Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Life Is Tough … For Some

Posted on March 22, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

I wonder if stuff like this helps explain why applications to UM Law remain strong?

Pseudonymous 1-L UM blogger Klio writes about her spring break:

Spring Break for the University of Miami Law Student is a bit non-traditional. Because we spend our law school days sparsely clothed in a tropical paradise, most of us head back home to a Abercrombie & Fitch wool sweater hell. Some of us seek refuge from the 1L stress with an inquisitive exploration abroad to places like London, Paris, and Latin America. Others just stay put, tumbling out of bed at noon to crash face down on the sandy, white beaches.

Personally, I spent the week binge writing.

Posted in Law School, U.Miami | 1 Comment

NYT Covers Abuses of Material Witness Statute

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

My colleague Ricardo J. Bascuas is quoted by Adam Liptak in tomorrow’s NYT story New Scrutiny for Law on Detaining Witnesses . Rick is an expert in this area, and the article is a good introduction to the abuses of the material witness statute.

Posted in Civil Liberties | Comments Off on NYT Covers Abuses of Material Witness Statute

What He Said, What They Said.

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Yes, I agree with the good folks at Talking Points Memo. But given the subject, I suppose I can’t say more than that, even though I’m speaking entirely for myself here.

Oh yeah, I agree with Brad too. And Atrios. And Media Matters. Must be a conspiracy or something.

Posted in The Media | 1 Comment

UM Law Still (Relatively) Popular

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

According to this article in something called The Independent Florida Alligator, law school applications nationally are down 9.5% this year, but UM is down only 4%.

Given that our percentage increases in applications during the past decade have tended to be way above recent increases in the national pool, it’s nice to see the pattern of UM beating the trend continue even when there is shrinkage in the over-all number of applicants.

Note: I have never served on the admissions committee.

Update: This decade-long increase in our applicant pool may explain why recent classes seem to have a substantially better median student then when I first got here. What’s especially notable is how much better the weakest students are today than they were over a decade ago (the best students were and are wonderful). It has been a long time since I flunked anyone who didn’t turn in a blank, or nearly blank, blue book (which usually means panic attack, but sometimes means pass/fail gambler). Indeed, I give almost no D’s and very very few C-‘s these days. This is a big change from 12-15 years ago, and while it’s possible I’m a victim of unknowing grade inflation, it would certainly be unknowing.

Posted in Law School | 2 Comments

Fighting the Darkness

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

The animated short In The Dark from openthegovernment.org has its heart in the right place, although to me it feels is a little heavy-handed.

But maybe that’s what the times require?

Posted in Civil Liberties | Comments Off on Fighting the Darkness

ReBlog Looks Good But Is a True Beta

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

reBlog by Eyebeam R looks like something I am going to use when it gets out of beta.

It’s another fork of feed on feeds, with an attempt at a fancy front end that both succeeds and yet makes me want to get in and do my own RSS because it’s just not the way I want it.

But in addition to being a moderately classy server-side feed aggregator, reBlog offers the potential of creating a link blog with ease, so I can make a feed of all the posts I wanted to blog about but didn’t get around to, and run it as a sidebar, or a separate page. There’s a full-text quoting feature too, which I can see incorporating into some classroom blogs, and just to make it super-easy reBlog integrates with WordPress, Movable Type, and soon with Drupal and other goodies. Alas, the MT integration is for versions 3.1 and up, and this blog is still at 2.6.x. But all my other blogs are wordpress, and someday, in my copious free time, I may try to convert this one…

At the moment, however, there’s a bad bug in reBlog that’s dropping error messages like

Warning: Unknown class passed as parameter in …/reBlog/refeed/library/RF/ClientController.class.php on line 740

into places that they do not belong.

So unlike google’s gmail, this is a real beta, and I’m going to wait a version or two until they clean it up.

From the about ReBlog statement:

What is a reBlog?
A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software.

Why should you reBlog?
reBlogs are useful to individuals who want to maintain a weblog but prefer curating content to writing original posts. They can also enable organizations to tap the contributions of their employees, members, and communities-at-large in order to easily redistribute relevant content.

What if I don’t want to blog anything?
reFeed, the RSS aggregating component is damn sexy and worth using if you just want to read lots of content and not be constrained to one computer.

Posted in Software | 1 Comment