Category Archives: Law School

Thanks to the valuable career advice in the following letter, which appeared in my mail box, unsigned, I forsee a vast improvement in my rotten citation track record:

Dear fellow law professor,

This letter has been around the world at least seven times. It has been to many major conferences. Now it has come to you. It will bring you good fortune. This is true even if you don’t believe it. But you must follow these instructions:

— Include in your next journal article the citations below.

— Remove the first citation from the list and add a citation to your journal article at the bottom.

— Make ten copies and send them to colleagues.

Within one year, you will be cited up to 10,000 times! This will amaze your fellow faculty, assure your promotion and improve your sex life. In addition, you will bring joy to many colleagues. Do not break the reference loop, but send this letter on today.

Professor H. received this letter, and within a year after passing it on she was elected to the International College of Law Professors. Professor M. threw this letter away and was denied tenure. In Japan, Dr. I. received this letter and put it aside. His article for Transnational Law Journal was rejected. He found the letter and passed it on, and his article was published that year in the International Law Quarterly. In the Midwest, Professor K. failed to pass on the letter, and in a budget cutback his entire department was eliminated. This could happen to you if you break the chain of citations.

1. Schlecht, How High is High?; A Summary of the Law of Usurious Interest Rates in High-volume Drug Trafficking 76 Colum. L. Rev. 47, 62 (1987).

2. Garrelts, Wiley Coyote and the Dynamite Sandwich: Continuing Viability of Reasonable Implied Assumption of the Risk 33 Warner L.J. 1011, 1042 (1964)

3. Ralston, Modern Approaches to Chaotic Heuristic Optimization; Means of Analyzing Non-Linear Intelligent Networks with Emergent Symbolic Structure (doctoral dissertation, University of California at Santa Royale El Camino del Rey Mar Vista by-the-sea) (1968)

4. Danielson, Getting Evidence to Stand up; Behind-the-Scenes Defense Strategies at the John Wavne Bobbitt Trial 54 Trial Defense Counselors Quarterly 127, 131 (1994)

The Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case-Western has an enthusiastic publicist.

To promote a new blog Case-Western are running, the publicist compiled a list of law professor emails, put them into mailing list software, and sent out a long email…that amounts to spam. Every colleague I’ve asked so far seems to have received it — it didn’t, for example, just go to bloggers (who might, I suppose, be considered fair game for such things). Like many spams, it came from mailing list software, described itself as a mailing list. Like all mail from well-behaved mailing lists, it included both header and text information about how to get off the mailing list.

Trouble is, smart users know you should never click on the opt-out info, it just encourages the spammers.

I wonder if the very fine people associated with this project — which I am purposefully not naming or linking to in order to spare them the shame, and especially to avoid creating another link that could be cited as a success metric — are aware of the ill will likely to be created by this form of promotion.

Eric Muller writes,

I have set up blogs for the Loyola-New Orleans and Tulane Law School
communities to use over the coming days and (if necessary) weeks and
months. The idea is to give the communities a message board — a
place to post information of common interest that community members
can access (as they are able). People can post to the blogs by
emailing me at the below addresses, or by phoning me at (919)
962-7067 and leaving a message with the content of what they’d like
posted.

For Tulane:
URL = http://www.isthatlegal.org/tulanelaw
email (for posts) = tulanelaw@isthatlegal.org

For Loyola-New Orleans:
URL = http://www.isthatlegal.org/loyno
email (for posts) = loyno@isthatlegal.org

And the IT director at Tulane writes an open letter saying,

We appreciate the efforts of all of you to assist those of us at Tulane Law
School as we put in place methods to communicate with one another.

Our efforts will be helped immensely if all were to put links directing
people to the “official” Tulane Law School website, which is being hosted
and co-developed by our colleagues at Emory:

http://tulane.law.emory.edu

Meanwhile, from the lawprof mailing list I learn that law schools around the country are making arrangements with the deans of the affected schools to take on their law students, for as long or short as they need it. Indeed, our associate dean sent a note around that we’ve taken on a few who had taken refuge with relatives in the Miami area. And one turned up in class this morning, looking a little shell shocked, as well one might.

And, Billmon posts a great list of charities

I’m always interested to learn how students decide which law school to attend. This explanation is somewhat unusual:

When I first had the inkling of attending school at UM. I knew nothing about Miami – the city. So I started watching Animal Planet’s Miami Animal Police on tv. I felt it was important to know which mammals, insects, and reptiles to run away from as an initial frame of reference for everything else in the area. Apparently, from the several episodes I saw in which “flight and flee” emerged as a common, team response to crazed-animal attacks, many of Miami-Dade’s finest believe the same.

Upon gaining confidence in my knowledge of the dangers inherent in South Florida wild-life (i.e. hungry gator – bad/black-nosed Coral snake – worse), I graduated myself to CSI-Miami. That’s when I made the decision to move to Miami. Dead people in Chicago, D.C., New York are invariably overweight, pale and pasty. But in Miami, corpses have the greatest bods and tans.

Then again…hot bodies and crazed wild critters does capture some of what makes Miami different. But only some.

One of the things about academic life is that it moves to its own rhythm. New Years day is an artifact of the common calendar and has fairly little meaning to me; (and Rosh ha Shona we barely notice). What’s more, as transatlantic flights tend to be cheaper on Dec. 31, we have slept through the stroke of midnight, jet lagged, for almost every one of the past ten years. I can’t remember the last time I went to a New Year’s Party, nor can I imagine how I’d get a sitter even if I were not jet lagged.

No, the real start of the year in this household is around now, when the kids go back to school, and when we have our first classes of the academic year.

My first Administrative Law class is 8am today (Monday). Last week I posted my assignments for both my classes. But if the past is a guide, fewer than half the students will admit having seen them. (Perhaps they’re afraid of being called on.)

Meanwhile, I get to enjoy the first fruits of one of the assignments I always use to start the semester. For my Internet Law class, I have asked every student to send me a paragraph about themselves with contact information plus whatever they’d like me to know about them, and paragraphs have started dribbling in. (In Administrative Law, we’ll do that in class some time around the end of the add-drop period as Administrative Law seems more subject to turnover.) Our students have interesting–and in some cases, rather harrowing–lives.

I have always had great trouble learning names by heart (any proper names, including case names), but I find it easy to remember facts; having facts about people helps me overcome my name-learning handicap, although not enough. But I’d ask for the paragraph even if I were good at names. Other than seminars, even my smaller classes tend to be around 30 people, and this year it looks as if they’ll be more in the 40-60 range. At that size, it’s difficult to get to know many students as people. In addition to being intrinsically interesting, the paragraphs give me a big jump start.