Yale announed yesterday that Harold Koh will be the next Dean of the Law School. Harold was one of my favorite professors in law school, and supervised one of the student papers I wrote — although I suspect it required him to stifle a fair amount of bemusement at my idiosyncratic ideas.
I think he'll be a terrific Dean.
How do you define the criteria for selecting who should run a law school newspaper? Although it has potential for both fun and service, editing the monthly, or maybe tri-weekly, paper for the school doesn't seem to be a dream job for the average law student, perhaps because does less for the resume than does a genuinely legal job. It's a fair amount of work, and what there is in the way of financial compensation isn't much for anyone except maybe the editor in chief, who gets a partial tuition waiver.
I have to write some up some criteria we can select a new staff for the law school newspaper. Why me? Because intelligent academic administrators have a way of dealing with faculty who complain about something: they make them fix it.
Dennis Baron reports on Faculty Behaving Badly. Wow. Either we at the law school are better behaved than that, or I'm seriously missing some great gossip.
I'm a single parent for the next few days, as Caroline is in DC for the annual hiring meeting of the AALS which begins tomorrow. Blogging may be light as a result. Caroline is the Chair of the law school's appointments committee, which is a brutally hard job, but one she does well. Some of our colleagues have joked that Caroline should be Appointments Chair for life, but I don't know that she or I could take that.
Every year Miami and every other law school gets over a thousand forms provided by the AALS's central clearing service. Each contains a one-page summary of the c.v. and the teaching interests of a person who'd like to become a law teacher. In our school, the chair is the only committee member who has to look at them all; the other committee members get a chunk each, although they're invited to look at more if they wish. Then those thousand-plus forms must be culled. To the extent they can, the committee members call references, and read writings, of the applicants whose forms pique their interests. Then they debate.
Some years we have only one opening, or none. This year, as it happens, we have several openings, and also some fairly specific subject-oriented needs, so the committee is interviewing in two parallel teams. Even so, that means winnowing down the 1000+ hopefuls to about 50 persons who'll be seen at the, excuse the term, “meat market,” for about 30 minutes each. From that group, the committee will have to select a small number to invite to fly down here and spend a day being interviewed, presenting a paper, and having dinner with a semi-random group of faculty. It's a very intense process for the interviewee, and fairly high stakes for the faculty since people tend to get tenure here. (That would be because we make such good initial choices, of course.) The initial hiring decision thus risks being the start of a lifetime relationship, and the faculty takes it very, very, very seriously.
You can be fairly confident that the animal rights activist who released thousands of minks and thus disaster — see The Fur Flies and Crawls and Bites — was not a lawyer. Just about every law student learns from Foster vs Preston Mill Co, 268 P.2d 645 (Wa. 1954), that minks eat their young when upset.
The Foster case's facts are at least as strange as the Washington Post article. The defendant was blasting to clear some land two+ miles away from a mink farm. The noise upset the minks, they started eating their young, plaintiff lost a bundle. The court held that because blasting is an ultrahazardous activity, the defendant was strictly liable for whatever harms it caused, however weird and unpredictable they might be. Once the class was duly outraged, our Torts professor managed to suggest that this is a predictable behavior among minks, so the issue is who has a duty to find out what local conditions are (how predictable are mink farms?), and it got more convoluted from there.
No one having had the experience of Foster, however, would be likely to turn minks loose on the world. But I've always thought it might be fun to teach Torts.
Eric Muller is a man of many talents. One of them appears to be bumper sticker design.
Jotwell Blenderlaw