Aside from Sandra Day O’Connor, “the swing justice of her day” and the first woman to sit on the Court, every Justice in recent times to be awarded an honorary Ivy degree has been from the Court’s left-liberal side. [John McGinnis, Law and Liberty; headline via @adamliptak]
Posts Tagged ‘Harvard’
June 10 roundup
- Alan Dershowitz, Harvard lawprof, suing TD Garden over slip and fall in bathroom three years back [Boston Globe]
- “Harsh Sanction Proposed For Attorney Who Blogged About Probate Case” [Mike Frisch, Legal Profession Blog]
- Maryland veto sets back reform: “Governor Hogan, Civil Asset Forfeiture Is Inherently Abusive” [Adam Bates, Cato]
- “‘Vape’ bans have little to do with public health” [Jacob Grier, Oregonian in February]
- Academics prosper through expert witness work, part one zillion [Ira Stoll]
- Sounds good: call for civil procedure reform includes fact-based pleading, strict discovery limits, case-specific rules, and more [Jordy Singer, Prawfs, on recommendations from American College of Trial Lawyers Task Force on Discovery and Civil Justice and Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System]
- Draft plan would arm FTC with vast power over data practices [James C. Cooper, Morning Consult, via @geoffmanne]
Schools roundup
- Following student complaints, Northwestern Prof. Laura Kipnis investigated by her university over an essay she wrote on campus sexual politics [Jonathan Adler and more, Chronicle of Higher Ed (Kipnis cleared amid nationwide furor), Glenn Reynolds] Flashback: How NPR, the Center for Public Integrity, and federal officials fueled the campus sex assault panic [Christina Hoff Sommers, The Daily Beast, January] Harvard lawprof Janet Halley, who battles for rights of Title IX accused, is anything but conservative [Harvard Crimson] “The pretense of ‘neutrality’ … has its roots in privilege.” Popehat’s wicked satire of academia looks so real;
- Throwing Skittles on a school bus = “interference with an educational facility” [Louisiana, Lowering the Bar]
- To reduce stigma, or so it’s said, Maryland will serve free school breakfast and summer meals to more children whether they’re poor or not. Why cook for your kids when the state will do it? [my Free State Notes post]
- Will high school football still be around in 2035? “Iowa Jury Awards Injured Ex-High School Football Player $1M” [Insurance Journal]
- “Maryland’s ‘free range’ parents cleared of neglect in one case” [Washington Post, earlier]
- St. Paul, MN schools in recent years embraced latest progressive nostrums on discipline, mainstreaming, cultural difference. Results have not been happy [Susan Du, City Pages]
- “Two-Thirds of Risk Managers Say Frats Are Major Liability” [Inside Higher Ed] California trend spreads as Connecticut Senate passes affirmative consent bill for college disciplinary policies [West Hartford News/CT News Junkie]
Suing the Ivies over discrimination against Asian-Americans
“A coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a federal discrimination complaint against Harvard University, claiming racial bias in undergraduate admissions.” A chance to find out how serious the university establishment, federal agencies, and the courts are about norms of non-discrimination [Bloomberg, Eugene Volokh on Bill Clinton 1995 comment, Razib Khan/Unz]
Prof. Laurence Tribe flayed for arguing business side in SCOTUS cases
And critics such as lawprof Tim Wu in the New Yorker aren’t ready to accept as an excuse the genuineness of Tribe’s belief in the argued-for positions [John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum] Perhaps the idea is that strong lawyers — like cartoonists? — have an obligation not to “punch down,” whether or not justice in a given case is on the side of the putatively less empowered party.
I’ve got an extensive discussion of law professors’ real-life litigation involvements in my book Schools for Misrule.
The imperfect diversity of Harvard Law School
“98% Of Harvard Law Faculty Political Donations Go To Democrats” [Paul Caron, TaxProf]
If I say so myself, my book Schools for Misrule makes a good place to start in understanding how American legal academia came by its distinctive ideological leanings. There’s a Kindle version you can download right now.
Harvard study: lawyers tilt left, judges don’t
A new study out of Harvard finds that lawyers in the United States lean left politically — though not nearly as far left as do law professors — while judges’ political views by contrast tend more toward the middle of the spectrum. An author of the study concludes something’s wrong with the judges. Oh, Harvard, don’t ever change [Adam Liptak, New York Times]
P.S. And in case you hadn’t guessed, lawyers are phenomenally active in the political process:
The study is based on an analysis of the campaign contributions of American lawyers, a group that turns out to be exceptionally active in the financial side of elections.
Of the 975,000 lawyers listed in 2012 in the Martindale-Hubbell legal directory, 43 percent had made contributions to state or federal candidates — including state judicial candidates — since 1979. That is about 10 times the rate of the voting-age population.
One difficulty with the study’s approach, as Liptak notes, is that contributions may reflect factors distinct from ideological leanings, such as economic self-interest. Certainly some lawyers have no terribly strong political views of their own but regard Democratic policies as more conducive to the prosperity of the legal sector or their own particular firm.
State of free speech doctrine at Harvard
Harvard lawprof Noah Feldman on the Paris/Fox case: let government sue media for saying (or maybe even for letting guests say) wrong things about government. Sure, what could go wrong?
Related, and outrageous: Morgan State University (Baltimore) journalism school dean wants to classify religiously irreverent speech as “fighting words,” which would throw into doubt its legal protection [DeWayne Wickham, USA Today] More: Allahpundit, Taranto/WSJ, The College Fix; edited to reflect Wickham’s (non)-clarification of his stance in the last-named link).
P.S. Via @benjaminlam: “Today’s Straits Times [Singapore] carried Feldman’s article.”
Harvard health-care hilarity
“For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.” [New York Times via Jonathan Adler; Rich Lowry, New York Post (quoting Twitter: “Karma is a pre-existing condition.”; Michael Cannon, Cato (“one of the most wonderful things I have read in the course of my career”)]
Harvard caves to a Title IX deal
The university has capitulated to U.S. Department of Education demands that it water down due process protections for accused students and faculty [celebratory ED press release]. That’s a sign of the “madness” afoot on campus at the moment, says Prof. Elizabeth Bartholet [WSJ Law Blog] With 27 other Harvard law professors, Bartholet had signed a letter calling for the defense of procedural fairness in disciplinary complaints under Title IX, which at this rate might as well have been shouted into the wind.
KC Johnson has a more detailed analysis of the settlement agreement at Minding the Campus. Sample excerpt:
As has occurred in previous settlements with SUNY and SMU, OCR also inserted an ex post facto review of cases from the past two academic years, ordering the law school to reinvestigate sexual assault claims (under the new, lower threshold) and to provide “any additional remedies necessary.” Will previously acquitted students now be branded rapists?
A considerable portion of the resolution agreement, however, amounted to little more than OCR lashing out at the Harvard Law professors, and reminding the law faculty who now has the power in campus due process debates….