspiracies to disentangle; part of the fun is trying to figure which crimes and clues go with each other. A Patent Lie, however, has only one, quite large conspiracy, and while some of the conspirators are working at cross purposes, all of the secrets and doublecrosses flow ultimately from that single source. (Errors and Omissions was this way, too, but Goldstein did better there at keeping a few absolutely crucial details of it from the reader until the final chapters.) There’s also so much trial time that I never got much of a sense that Seeley was in serious danger. But on the whole—and especially if you’re an IP type—A Patent Lieis a great read. In addition to the cleverly handled trial at the center of the book and the remarkably cynical scheme behind it, it also conveys a wonderfully rich sense of melancholy. This is a novel about broken families, failed dreams, and the lawyer’s virtue of always, always soldiering on.
Posted by James Grimmelmann on August 5, 2008 at 08:32 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
More against the Judge-Umpire Analogy
Some recent discussion of the analogies between judges and umpires (or other sports officials) over the past few days at the Volokh Conspiracy (here, here, here, and here) and Erike Lilliquist at CoOp (here). Ilya Somin calls the analogy "a good shorthand way of emphasizing the judge's duty to set aside his policy preferences and be impartial between litigants."
I continue to believe that the analogy is worthless. First, Ilya defends it as shorthand for decisional neutrality and impartiality, responding to a particular use of the analogy by Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry E. Smith (Ilya's former judge) to explain why judges should not call balls and strikes based on which team is his favorite. But while true, we do not need the analogy for that--it seems obvious that no decisionmaker should reach conclusions based on the identity of the parties rather than the applicable rules.
Second, my disagreement with the metaphor is not that umpiring is simple and obvious while judging is complex and demands interpretation. As Ilya and Erik (in an very detailed post) both point out, there are all sorts of ways in which sports officials exercise a lot of discretion. This is especially true of choices between enforcing rules as written or in a more practical manner grounded in the game's realities and evolution and in applicable "unwritten" (Common Law?) rules that have become part of the rule set (Erik uses examples of the "neighborhood rule" on tag plays and double plays in baseball). So the analogy really becomes "a judge is like an umpire/referee because both must make difficult decisions, often requiring the exercise of discretion and the accumulation of different legal authorities, and must develop an interpretive methodology for doing so." But if that is it, then the analogy again does no work. Why are sports officials particularly illustrative of this principle, as opposed to any other decision maker? I could say the same thing about my decision whether to give my daughter a time-out.
Ultimately, the analogy (at least as used by Chief Justice Roberts in his confirmation hearings, the most recent and well-known use) is based on a (deliberate, I think) oversimplication of umpiring--the notion that an umpire "simply" calls balls and strikes and it is obvious which is which--and an effort to make judging look similarly simple and straightforward. Thus, the analogy is worthless precisely because judging and umpiring are both complex, interpretive endeavors. The analogy is accurate but it serves no meaningful illustrative or rhetorical function.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 5, 2008 at 08:00 AM in Culture, Legal Theory | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)
Monday, August 04, 2008
Why tax entities?
Over at Conglomerate this week, they're discussing Heather Field's fine and ambitious new paper, "Checking in on Check the Box." One of the many tough questions Heather takes on is whether there should be a separate layer of tax for entities -- that is, whether we should tax corporations at all. (In contrast, partnerships and certain small corporations are generally not taxed directly -- their equity holders pay tax as individuals on their share of profits). Corporate tax is complicated, as the intricacy of Heather's other arguments shows, and most economists would tell you the corporate tax inefficiently influences business decisions. So why bother? It's hard to improve on the work Reuven Avi-Yonah has done on this, but let me throw out a couple of other possibilities.
(Ok, this is tax greek central, but you'll find it strangely interesting, I promise. Go ahead and click for more...)
Continue reading "Why tax entities?"
Posted by BDG on August 4, 2008 at 09:40 PM in Corporate | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Laws of War and Norm Entrepreneurs
Hello out there and thanks to my colleague Dan for inviting me for another guest stint on Prawfs Blawg.
This past Thursday, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, a prosecutor at the Office of Military Commissions, was kind enough to speak at FSU Law School as part of a Human Rights and National Security Series hosted by the FSU Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. In particular, Lt. Col. Couch focused his talk on his decision to refuse to prosecute Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay suspected of having ties to the Hamburg cell of Al-Qaeda. Based on his belief that Slahi had been subject to torture, he decided that the evidence acquired after such enhanced interrogation techniques was unreliable.
A few things about Lt Col Couch's speech stuck out to me. The first was that his reliance on faith to describe his moral compass in this situation sounded very similar to the more secular perspective on human rights I teach in my laws of war class. His belief in the inherent dignity of man came at least partly from a religious perspective, but was also couched in the language and framework of international law and international norms. I thought his behavior and his speech was valuable evidence of the way in which international law and norms are both shaped by and in turn shape domestic actors. While many in the audience seemed to come from a different starting point, such language and ideas seemed to provide common ground.
Continue reading "Laws of War and Norm Entrepreneurs"
Posted by Lesley Wexler on August 4, 2008 at 02:19 PM in International Law | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Happy to be Back ...
For another stint of guest-blogging at PrawfsBlawg, having just returned from a long weekend in Seattle, where we visited the the Olympic Sculpture Park for the first time. It's a really wonderful combination of outdoor art display, urban park, and beach, all within walking distance of fun areas of Seattle. Highly recommended.
Today it's time to return to work, however, as my faculty today holds our annual re-admission meeting, where we vote on academically dismissed students' petitions to return to school. I struggle with this assignment just about every year. We of course have specific criteria by which these petitions are judged, and most petitions are pretty straightforward. But invariably one or more petitions require us to revisit the purpose behind our criteria: What should the goals of a law school be when reviewing petitions for readmission? To ensure the greatest opportunity for students to complete the legal education on which we started them, even if some percentage of these returned students will fail yet again? To weed out stragglers to maintain or enhance the prestige of the legal profession, or our school, even at the expense of some dismissed students who, with another chance, could graduate and develop into good lawyers? Some other purpose?
Posted by Brooks Holland on August 4, 2008 at 01:30 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part II: The Mystery of Alfred Mosher Butts
In Part I of this series, I reviewed the Hasbro complaint against RJ Softwares and the Agarwalla brothers, the creators of Scrabulous, and noted that the strongest copyright claim appears to be for infringement of Scrabble's copyrighted game board. Indeed, given the Boisson v. Banian Ltd. case from the Second Circuit, Hasbro would have a pretty strong case, except for just one thing: Alfred Mosher Butts.
Continue reading "Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part II: The Mystery of Alfred Mosher Butts"
Posted by Bruce Boyden on August 4, 2008 at 12:43 PM in Intellectual Property | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Lineuppers vs. Sidezoomers
I quite enjoyed this little article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine on the age-old debate: when entering an exit lane on the freeway, are you a polite but angrily norm-enforcing "lineupper," or one of those damned "sidezoomers" who takes advantage of the empty line to cut in at the last minute? I could have done without the extremely annoying writing style, which takes far too much advantage of the vertical pronoun, but the subject itself is terrific.
For the record: I am a lineupper, and the dents on the side of my car attest to my willingness to defend my line against latecomers. Give me an uncrowded straightaway and I am more than happy to go extremely fast; but come exit time, my Canadian nature emerges fully fledged, with a bit of bite. Thus are our norms enforced.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 4, 2008 at 09:17 AM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
More on Critical Mass and the Role of Video
The videotaped assault at last month's Critical Mass ride by a rookie NYPD officer against a rider has become a singularly perfect illustration of the many effects of video evidence, good and bad, on civil-rights enforcement that I analyze in my hopefully-soon-to-be-submitted paper. As of this morning, the video had been viewed more than 1.3 million times since it was posted to You Tube last Monday (three days after the ride).
So here are four aspects of video, which I discuss in the paper, that clearly are in play in this incident.
First, the initial post and some excellent comments already considered the primary issue of how this video, seemingly very favorable to the citizen's version of events and unfavorable to the officer's, may be used as evidence at any civil or criminal trial (including a likely perjury prosecution against the officer). And of particular interest to me is how it might be used on summary judgment in the inevitable civil-rights suit, particularly on a motion by the plaintiff for summary judgment, which would force the defendant officer to rebut a video that, one might argue, "plainly contradicts" the officer's testimony, just as the video in Scott plainly contradicted the plaintiff's testimony.
Continue reading "More on Critical Mass and the Role of Video"
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 4, 2008 at 07:19 AM in Article Spotlight, Constitutional thoughts, Current Affairs, Law and Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Corporate charter competition through the mirror
Why don't non-profit firms reincorporate in other states? We know, of course, that states compete to offer the most enticing set of corporate law rules (along with fees for incorporating) to for-profit firms, who can "charter" in any state. There's a long-standing debate about what drives the competition -- is it market pressure for efficient rules, producing a "race to the top" for the best state laws, or something else, such as self-serving managers? I tend to agree with Bebchuk and others that the second story makes more sense, given available evidence.
But how can we reconcile this result with the fact that (as OSU's Garry Jenkins described last year) non-profit firms do not appear to shop around for favorable state laws? The efficient market hypothesis looks like a much better description of the non-profit sector. After all, non-profit managers can be just as self-serving as managers in for-profit firms. Unless there's something a lot different about the non-profit sector we're overlooking, it seems like the absence of charter competition undermines the managerial rents story. Plus, n/p's aren't as subject to market pressures, so the absence of competition in that sector is consistent with the efficiency theory. Of course, there are lots of other things that are unique to the n/p sector that could explain the difference. More after the jump...
Continue reading "Corporate charter competition through the mirror"
Posted by BDG on August 3, 2008 at 09:45 PM in Corporate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Friday, August 01, 2008
More on Duke Lacrosse at SEALS: Updated and Moved to Top
Updated and moved to top:
Audio file is here. Download DukePanel0730.mp3
We held the panel on the Duke lacrosse controversy yesterday at SEALS. I thought it went very well, an excellent, vibrant discussion. We managed to hit almost all the points and issues I wanted to hit, although not necessarily in any expected order; in fact, we got knocked out of expected order after the first answer. We also had a nice crowd of about 40 people, not bad when you are competing against golf, tennis, and the Atlantic Ocean. I am having trouble uploading the audio file (I think it is too large a file--if anyone has suggestions or instructions, please comment), but will get it posted as soon as I can.
Some random thoughts that I take from this. First, we did this as a moderated conversation or dialogue among the speakers, with no individual or planned presentations. I echo Steve's sentiment in favor of this type of program rather than seriatim presentations of papers that people have not read. That is especially true at a conference such as SEALS, which has so much going on. And if the idea is to generate a meaningful conversation, it is much easier to do that if you have a full hour-and-a-half of interactive engagement, rather than 20 minutes at the end of the panel.
Second, the one major thing we did not get to discuss are the two pending lawsuits against Duke and Durham and its officials (ironically, since these lawsuits are what started me down this road in the first place) and the idea of using civil litigation to gain compensation and remedy of misconduct within the criminal justice system. But I spoke with an audience member afterwards about doing a follow-up at next SEALS, focusing on these post hoc remedial issues and whatever develops with them in the next year.
Third, and entirely unrelated: Having successfully recorded a large-room discussion, including people who were not miced and who were not right by the recorded, and now that I can get the MP3 file uploaded to a blog, I am convinced that my solution will be to ban laptops rom the classroom, record the class, and make the file available on the course blog. Anyone who wants or needs to transcribe the class for her notes can listen to the audio. Meanwhile, their full attention is on the class discussion as it occurs. I saw this suggestion made by a commenter on one of the many recent blog and e-mail discussions on this (I cannot remember which one) and immediately liked it because it can be pitched as the equivalent of a deposition or day of trial--you cannot sit at a computer and transcribe things as they go; you have to be engaged in the conversation and taking short, quick notes, knowing that you will get a transcript and/or a recording in a couple of days.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 1, 2008 at 09:15 PM in Current Affairs, Life of Law Schools, Teaching Law | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)
Hola
Greetings again to the Prawfs audience, this time from amidst a pile of cardboard boxes in our nation's capital. Of the two or three readers who remember my first stint, one or two may recall that Dan urged me not to blog about tax, notwithstanding the indisputable success of other tax bloggers (scroll down to "best post ever"). I guess I can see his point. I mean, sure, tax pays for, y'know, everything, but do we really care about how the rules work? Yeah, there's questions about justice, but surely there is no concept of justice unique to tax, is there?
So, in short, I plan to ignore Dan's request, but fear not, loyal reader (s?). Tax is a capacious field. I'll be blogging this time around mostly about federalism, politics, non-profit organizations, and the relationships between the three. Thanks for stopping by.
Posted by BDG on August 1, 2008 at 04:09 PM in Housekeeping | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Markets for Space in Law School Classes
Apparently NYU law students have developed an informal market for space in law school classes. As reported in a recent New York Post story, some students have posted offers of cash and other goods in return for class spots. According to new NYU registration guidelines, the practice of "ad hoc add-drop" with no waiting list forced law students to "troll for open spots or arrange late-night trades with friends." My first reaction is that ability to pay should definitely not affect class access. And I assume that angle is what got the Post's attention, as suggested by the somewhat cryptic headline, "NYU Law's Classless $wapfest." (The article also suggested that other non-cash types of currency were proposed, although the students interviewed said these were just jokes.) So, should students be able to trade goods or cash for class spots?
The Post story notes that the registration process is changing in 2009-10, but leaves out the fact that NYU Law's new system also creates a market for classes. The system drops the lottery system in favor of an auction in which students bid points for class spots. In addition to popularity of subject matter (the Post article listed Environmental Law and Capital Punishment), I wonder if down the line the information from this system will rival student evaluations as a way of gauging how much a student is willing to pay for the various classes and professors. Is this auction system a current trend? Is it a good idea?
Posted by Verity Winship on August 1, 2008 at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part I: The Complaint
So Hasbro finally pulled the trigger on the Scrabulous lawsuit that, no doubt, their lawyers (Patterson Belknap) have been working on for months. The New York Times Bits Blog has coverage, Mike Madison has an interesting high-level view, and IPTAblog has the complaint. This case is in a sweet spot for me in terms of research and teaching interests: games, copyright, and litigation. So I'm going to celebrate with a 3-post series on the Scrabulous case.
Copyright claims involving games are fascinating because of the often-stated but rarely explained blackletter rule: "Games are not copyrightable." Why is that the rule, and how does Hasbro get around it? The second question turns out to be much easier to answer than the first, so I’m going to tackle them in reverse order. In this post I’ll break down Hasbro’s copyright claim into its constituent bits, offering predictions about the likely and doctrinally most coherent outcomes. (Those are not the same things.) Hasbro also has trademark claims, which may be somewhat stronger, but I’ll mostly leave those to others. In Part II (Monday), I'll delve into a minor mystery, flagged in the complaint, that involves the copyright registrations for the game. In Part III (Tuesday), I’ll return to the blackletter rule and consider the justification for it, a subject I find enormously interesting and which is the basis for a paper I’ve been working on for some time.
Today's bottom line: The copyright in Scrabble is surprisingly weak, although if I had to bet, I would bet on Hasbro to win.
Continue reading "Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part I: The Complaint"
Posted by Bruce Boyden on August 1, 2008 at 02:07 PM in Intellectual Property | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)
Garfieldlessness
Two years ago that seem like two decades, I wrote a Prawfs post about the Nietzsche Family Circus, then the internet fad du jour, and still a phenomenon that gets linked on blogs worldwide daily (so its creators tell me). The present-day incarnation of the NFC is Garfield Minus Garfield (“G-G” for short), a site that takes Garfield cartoons and removes from them their protagonist feline, leaving only the cat’s loser owner, Jon. The result is astounding; all of a sudden, an unfunny, dated comic strip becomes a dark (and hilarious) feature about a lonely, possibly insane man. (NB: there is another variant of G-G that predated it, and which leaves Garfield in but eliminates his thought-dialogue. I think the latter is actually funnier. See if you agree.) Does this have anything to do with law? I actually think so. Three thoughts below the fold.
Continue reading "Garfieldlessness"
Posted by Dave_Fagundes on August 1, 2008 at 12:13 PM in Culture, Intellectual Property | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
FSU Law Ranks Very Highly on the New Leiter Methodology
It may not please Jason in terms of what he's trying to measure in the race to the top, but according to Jim Rossi, our fearless number-crunching Associate Dean for Research, Florida State's College of Law compares quite favorably on the new Leiter Rankings methodology.
Jim reports: "we seem to fall right around [Leiter's] cut-off for the top 20, right behind Minnnesota (which has an average of 200), but a) this is based on numbers [Rossi] ran [yesterday] and b) [Rossi] really don't know how many other schools are in the same general ballpark since Minnesota is the lowest ranking school [Leiter] reports for the most recent citation numbers." Please let me know if Rossi is missing anything here. We'll be happy to correct it. And if you're a school who wants to run numbers similar to the setup below, then please feel free to share the stats in the comments as they appear in the table below with the date the stats were performed.
Name Total Cites Post-2000 Cites
in JLR in JLR
frederick /2 abbott 659 463
rob /2 atkinson 413 205
barbara /2 banoff 117 80
donna /2 christie 100 65
robin /2 craig 219 139
joseph /2 dodge 473 356
dino /2 falaschetti 7 5
steven /2 gey 681 287
elwin /2 griffith 93 64
adam /2 hirsch 380 269
tahirih /2 lee 118 70
wayne /2 logan 311 187
david /2 markell 272 189
gregg /2 polsky 116 85
david f /2 powell 8 7
jim /2 rossi 552 343
j.b. /2 ruhl 943 558
mark /2 seidenfeld 690 411
nat /2 stern 173 77
fernando /2 teson 490 218
manuel /2 utset 143 87
donald /2 weidner 263 171
==============================
Average 328.23 197.09
Posted by Administrators on August 1, 2008 at 10:04 AM in Funky FSU | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
Rotations
It's the beginning of August -- and with it some rotations on the Prawfs guest list. This month we're excited to welcome to Prawfs for the first time Verity Winship, a VAP at Cardozo who teaches civ pro and corporations, and is the author of the forthcoming article, tentatively titled, Fair Funds and the Compensation Conundrum.
Let me also welcome back to the conversation our friends: Adil Haque (a rising crim prawf at Rutgers Newark); my beloved FSU colleagues, Lesley Wexler (public int'l law) and Brian "He's funny for a tax guy" Galle (visiting at Georgetown this year); Brooks Holland (crim at Gonzaga); James Grimmelmann (law and technology at NYLS); Bruce Boyden (IP at Marquette); and Adam Kolber (law and neuroethics/crim, San Diego, visiting at Brooklyn this fall).
Finally, a big thanks to all our guests for July, some of whom may linger a bit longer. We look forward to having you back.
Posted by Administrators on August 1, 2008 at 07:29 AM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Obama v. McCain: No one is leading because the game has not started yet
I have tried not to get caught up in the horse-race analysis of the presidential election at this point so as not to drive myself nuts, but I cannot help myself. I find myself checking lefty political blogs (mainly Huffington Post, TPM, and Kevin Drum) and a good new lefty poll-analysis and projection site. The constant story, besides criticism of the MSM, is the narrative, based on polls, that Obama is "winning" and McCain is "losing" and the question is by how much and whether Obama should be leading by more and who is gaining or losing ground (constant theme: Obama leads, but not by enough, so every poll showing a close race is "good news" for McCain). McCain played into this a few weeks ago by insisting that he was going to make a big comeback and pull the election out forty-eight hours before Election Day.
My thought when I read that was "No, you're going to pull it out (or not pull it out) on Election Day." Prior to that, you are not leading or trailing or coming back or blowing a lead. There is nothing to lead or trail in until the polls open at 7 a.m. on Election Day and people actually begin casting votes; prior to that point, "the game" has not started. Compare it to the Super Bowl. There are two weeks of wall-to-wall coverage leading up to the game, talking about who has advantages over whom and why and how the game likely would play out, one team is installed as a "favorite" over the other (sometimes, as in this past game, a prohibitive favorite), and pundits predict who is going to win when the game finally is played. But for all that noise, at kick-off the score is 0-0. The Giants can claim a lot from their win in the last Super Bowl; "coming from behind" because all the stories prior to kick-off predicted a New England victory is not one of them. Nor would we say the Patriots "blew" a big lead because they were early favorites.
So why is that any less true of elections?
Continue reading "Obama v. McCain: No one is leading because the game has not started yet"
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 1, 2008 at 07:14 AM in Current Affairs, Law and Politics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Are previously "under-taught" course now more taught in law school?
For my sign-off post to finish a month of sporadic guest-blogging, I thought I might return to a topic that I covered in a prior guest stint in this post, titled "What course is most "under-taught" in law school?". That post generated lots of interesting suggestions, including:
- Sentencing Law (my suggestion)
- Disability Law
- Information Privacy Law
- Enforcement proceedings
- Remedies
- Insurance Law
- Conflicts / Choice of Law
- Limited Liability Companies
- White-Collar Crime
- Legal History
- and all sort of transactional law
I seriously doubt that, three years later, many (or any) of these course are more taught now than they were three years ago when I asked this question initially. That said, there has been lots of talk in recent years about law school teaching reform (as highlighted at Law School Innovation and elsewhere), but most of this talk has been about teaching methods rather than teaching substance.
Whether you like or dislike recent trends in law school teaching, I would love to hear another round or reactions to the question I put out way-back-when: What legal topic do you think should develop into an upper-level elective offered at most or all law schools in the coming years?
Posted by Douglas A. Berman on July 31, 2008 at 06:01 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)
On Workshop Formats
I just workshopped two different papers in two different formats -- and had some ruminations on their differences. One was an "incubator" workshop for works-in-progress at Hofstra (called Prawfsfest!, whose name gives me the creeps, I confess) and the other was an online Junior Scholars Workshop at The Glom for essentially complete papers.
Privacy vs. Publicity: The Hofstra workshop was private. There were about 12 people talking about the papers in a small room, in person. Although what was said was not confidential, neither was the conversation recorded or blogged about for all to see. There was an informality to the comments as we went around the room talking about each paper. By contrast, all that was said yesterday at The Glom was available for the universe to see (though some people sent me private nitpicky comments). I had to maintain some informality in reply because people were at me from all angles in a short span of time; but the publicity of the format encouraged at least four formal responses that were posted online. Both were useful to my work but I certainly felt the need to be more defensive when my paper was being criticized publicly.
Author Responses: At Hofstra, the presumption was that the paper author was there only to listen, not to defend or reply. This is remarkably hard but remarkably useful. When you know you can't respond, after you are done boiling for a few minutes, you actually listen. If I was being publicly skewered, I probably would have just burst -- hey, I have my own blog to respond! -- but the privacy of the venue helped make that strategy work. So, too, The Glom couldn't really expect authors to shut up. But I wonder if I didn't spend most of my time in that workshop getting defensive. Indeed, I re-read my paper last night with the hope of re-working material in light of what was said and kept thinking to myself: "I can't believe s/he made that comment; the answer is right here on page X!" As I incorporated changes from the Hofstra conference, by contrast, I rarely felt that way. But this may just be my psychology -- and the Hofstra paper is still being refined for submission, whereas The Glom paper is already slated for publication.
Continue reading "On Workshop Formats"
Posted by Ethan Leib on July 31, 2008 at 12:10 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Thursday Morning Randomness: On the Naming of Supreme Court Cases
I once heard a story, although I forget from whom, about why Bush v. Gore is captioned "Bush v. Gore." After all, the particular lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court was captioned "Gore v. Harris" in the Florida state courts, since it was an attempt to contest Katherine Harris's certification of the election... according to the story, the Supreme Court's reporter of decisions -- Frank Wagner -- decided that the case "had" to be called Bush v. Gore, because that's really what it was. (In contrast, the Supreme Court's earlier per curiam decision sending the case back to the Florida courts was captioned "Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board.")
Anyway, this got me thinking about why we don't choose "appropriate" or "more accessible" case names for more major Supreme Court cases. After all, in the "old" days, it was common to do so -- just consider the Legal Tender Cases, the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Civil Rights Cases, the Chinese Exclusion Case, the Japanese Immigrant Case, the Selective Draft Law Cases, and the Gold Clause Cases, just to name a few, none of which are remembered by the names of the actual litigants, even where that's how they're memorialized in the U.S. Reports... (curiously, the Slaughterhouse and Civil Rights Cases are actually so captioned).
Why, except for Bush v. Gore, don't we do that anymore? Is Frank Wagner right (if the story is true) that cases should be captioned in a manner that makes them more publicly accessible whether or not it's a technically correct statement of the parties? If so, any suggestions for recent decisions of note?
Posted by Steve Vladeck on July 31, 2008 at 10:01 AM in Constitutional thoughts, Steve Vladeck | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
New Version of Retributive Damages up on SSRN
Just a note to highlight that there's a revised draft of my article, Retributive Damages, up on the funky new SSRN over here. The article, which sets out a normative theory defending punitive damages as an intermediate sanction from a retributivist perspective, is coming out in January 2009 in the Cornell Law Review. I just sent this new draft to the folks at Cornell. I also recently sent the draft to a bunch of the people whose work I cite, use or criticize to make sure they are happy with the way I've characterized their work. I probably left out some people, so if you find yourself in the paper or not in the paper but think you should be, I'd be most grateful for any suggestions to improve it.
As I think I've said here before, this paper is the first in a series on "retributive damages." I'm presenting the second one, Implementing Retributive Damages, tomorrow at 130pm at a SEALS panel I put together on trends in punishment and privatization. Also on the panel will be Prawfs' Jason Solomon, and Kenworthey Bilz (Northwestern), and Ric Simmons (Ohio State). Kenworthey will be discussing developments flowing from her work on the puzzle of delegated revenge, Ric will discuss themes from his work on "private criminal justice," and Jason will be talking about new developments in his revenge against the USNews rankings work in the civil recourse theory of tort law. Should be very exciting.
I should add parenthetically that it looks like, after the feedback I received at Prawfstra, I will probably be spinning off a short piece from the current version of Implementing Retributive Damages. The current working title of the spin-off is Pluralism and Punitive Damages after Philip Morris. Depending on dates, etc., I will be happy and grateful for the opportunity to come talk about any of these projects this coming year if you're looking to round out your faculty workshop series.
Posted by Administrators on July 31, 2008 at 08:53 AM in Article Spotlight, Criminal Law, Dan Markel, Retributive Damages, Torts | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Prawfstra! wrap up and happy hour reminder
Just a reminder for those of you here at the SEALS conference: we will have a happy hour at Stir in the Ritz tonight at 9pm.
With some degree of luck, it will be more successful than the happy hour we had scheduled in NYC last week, when, at around 8pm and after a delicious dinner at Crave, all the Prawfsfest! participants decided to pack it in after a long day of having their papers be Ristrophed, i.e., skewered with brio and grace. My apologies to anyone who showed up spontaneously--I was able to warn those who had RSVP'd beforehand.
In any event, many thanks again to our wonderful hosts at Hofstra, Deans Nora Demleitner and Michelle Wu, and Professors Katy Kuh, Bennett Capers, and Julian Ku. I'm also grateful to our presenters and observers -- Alice, Katy, Bennett, Julian, Ethan, Steve, Adam Kolber, Verity Winship, Mike Cahill, Michael O'Hear, Ekow Yankah, Adil Haque -- all of whom made it an extremely successful get together as we incubated papers in public law and legal theory. Thanks are also owed to Alice and Jameel, for introducing me to Brooklyn properly. And last, I give especial thanks to the Hofstra folks for the bucket of swag. I love a good emblazoned pen set!
The next Prawfsfest!s will be at UMiami in December, and at FSU and Southwestern in 2009.
Posted by Administrators on July 31, 2008 at 08:17 AM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The Glom Workshops Friends as Fiduciaries
In connection with the Fourth Annual Conglomerate Junior Scholars Workshop, people are talking about my article Friends as Fiduciaries today -- and I'm trying to respond all day. Long comments are up from Eric Goldman, Doug Moll, Curtis Bridgeman, and Brett McDonnell. You can comment or school me here.
Posted by Ethan Leib on July 30, 2008 at 12:09 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Race To The Top Project Begins
Over the last few weeks, I have been blogging about the possibility of creating a race to the top in legal education by using information on relative educational quality to fill out the U.S. News surveys of law professors, lawyers and judges. Based on the significant interest expressed by many of you, what started as a thought experiment is now turning to a real one.
So let me announce a new project, Race to the Top, which will provide information to U.S. News voters in the next few months, leading up to the November survey. Based on the public comments of deans in the past week, we are assuming that the proposed boycott will not materialize, but if it does, we will stay out of the way.
The project will be headed up by me and Mark Osler of Baylor Law School, who is a co-editor of the Law School Innovation blog. By September, we will have the site up and running at www.racetothetoplaw.com, which will be based in Jim Chen's Moneylaw/Jurisdynamics Network. I will be posting about the project again in October and November back here at Prawfs, with cross-posting at MoneyLaw, and Mark will be discussing it at Law School Innovation.
Continue reading "Race To The Top Project Begins"
Posted by Jason Solomon on July 30, 2008 at 10:46 AM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Picture a Port
The city that never sleeps – this is the motto of Tel-Aviv. When I am here, I am at home. I love everything about this city, the good and the bad, the new and the old, the beautiful and the ugly. It is a city full of paradoxes and chaotic developments and something for every soul. The Tel-Aviv University campus, itself marvelous, familial and inspiring, is where I am getting my summer projects done. But Tel-Aviv at large, and its port in particular, is what gets my heart racing. Picture a port, waves hitting high, that is alive every hour of the day. Fishermen, runners, bikers, yogis, tourists, a mix of families of Orthodox Jews, Jaffa Arabs, Recent Immigrant Russians, Galilee Druze (especially at the gourmet farmer’s market on Friday) and yuppie Tel-Avivian trendsetters. Just a sample of things to be found on the port: in addition to the dozens of restaurants and cafes, bars, jazz clubs, small concert venues, event hangars, (you can see at least one wedding going on every day of the week), there is an amazing yoga studio (ElhaYoga), with three different classes going on simultaneously, all with views of the Mediterranean (perhaps some of you may equally appreciate that yesterday Shlomo Artzi was there during my morning practice), fashion and apparel stores, a gymbouri style kids activities center, galleries, a women’s only sex shop (called “sisters”), several spas, a free outdoor gym that is designed like a children’s playground, a bookstore, and, right now, a temporary performance hall featuring dance by Bat-Sheva paired with a Japanese animation movie.
I have been writing about my love of Tel-Aviv in my head for a few weeks now and then, a few days ago, a NYT article about the city captured a lot of my feelings, albeit from the perspective of a tourist (Henry Alford) rather than a native (I always will be! - even if for some reason I increasingly get mistaken as a tourist). The article has snippets of muses such as “the fear of the future makes the present more vibrant” (quoting the talented young Israeli writer Etgar Keret) or “we order is an elegant column of four layers of ingredients that sound all wrong for each other — crabmeat, feta, dates, harissa peppers — but are in fact Il Divo of food. I order a gin and grapefruit juice, and the juice is fresh-squeezed. Happiness trickles through my body as my companion and I watch the sun slowly slip over the edge of the Mediterranean; I contemplate having a T-shirt made that says, “I’m with Esther.”
I plan to write more about Tel-Aviv University and its wonderful law faculty, the campus and the dilemmas of publishing in English or Hebrew, to a local or international audience. But for now, I wanted to share the beat of the city that never sleeps. Oh, yes – and there is a big international conference coming up (in English), Law and Society in December 24-26, 2008. It takes place in Jerusalem , but Tel-Aviv is only less than an hour away.
Posted by Orly Lobel on July 30, 2008 at 05:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
On Publishing and Professorial "Happiness"
One of the benefits of conferences like SEALS is the chance to have searching conversations with lots of folks you don't usually get to speak to, and then to reflect on those discussions. Here's one such reflection:
Increasingly, I've noticed that I tend to get introduced at conferences and the like as "prolific," a moniker that I believe the speaker usually intends as a positive -- as indicative of a productive scholar who writes a lot (and, to be fair, I do) in a discipline where publishing is generally valued above almost anything else, whether or not it should be.
But every now and then, folks ask me whether I think I publish "too much," which I take as asking whether I fear that the quality of what I publish is undermined by the quantity. Of course, I'm in no position to answer that question objectively, and would not dare to even try, save to point out that I'm not sure one could assume there is a negative correlation between quantity and quality without actually reading at least some of the writing...
Such questions do lead me, though, to reflect upon why I do what I do, including why, as I've discussed before, I am perhaps overeager in accepting symposium invitations and other chances to publish solicited papers, especially if, in the view of some, that's actually the mark of an un-careful scholar, and someone perhaps not to be taken as seriously...
Continue reading "On Publishing and Professorial "Happiness""
Posted by Steve Vladeck on July 29, 2008 at 04:58 PM in Blogging, Steve Vladeck, Teaching Law | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Duke Lacrosse at SEALS
Tomorrow I will be at SEALS, hosting and moderating a panel titled The Phases and Faces of the Duke Lacrosse Controversy. This will be a moderated conversation about the multiple facets, details, and issues of this still-ongoing legal controversy. Panelists include KC Johnson of Brooklyn College (author of a bestselling book on the case), James Coleman of Duke Law (who chaired a University committee that investigated the case), Michael Gerhardt of UNC Law, Lyrissa Lidsky of Florida Law, and Angela Davis of American/Washington College.
I hope to have an audio file to post here later in the week and the proceedings will be published in the Seton Hall Journal of Sports and Entertainment. I hope to write more about the many and varied issues implicated in this case. And I think it would make an interesting single-topic seminar to explore the multiple angles raised by one controversy, akin to the class on Wal-Mart.
If you are at SEALS, I hope you can check the panel out.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on July 29, 2008 at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
ExpressO Delivery Confirmations
At the short-lived Anonymous Articles Editors Blog that popped up last March, a law professor left the following comment:
I and at least one colleague at my top tier law school submitted paper copies by mail this go-round because we perceived a break-down in the electronic system last fall, with articles submitted by ExpressO never even downloaded by most journals.
This comment seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the information that ExpressO gives to authors, but it reflects a flaw in the ExpressO delivery system that would be easy to fix. The "Author's View of Delivery" page on ExpressO gives four columns of information for each journal: (1) Delivery Date (the date the author hits "submit"), (2) Confirmation of Receipt, (3) Expedite Date, and (4) Withdraw Request. The Confirmation of Receipt column is misleading. When a journal editor opens a submitted article, the editor apparently is given an option to send a confirmation receipt to the author. If the editor clicks that option, then the date appears for that journal's row in the confirmation of receipt column. Many journals don't click on the confirmation receipt option, which creates the impression in authors that the journals haven't received the article. I only figured out the significance of the column by getting rejections (many) and acceptances (one) from journals that had not sent receipt confirms. The ambiguity about delivery stresses out law profs in a big way, and leads to misperceptions like the one reflected in the comment above.
In the short term, it would be very positive for law prof wellbeing if all journals would click on the confirm option. In the long term, ExpressO should modify its system to report delivery to the author as soon as the article is opened by a journal. I can't think of any good reason why this information should not be made available to authors automatically.
Ben Barros
Posted by propertyprof on July 29, 2008 at 11:13 AM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
"Pervasive Surveillance" and the Limits of Video Evidence
During last Friday night's Critical Mass bike ride in New York, a uniformed NYPD officer, seemingly out of the blue, tackles a rider, sending him flying off his bike. The rider (the last of a pack to ride past the officer, who was standing in the middle of the street was arrested and held on charges of attempted assault and resisting arrest. The event was caught on video and the video uploaded to YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 113,000 times. (H/T: Frank Pasquale at CoOp). This is a great example that I have to add to that paper on video evidence.
Continue reading ""Pervasive Surveillance" and the Limits of Video Evidence"
Posted by Howard Wasserman on July 29, 2008 at 07:54 AM in Article Spotlight, Culture, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (1)
Monday, July 28, 2008
Can we explain why (and should we care that) SCOTUS gets its first negative rating?
This short story from the folks at the ABA Journal, headlined "Supreme Court Gets First Negative Approval Rating," has me thinking about the dynamics (and significance) of SCOTUS popularity. Here are the latest SCOTUS polling numbers:
Only 39 percent of U.S. voters approve of the way the U.S. Supreme Court is handling its job, while 43 percent disapprove, the first negative approval rating for the court in five years of polling.
The court got its highest approval rating in May 2007, when 58 percent approved of the job being done by the court. The Angus Reid Global Monitor noted the results.
In the latest survey, conducted by Quinnipiac University, 42 percent said the court is moving in the wrong direction while 33 percent said it is headed in the right direction. Twenty-five percent said the court is too liberal, 31 percent said it is too conservative and 33 percent said it is about right.
For lots of reasons (including question-wording biases), I am wary of making much of the absolute numbers in poll data regarding legal issues. But if the same question is being asked the same way, trends in this data may be worth watching. And the trend in SCOTUS approve/disapprove numbers are quite dramatic: as detailed here, in April 2007, a full 58% approved and only 27% disapproved of how the Supreme Court handles its job; only fifteen months later we get the current 39/43 split.
Perhaps the two most discussed end-of-term cases, Heller and Kennedy, can explain these polling data. I suspect everyone could find something they did not like in these rulings, and that dislike may be most salient when lay persons respond to a poll question about SCOTUS job performance.
Of course, the broader question is whether these kinds of poll questions and results are of any value and significance. I am not sure how I feel on this front, but I suspect that some staffers inside both presidential campaigns view these numbers as meaningful for some reason.
Posted by Douglas A. Berman on July 28, 2008 at 02:36 PM in Constitutional thoughts | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
AALS Plenary, Call for Talents, and Legal Education: The Musical
I am looking for suggestions / self- or other-nominations of law professors who use singing as part of their classroom teaching. Turns out, many do and students love it! HLS's Dean Bob Clark for example is well-known for having composed approximately 50 jingles that he then sung to his corporations classes. The Committee on Curricular Reform is planning to showcase some of these musical talents at the AALS plenary on teaching this year in San Diego.
Following the success and great interest (record attendance according to the AALS administrators) of last year’s plenary session on Rethinking Legal Education for the 21st Century, this year the Committee on Curricular Reform is organizing a three hour plenary session of demonstrations, panels and discussions, entitled Workshop on Redesigning Legal Education. Here is a brief description put forth by our committee chair, Vanderbilt’s Dean Ed Rubin:
Getting down to specifics this year, we will address some of the most promising -- and most troublesome – possibilities in legal education: the integration of academic and skills training, the use of technology in the classroom and beyond, the assessment of student learning, the lessons that pedagogic theory offers about standard, often unexamined legal teaching methods, and the appropriate level of formality or informality between the classroom teacher and the students. At the core of these various issues, which will be presented through suitably varied formats, is a central question: What should law professors do to be effective teachers? Should they incorporate simulations into lecture classes, ask students to answer classroom questions en masse over the Internet, employ evaluation devices during the course of the semester, alter their approach in light of contemporary psychological theories, sing a song at the beginning of class? The workshop will offer a (necessarily brief) overview of path-breaking developments on these topics, and provide resources for further exploration.
The program itself will include segments on assessment (organized by committee member, and my former dean, Dan Rodriguez (Texas), learning theory (organized by Bill Sullivan), integration of clinical and skills training in academic programs (organized by Larry Marshall) and demonstration of technology in the classroom (organized by Larry Cunningham).
To warm things up, we are planning a short segment at the beginning of our program of “legal education and song singing” or “musical law teaching,” followed by a brief discussion about pedagogic distance -- how informal a teacher should be with her students? I am in charge of organizing this first part and I am looking for suggestions as to those fabulous courageous teachers who use the technique of singing songs about torts, contracts, common law cases, law and policy as part of their teaching. You can either post comments or email me directly with names. The workshop as a whole is a rich and exciting program and I am sure many will find it highly relevant to their work as teachers and educators. Stay tuned!
Posted by Orly Lobel on July 28, 2008 at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)
Negotiating Protest
The AP reports (via First Amendment Center) about negotiations taking place between Denver police and certain protest groups to establish rules and details about parades and parades for next month's Democratic National Convention. Similar negotiations are underway between protesters and police in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican National Convention. The goal of such negotiations is to "make sure everybody is on the same page to clear up any misunderstandings and rumors that are out there." As a police spokesperson said, "Instead of a bullhorn (on the streets) you’re having a conversation across the table." Of course, by negotiating all the rules in advance, protesters bind themselves to play by the government's rules, although those rules are increasingly restrictive and inconsistent with vigorous public expression and the fullest opportunity for individuals and groups to engage in meaningful speech. Last week, a district judge in Minnesota rejected challenges to limits on parade routes outside the convention center.
Timothy Zick has done some great work criticizing what he calls "negotiated management," through which protester and protest target (the government) agree to minute details as to the timing, routes, locations, participation, and all aspects of large-scale expressive events. The result is that public expression is less spontaneous and more controlled and the message carries less "sting." This is a part of the broader problem of what Zick calls the "institutionalization" of public contention, which has routinized and neutered public protest and speech. Ironically, negotiation makes confrontation and violence between police and protesters more likely, since even the slightest deviation from the precise protest/parade guidelines (which, of course, the protesters agreed to) likely will be met with massive police resistance, crowd disperals, and mass arrests.
My current project (hopefully to be submitted early next month) looks at the connection between video and civil-rights enforcement, particularly in cases of police confrontations at protests. In it, I use Zick's arguments as a starting point to discuss the increasing importance of video as an issue in civil-rights disputes arising from protests-gone-wrong. First, the media presence (and media recording of these events) at such protests tends to be greater, because the high potential for conflict from a larger, tightly managed protest with a heavy police presence is a media draw. Second, protesters themselves are capable of capturing protests-gone-wrong on video. The recording then can be disseminated (through YouTube, blogs, etc.) as part of its group's protest message ("Look at how we were stopped from speaking out") and can be used as evidence in the § 1983 First Amendment actions that inevitably follow the indiscriminate mass arrests and police crackdowns against otherwise peaceful protesters who step out of line (literally) or whose numbers overwhelm police.
For all the talk about unprecedented protester access and establishing conversant relations between police and protesters, expect both conventions to contain more of what we saw in Philadelphia in 2000 and New York in 2004. And expect much of it to be captured on video.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on July 28, 2008 at 07:27 AM in Current Affairs, First Amendment | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Using a class blog instead of TWEN
For a variety of reasons, I have never been a big fan of propriety law-school-support technology like TWEN. Though I did begrudgingly utilize the Lexis Blackboard for a few years, more recently I have begun developing a class blog to support and supplement each of my courses. (My most successful class blog experience was with this death penalty course blog, and I have just created this shell for my first use of a blog with a required Fall 1L course.)
Because I have not used TWEN or Blackboard for a few years now, I am not in a great position to compare an contrast the current state of those technologies with the class blog experience. But I am in a great position to request input from other law professors and/or from law students concerning their views on the pros/cons of TWEN and the pros/cons of blogs as a law school teaching technology.
Posted by Douglas A. Berman on July 26, 2008 at 03:19 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Attack ads and going negative
Nate Oman at CoOp talks about and links to two of the masterpiece political ads: Lyndon Johnson's 1964 "Daisy" and Ronald Reagan's 1984 "The Bear" (the first political ad that ever really stuck with me and still the best of my lifetime). Nate labels both as "attack ads," but I am wondering why (especially as to the Reagan ad). What makes something an attack ad--is it oversimplifying an opponent's position Is it mentioning (or alluding to) an opponent and his position at all? Is it a complete absence of any reference to the candidate's own positions in favor of criticism of the opponent's position? Is it that it is somewhat personal? Something else? And note that at least "The Bear" probably is not an attack ad under many of those definitions.
This is a narrow question subsumed in a broader one: What constitutes "going negative" in a campaign? This issue bothered me during the 2004 presidential election, when John Kerry was accused of going negative for ads and comments that criticized President Bush's performance in office. But that seemed strange (and unfair), because, by definition, a challenger runs against the incumbent's past performance and only can do that by talking about what the incumbent had actually done in his time in office. Is criticism of the opponent per se negative?
By the way, if you watch the ads, the length was cut in half from 1964 until 1984--and at 1:00, Daisy now feels really long.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on July 26, 2008 at 02:54 PM in Culture, Current Affairs, Law and Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Friday, July 25, 2008
"Save the World On Your Own Time"
That's the title of Stanley Fish's latest book. In the book, as the dust jacket says, Fish argues that "the only goal appropriate to the academy is the transmission and advancement of knowledge. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the mthods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. . . . Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor's mind." He is, in short, an anti-Gutmann, an anti-Nussbaum (although, wrongly in my view, he doesn't mention either of these scholars).
I'm only a third of the way through the book, but it's a great read so far. I hope to put up a series of more substantive responses to it (and yes, as always, I'm looking for a law review that might be interested in a review of this very timely book). I make note of it now because it seems pertinent to many of the questions we've been airing in the past few days, and some that have lurked behind our discussion: Are religously affiliated schools proper "academic" enterprises in the sense in which Fish uses the word? Is the "academic" enterprise necessarily as narrow as he suggests, or should we have a broader conception? Should an "elite" education be measured by any other metrics than the most academic ones? Is there any room for a pluralistic conception of the mission of higher education, or is there only a narrow definition of "academic" and a series of other schools, focused on religious mission or social change or any number of other values, that may be fine but aren't "academic" as such? And are law schools, which mix intellectual inquiry and practical training, really part of the academy in the first place?
I think Fish is too monistic in his view of the university, and hope to expand on that point soon. In the meantime, however, let me say that Fish is characteristically spirited and fun and, so far in my reading, has made many incisive, if repetitive, points. He is particularly useful in arguing that the academic enterprise, in its seeking after truth, should eschew a sense of urgency, which is the realm of politics, in favor of a certain sense of timelessness -- a point I have made here before, and probably a sticking point for law schools and much legal academic writing, and for the endless and distorting quest for "novelty" among both authors and law review editors.
And it's all very Fishy, written with a tremendous sense of joie de vivre and Peck's bad boyishness. After the jump, a few quotes. Note, in particular, the quote questioning whether law schools belong in the university at all, the discussion of whether it would have been right for academics in the '50s to make any positive declarations about segregation, and the very anti-Nussbaumian argument that reading novels doesn't make you a better person.
Continue reading ""Save the World On Your Own Time""
Posted by Paul Horwitz on July 25, 2008 at 09:59 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Still more on religiously affiliated schools and institutional pluralism
I really appreciate the recent posts -- by Paul, Jason, and Gordon -- on religiously affiliated law schools and law schools' "missions" generally. (For what it's worth, Paul's experience at the religiously affiliated law school at which he recently visited is -- whaddya know! -- very much like my own experience at Notre Dame Law School.)
A few months ago, Madisonian.net hosted a forum on law schools, and I contributed this post, on "institutional pluralism":
. . . this might not be the forum for thinking-out-loud about what a “Catholic law school” should be, what precisely should be its distinguishing features, etc. In my view, the project of building such a law school — an engaged, open, critical, and distinctively Catholic law school — is not an exercise in nostalgia, reaction, or retrieval. The project is, in my view, a new one.
It’s also, I think, an exciting and worthy one, and I’m inclined to think that it should be regarded as such by the legal academy generally, not just by co-religionists and the like. It is not just “not a bad thing”, it is a good thing, that there be distinctive law schools. Our commitments to diversity need not, and should not, lead us to insist on homogenization at the level of institutions. Quite the contrary — the same commitments that push us to respect and learn from diversity in many academic settings might also push us — and the AALS, and the ABA — to stay our hand from requiring that each institution look and act in precisely the same way.
Garvey fleshes out a number of reasons — reasons that I find persuasive — why we might think that institutional pluralism in the academy is a good thing. It seems to me that we ought not to resist, but instead should welcome, not only law schools that have focused on serving underserved populations, or law schools with a particular strength in a specific subject-matter area (for example, Lewis & Clark in environmental law), or even law schools with a particular animating point-of-view (Law & Economics at George Mason?), but also law schools that are distinctive in being meaningfully animated by a shared — even if contested — religious tradition.
Posted by Rick Garnett on July 24, 2008 at 10:48 AM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
Gordon Smith on BYU
Over at the excellent business law blog, Conglomerate, Gordon Smith, who just finished his first year as a professor at BYU and has taught at five other law schools, is good enough to share some thoughts on mine and Paul Horwitz's posts from yesterday on BYU and other religiously affiliated law schools.
On religious affiliation, he says in part:
"Finally, the most distinctive aspect of BYU Law School is the religious affiliation. Jason makes the obligatory disclaimer: "And no, it's not for everybody with its religious affiliation and fairly conservative faculty, administration and student body ..." Can't we say "And no, it's not for everybody ..." about every law school? Wisconsin is not for people who hate snow. Lewis & Clark is not a great place for people who hate hanging around environmentalists. Chicago is pretty uncomfortable for stupid people. So, yes, BYU is distinctive on religious grounds, but as Jason observes, most people figure that out long before they set foot in the building."
I'm glad Gordon made this point because I was confused not to hear a defense of BYU from our Yale friends yesterday, who had been defending their school in part on "different strokes for different folks" grounds. If you want moral relativism, go to Yale; if you want a little more moral certainty, go to BYU.
And in defense of religious homogeneity, he says:
"[T]he notion of "religious homogeneity" is a placeholder for a much broader accusation of lack of viewpoint diversity. While I am not going to pretend that BYU has no challenges with regard to diversity, I was impressed with the passion of my first-year law students last fall in Contracts on all sides of the issues we covered in the course. (By the way, I was using the Wisconsin materials, so we weren't ducking tough values issues!) The empirical point is hard to verify, but my impression was that religious homogeneity actually enabled or encouraged many of those discussions. Why? Because the students were required to examine the implications of their (assumed) shared beliefs. They could not pass off their disagreements on the simplistic ground that they held different values than their classmates. This was real learning, not indoctrination."
Read the whole post here.
Note also BYU 3L's comment on my prior post, making the case that being one of ten non-Mormons at BYU has its downsides.
Posted by Jason Solomon on July 24, 2008 at 08:55 AM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Q: What do you call that guy who hangs around with musicians?
A: A highly skilled world-class athlete.
Drummers, vindicated at last.
P.S.: The answer is 16 -- one to change the lightbulb, and 15 to tell you how much better Steve Gadd would have done it.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on July 23, 2008 at 08:34 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Just How Good Are Non-Religious Law Schools?
Jason's posts, however many qualms I may have about them, continue to be thought-provoking, and his latest post , about BYU Law School, is no exception. What has me thinking this time is the anonymous commenter who notes the "religious homogeneity" of BYU, which I am assuming is accurate, and adds, "I guess there should be places for people who are really into religious homogeneity. That homogeneity, which I admit to finding a little creepy, very likely explains a lot of the satisfaction-based results reported above. I'm sure Regent Law students are also highly satisfied with their educations - it's the rest of us who are not. That said, BYU is a rigorous school that has quality students and faculty, no doubt. It just may not be a great model for anyone else." And a second anonymous commenter, or perhaps the same one, adds that it may be that "there's not much we can learn [from a religious law school like BYU] about educating diverse student bodies at mainstream law schools."
I have always assumed -- and commenters are free to disagree with me on this -- that religious law schools, while they may get a bump up in the US News rankings due to the kinds of self-selection and satisfaction effects discussed by the commenter(s), also face a ceiling in the rankings: without the ability to attract a broader set of constituents, they can only rise so far. In my view, there are at least a few under-ranked religious law schools, although conversely I think that many religious law schools are better at achieving some brand distinction and serious loyalty than are many of their peer schools.
But my own experience from visiting at one genuinely religious law school, and from some visits to a couple of others, is that these can be incredibly strong academic institutions, precisely because they share such a strong common mission. The school I visited at had a deep commitment to the mission of the law school, saw that mission as both intellectual and practical (especially to the extent that it involved offering genuine help to others), and had a strong sense of professional and general ethics that suffused every class and every discussion. That mission was shared by both faculty and students, so the sense of connection between and among the entire community was palpable. Not every student or faculty member shared the same religious faith -- I did not -- but the sense of allegiance to an underlying worldview concerned with ultimate ends, or at least to the possibility and value of such a worldview, was widely shared by people within and outside the faith.
That experience, combined with Jason's posts, leads me to ask, somewhat for purposes of provocation but also with a geninue question behind it, whether we are again mistaken to be looking at the usual "super-elite" schools in thinking about what makes for a great law school. Perhaps we should be looking specifically at the religiously affiliated schools -- and perhaps we might ask, is a great legal education possible outside the religiously affiliated law schools?
One answer to this question might be the old answer to the question whether you believe in infant baptism: "Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it!" But I do mean to suggest that one of the great and perhaps underlooked qualities of the religiously affiliated law schools is a profound sense of shared mission that unifies faculty and students alike. That common cause can, in the best instances, be deeply tied to a questing intellect and a sense of underlying values, and can thus provide the kind of mystical marriage between practical skills, ethical values, and intellectual rigor that we keep hoping for in the best of our law schools. And none of it need be the kind of warmed-over bien-pensant liberalism that I see, somewhat over-simplistically, as the result of the usual attempts to mix values and intellect at the top secular law schools.
Again, I don't want to overstate things. I had a great legal education at two secular law schools; I don't think there was much of a common mission at either place, but that can also be a virtue. Of course, too, there are mediocre religious institutions. And, in any event, I believe very strongly that one need not have any single picture of what a university or law school is supposed to believe or do. But I do mean to suggest that a great religious law school brings particular qualities to the table that should very much inform our picture of what it means to be a "great" or "elite" institution -- and that it might not be so easy for secular law schools to reproduce those qualities.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on July 23, 2008 at 05:10 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
Flexing the Mind Muscle
Making decisions, even about the simplest thing such as what sandwitch to have for lunch, may reduce our short-term ability to solve problems, articulate arguments, and write articles. Check out On Amir's piece in Scientific American: The brain is like a muscle: when it gets depleted, it becomes less effective.
Posted by Orly Lobel on July 23, 2008 at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Judge McConnell on "pervasively sectarian"
Today, in an opinion written by law-and-religion scholar Michael McConnell, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that Colorado violated the Constitution when it refused, on the ground that the school is "pervasively sectarian", to permit otherwise-qualified students to use publicly funded scholarships at Colorado Christian University. Here is a link to the opinion. The court found "the exclusion unconstitutional for two reasons: the program expressly discriminates among religions without constitutional justification, and its criteria for doing so involve unconstitutionally intrusive scrutiny of religious belief and practice." Any reactions?
Posted by Rick Garnett on July 23, 2008 at 03:32 PM in First Amendment | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)