Florida: “To protect the [6-year-old] girl [with a severe peanut allergy], students in her class at Edgewater Elementary School are required to wash their hands before entering the classroom in the morning and after lunch, and rinse out their mouths, [Volusia County school spokeswoman Nancy] Wait said, and a peanut-sniffing dog checked out the school during last week’s spring break.” [Reuters]
Archive for March, 2011
William Henderson, Andrew Morriss: “It’s Time to Restore Morality to Law School Rankings”
Or is it already too late?
Each year the rankings arms race seems to produce a new low in law school conduct. Although all the law schools are run by lawyers, our reliance on moral suasion has failed….
This day is upon us because nobody in the legal academy was willing to step up and lead.
International human rights law roundup
Recent clips on a subject treated in much more detail in Schools for Misrule:
- Claim: Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s reforms to public sector labor law violate international human rights [HRW, Mirer/Cohn, FoxBusiness (views of Marquette lawprof Paul Secunda)] Related: UAW threatens charges against automakers [ShopFloor]
- Per some advocates, “right to health” has emerged as an “established international legal precept” even if it is “still to be fully embraced in the United States” [Friedman/Adashi, JAMA]
- GWB at risk of arrest if he visits Europe? Or are some of his enemies just posturing? “Bush trip to Switzerland called off amid threats of protests, legal action” [Atlantic Wire, WaPo, Daily Dish and more, Frum Forum, more and yet more]
- Oh, good grief: Tennessee solon “proposes law to make following Shariah law a felony” [Tennesseean] More states prepare to join unsound “ban all recogition of international law” movement [Ku, OJ] Background: Volokh.
- For those interested in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recently given a favorable nod by the Obama administration, a copy of the text is available here [CWB]
- “Conceptualizing Accountability in International Law and Institutions” [Anderson, OJ]
- Human rights initiative in UK: “Rapists and killers demand right to benefits” [Telegraph] European Court of Human Rights, Human Rights Acts “merely pretexts for judicial activism, argues Alasdair Palmer” [Telegraph]
- Claim: U.S. is odd-country-out in international law. Reality check please [Bradford, Posner et al, OJ]
- Opponents charge trying Pennsylvania 13 year old for murder as adult could violate international law [AI]
C-SPAN2 “Book TV” today
Today at noon Eastern, C-SPAN2’s popular “Book TV” feature will broadcast my remarks before a Heritage Foundation audience in Washington, D.C. I’ll be talking about my new book Schools for Misrule, reviewed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal and (by George Leef) in The Weekly Standard (more). Last night Schools for Misrule hit a sales ranking of #718 on Amazon, and stood at #1 in the One-L category, #2 in Legal Education after a test prep book, and #7 in Law (with only one policy-oriented book higher). It stood at #332 this morning on Barnes & Noble.
Have you bought your copy yet? It’s available through your local bookstore, as well as by way of online sources such as Amazon (commission to this site applies), Barnes & Noble, Powells.com, and Books-a-Million. And electronic versions are available for a variety of e-readers including the Amazon Kindle, BN “Nook”, and others.
“Cats are not a recognized form of pest control as far as we’re concerned”
But the case of a Calgary, Alberta tire store suggests that maybe they should be [CBC]
Sued if you do dept., immigrant workforce division
After Chipotle restaurants in Washington, D.C. sacked about 40 workers for lack of immigration papers, some of the workers approached the D.C. city council in search of remedies for grievances that include “unjust dismissal” and inadequate notice. [NBC Washington]
“Judge Tosses Boeing Suit After ‘Confidential Witness’ Recants”
Daniel Fisher at Forbes explains:
…The rise of the “confidential witness” can be traced to the Public Securities Litigation Reform Act and subsequent Supreme Court rulings, under which class-action lawyers are required to do more than just point out the obvious, that a stock price fell. They need to state “particularized facts” giving a strong inference that somebody in management, not just a faceless corporate entity, did something he or she knew was fraudulent.
To get over this hurdle, class-action lawyers frequently call upon nameless “confidential witnesses” who apparently are willing to speak with plaintiff lawyers but live in fear of their identities being revealed to anyone else.
Funny thing is, the testimony of these confidential witnesses on eventually reaching the light of day keeps not backing up the propositions the lawyers said it did. The newest embarrassment afflicts Robbins Geller, a successor law firm to Bill Lerach’s Coughlin Stoia. More: ABA Journal; City of Livonia Employees Retirement System v. Boeing.
March 21 roundup
- “Cleveland Browns lawyer letter is apparently real” [Lowering the Bar, earlier]
- “Headlines of the Apocalypse: ‘Lady Gaga eyes legal action over breast milk ice cream.’” [@vsalus re: Breitbart via @EdDriscoll]
- Chesley discipline prospects in Kentucky fen-phen scandal: “King of Torts Dethroned” [Laura Simons, Abnormal Use]
- Busy construction-defect lawyers vex Fresno builders [Bee, Business Journal]
- “NHTSA Postpones Back-Up Camera Requirement Rule” [The Truth About Cars, earlier]
- Lawyers in Italy call strike to protest law requiring mediation of commercial disputes [WSJ Law Blog]
- NYT’s Mark Bittman has a magical touch with food (alas) [Patrick at Popehat]
- Beasley Allen lawyers sluiced $850K to Alabama GOP judicial contender [Birmingham News via PoL]
Demands $1.6 million for neighbor noise, $52 million for involving reporter
A Manhattan couple were sued by their downstairs neighbors for allegedly allowing too much noise that might have been better muffled with carpets. They approached a well-known local reporter who did a segment in his “Shame! Shame! Shame!” consumer series critical of the suit. The plaintiffs proceeded to file a new $52 million suit against their upstairs neighbor for intentional infliction of emotional distress, which a judge has now dismissed. And now the defendant wife and her husband have sued the condo board for removing her from the board, apparently in reaction to the publicity. [TVSpy]
WSJ: John McGinnis reviews Schools for Misrule
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Northwestern law professor John McGinnis favorably reviews my new book:
American law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university. In ‘Schools for Misrule,’ Walter Olson offers a fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions. One of his themes is that law professors serve the interests of the legal profession above all else; they seek to enlarge the scope of the law, creating more work for lawyers even as the changes themselves impose more costs on society.
Prof. McGinnis deftly conveys my theme about how embracing the cause of reformist legal critique helped serve law schools’ quest for academic respectability within the university, and he is particularly complimentary about the book’s discussion of law school clinics (“superbly describe[d]”). He is perfectly fair in observing that the book makes no attempt to evaluate some important recent developments such as the burgeoning of interest in empirical legal studies, even as I do devote considerable attention to other academic enthusiasms (like the ill-fated movement for race reparations) that he and I agree led to practical dead ends.
Most of Schools for Misrule is by intention backward-looking, an assessment of wrong turns and misguided enthusiasms that have led legal academia astray up to now. As Prof. McGinnis and I agree, things have been changing of late, sometimes in favorable ways. And that I hope provides much fodder for discussion as more observers join the debate.
P.S. Prof. Bainbridge has some kind things to say today as well. And I’ve got a general reaction roundup at Cato at Liberty, including those obsessively watched Amazon sales rankings, which are almost as bad a distraction for the author world as the U.S. News rankings are for the legal-academic. Yet more: Paul Caron/TaxProf, Instapundit, Above the Law, Kent Scheidegger/Crime and Consequences, Smallest Minority, Estate of Denial, Jeff Hadden/Detroit News, Memeorandum.