Category Archives: U.Miami

Welcome to Bricks on the Brain, a new blog by a UM law student. S/he doesn't provide any biographical information, but I'm guessing that s/he is not a first year student, and has

• Keen powers of observation. (“Without a doubt the majority of UM Law professors are left-leaning. But usually politics are kept out of the classrooms, and policy issues within the law receive balanced coverage. … Students at UM are very respectful of each other's political and religious views. With one exception, I have never seen any flyers I felt were objectionable, inflammatory, or in bad taste. For political discussions on the Bricks, civility is the norm.”)

• A taste for interesting questions (“Do private outline banks violate the UM Law Honor Code?”)

• And last, but not least, a good grasp of the obvious (“Professor Froomkin['s] … blog focuses on politics. He clearly does not like president Bush.”)

One to watch.

Incidentally, on the question about outline banks, I'd be surprised, unless there is a rule against unintentionally passing on mistaken information….

Hispanic Business Magazine's annual ranking of the Top Ten Law Schools for Hispanics rates UM #2—again.

Continue reading →

Months and months after I gave up asking for it, it now appears that the Law School is going to give me, in addition to my MS-bound desktop, a Unix box inside our firewall to use as a 'sandbox' to test out various things I think we should be doing in the law school — blogging tools, collaborative drafting and the like. (This development is obviously unrelated to the impending arrival of an outside consultant who is going to evaluate the IT department's faculty and student support.)

So I get to pick a fourth-level name for it, to sit on top of law.miami.edu. The ordinary naming conventions for law school computers used to be fast cars (e.g. 'spitfire') without thought for any trademark issues, and then cities (e.g. 'Casablanca', 'Chicago') despite the possibilities for confusion with eponymous law schools. I never liked either of those conventions, and I'm told I don't have to adhere to them.

The ideal name might have at least several of the following not entirely consistent properties:

• Not too long (I type badly)
• Some connection to the law
• Not too serious, or maybe even funny
• Uses a naming convention that could be used for other machines if it catches on
• Not named after a living person

or, it might be so clever it doesn't have any of them.

My first thought was to pick a legal philosopher, like Fuller (but that's a bit serious). Or a legal concept, like “tort”, but that's potentially confusing since the machine won't be dedicated to that subject, and who'd want to get “bankruptcy” or “domesticviolence”?

Then, I was thinking I might call it “Soia” for Soia Mentschikoff, UM's late great Dean whose ghost is still invoked at faculty meetings, but I'd worry that some here might find that sacrilegious since I didn't know her. Then again, by all accounts Soia never worried about what anyone thought, and as a practicing Legal Realist never followed any rule she didn't like. Accounts differ as to whether she got building permits for the law buildings she built, and the extent to which she complied with them. It's generally agreed, though, that she never had a driver's license, although she drove a car.

My distinguished, articulate, and wry colleague Susan Haack, who holds a joint appointment in Philosophy and Law has been honored with inclusion in a book profiling One Hundred Philosophers : The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers.

Update: For those who do not follow the link, I should perhaps make clear that this does not appear to be a peer-reviewed production, but rather a well-illustrated list of the 100 greatest philosophers of all time — and not just Western ones. There's a page or so on each philosopher, nice graphics, and some potted outlines of major schools of philosophy. So according to Dr. Peter J., King, Ph.D. Susan is up there with Plato, Aristotle and K'ung-fu-tzu (Confucius). And Peter Singer.

Also, I've changed the link so that if you buy the book, a small commission goes to ICANNWatch.org.

I hope exposure of this practice causes its elimination.

I am happy to report that I queried a UM sports administrator if UM ever gave academic college credit for sports and received a pithy emailed reply: “No way, no how!”

As noted by Jason Wolf in comments to an earlier item UM has another student blogger (that makes a net of three who I know of), LawFool. Judging only from what's visible this evening, he's at least as irascible as Wolf's own Random Acts of Meanness .

Nevertheless, if I were the Dean — perish the thought! — I'd be reading these guys ever day. And even though there's little I personally can do about the things that annoy them, it's very interesting to see the classroom from the other side of the podium.

(Even though I don't actually use a podium, and even though I haven't taught first years for some time now.)

Hey guys, look me up some time – Room 382.