Posts Tagged ‘law schools’

Law professor anagram names

Kyle Graham kicked off the meme with examples that include “Guido Calabresi” = “Discourage Bail,” “Elizabeth Warren” = “Brazen Wealthier” and “Cass Sunstein” = “Insanest Cuss.” My contributions include “Randy Barnett” = “Nab Red Tyrant” and “Dale Carpenter” = “Parade Lectern.” If you’re wondering about rearrangements of my own name, by the way, the best one seems to be “Wastrel Loon.”

P.S. “Stephen Breyer” = “Hereby Repents” and more Supreme Court Justice anagram names.

Law schools roundup

  • Yale lawprof Peter Schuck reviews Schools for Misrule [American Lawyer last November, alas behind subscription paywall]
  • Look at bright side: Prof. Warren “did not list herself with the AALS as the rightful Empress of France” [Popehat; Seth Mandel, Commentary]
  • Jeffrey O’Connell, greatly admired and influential torts scholar at the University of Virginia, retires from teaching [via Robinette]
  • New Brian Tamanaha book on law schools stirs wide interest [Orin Kerr, Scott Greenfield, Chron of Higher Ed via TaxProf, Bill Henderson]
  • In recent criminal law and procedure cases, high-level academic opinion did sway Supreme Court [Jack Chin, Prawfs]
  • “75 Years of Law Professors as Pundits” [Kyle Graham; and thanks for Schools For Misrule reference)
  • Kindle version of Charles Reich’s “Greening of America” omits super-embarrassing stuff. It’s 80% shorter [Ann Althouse]

U.N. enlists U.S. lawprof to scold U.S. on Indian land rights

As noted earlier, last week U.N. Human Rights Council rapporteur James Anaya (who also happens to be a lawprof at the University of Arizona) declared the U.S. to be trampling the aboriginal land rights of Indian tribes. I have a new Daily Caller piece pointing out (as I detail at more length in Schools for Misrule) that the U.N.’s involvement with American law school projects is nothing new: “Now the plaintiff’s counsel [in the Western Shoshone claim] of a few years back re-surfaces as the official instrument of a U.N. body, a revolving-door arrangement that is actually quite typical of the international human rights establishment, where a rather small band of crusading law professors, ‘civil society’ activists and Guardian readers around the world seem to take turns investigating each others’, or as the case may be their own, countries for putative human rights violations.” (& Julian Ku, Opinio Juris)

Education roundup

Law schools begin to shrink

George Leef wonders whether economic necessity will drive them to radical, even Olsonian, lengths. [NRO “Phi Beta Cons”]

P.S. Ann Althouse wonders why, quizzed about the Elizabeth Warren brouhaha, law school administrators don’t have the courage of their oft-expressed convictions on minority recruitment. And see thoughts from John Rosenberg and Hans Bader at Minding the Campus.

International law roundup

  • NAACP takes complaint against American election laws to U.N. Human Rights Council [PowerLine, Steyn, von Spakovsky, Ku]
  • Also at Opinio Juris: David Landau, Mark Tushnet on judicial/constitutional enforcement of “social rights”; getting international law enforced in U.S. courts is hot topic in legal academia [Oona Hathaway, Sabria McElroy and Sara Aronchick Solow and Steve Vladeck]
  • Too many strings in Toronto: “York University Faculty Torpedo $60 Million International Law Donation” [Ku/OJ]
  • What UNESCO is up to: “Empowering the Poor Through Human Rights Litigation” [long PDF]
  • “Taming Globalization,” new Yoo-and-Ku book on international law [Liberty and Law: about, interview, more]
  • Baby thrown out with bathwater: courts now coping with grossly overbroad state enactments barring reception of foreign law [WSJ Law Blog, earlier here, etc.]

High cost of law schools, cont’d

Walter Russell Mead weighs in [“First, Let’s Indenture All The Lawyers,” The American Interest] Federal student loan program serves as enabler of insane law student debt burdens [Brian Tamanaha, “The Quickly Exploding Law Student Debt Disaster,” Balkinization via Caron] Related: “Judge Tosses Lawsuit against Law School over Employment Stats” [WSJ Law Blog, WLF “Legal Pulse”, earlier] “Remedies for Unreasonably Defective Law Schools” [Frances Zacher, Abnormal Use, more] And: A. Benjamin Spencer (Washington & Lee), “The Law School Critique in Historical Perspective” [SSRN via Caron]

Also, another review of Schools for Misrule is out, this one from Bradley Watson in the Claremont Review.

Lawyers’ and law schools’ mission, cont’d

More grist for a revised/expanded edition of Schools for Misrule:

“At Howard, they tell us as soon as we get there, ‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society.’ … that’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer, and that’s what my parents always were trying to be,” he said.

Kevin Cunningham, quoted on MSNBC (& Hans Bader).

“Harvard’s Shareholder Rights Project is Wrong”

According to the Harvard Law School online catalog, the SRP is “a newly established clinical program” that “will provide students with the opportunity to obtain hands-on experience with shareholder rights work by assisting public pension funds in improving governance arrangements at publicly traded firms.”

Marty Lipton and others at Wachtell, Lipton don’t like the idea and criticize it here. More at NYT DealBook (via Bainbridge).

Reader J.B. emails to say:

Whatever one thinks of Wachtell’s substantive critique of the attack on classified/staggered boards, it’s kind of interesting for a law school to be promoting a “clinical program” in which the kids get to work for institutional investors with bajillions of dollars in assets (and, you know, the wherewithal to retain sophisticated counsel at market rates) rather than the sort of boring old indigent individuals that are the traditional law school clinic client base.

A different view: Max Kennerly.