The court has just approved the subpoena against the service provider in the Apple v. Does case, which involves trade secrets that were leaked to and then posted on some blogs.

The judge did not deal with any possible subpoenas against the bloggers. He thus didn't decide whether bloggers are entitled to be treated the same as other journalists, but concluded that in any event the subpoena against the service provider -- which the service provider isn't contesting -- is constitutionally permissible.

The judge did, however, signal that he isn't fond of third parties posting illegally leaked trade secret, analogizing them to "fences" of stolen information. I have argued that the First Amendment bars imposing trade secret liability on third parties, such as newspapers or Web sites, see pp. 739-48 of this article, but it sounds like the judge disagrees.

I'm not a fan of political patronage systems myself, but a few years ago my brother Sasha pointed me to this great quote from George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall political boss of the late 1800s and early 1900s; I added it as an epigraph to the patronage cases section of my First Amendment textbook:

The civil service humbug is underminin’ our institutions and if a halt ain’t called soon this great republic will tumble down like a Park-avenue house when they were buildin’ the subway, and on its ruins will rise another Russian government.

This is an awful serious proposition... Let me argue it out for you. I ain’t up on sillygisms, but I can give you some arguments that nobody can answer.

First this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be h--- to pay...

Let me tell you that patriotism has been dying out fast for the last twenty years. Before then when a party won, its workers got everything in sight. That was somethin’ to make a man patriotic. Now, when a party wins and its men come forward and ask for their reward, their reply is, ‘Nothin’ doin’, unless you can answer a list of questions about Egyptian mummies and how many years it will take for a bird to wear out a mass of iron as big as the earth by steppin’ on it once in a century?’”

A reader pointed me to a Web post titled "Jews and Self-Loathing," which condemns some Jewish writers' work that "promote[s] their own stereotypes," and expresses doubt that "certain forms of Jewish humor is really good for the Jews."

I'm always skeptical of these claims of "self-loathing," whether in politics or in literature or entertainment. They generally strike me as hyperbole that works to insult but not really to enlighten.

I suppose some Jews who portray Jewish characters with negative traits may actually loathe themselves, or loathe Jews (see Eric Muller's thoughts, and my response to them). I suspect that most don't.

Rather, they may want to criticize some aspects of Jewish life (whether Orthodox or secular). They may want to point out some aspects of common Jewish behavior that are funny.

Or they may just want to tell a story in which some character is Jewish, interesting, and credible. They may want to create rich characters that have good points as well as bad ones. They may want to describe characters as they or others see them: Saying that someone has a Jewish nose may indirectly bear on those very points. Or they may want to be vividly descriptive; a Jewish nose is not the same as a strong or prominent nose, for instance.

What's more, the ability to make fun of one's own group is often healthy: It helps people critically examine certain traits, and it also makes for good comedy. Conversely, judging either literature or comedy based on whether it's "good for the Jews" (or good for anyone else) tends to make for not very good literature or comedy.

There are, I'm sure, some costs in perpetuating stereotypes -- even often accurate, though naturally incomplete, stereotypes -- of Jews or of others, even in fiction. But I think there are greater costs in demanding that humor or storytelling be socially responsible. Sometimes there's a story that reflects badly on people in some group (consider movies about the Italian mafia). It's important for observers to realize (and if necessary to stress to others) that the story isn't supposed to characterize all or even most members of the group, but I don't think that authors should refrain from telling the story for fear that it will fuel wrongheaded views.

Now of course one can get only so far by talking about this in the abstract. The post points to an article that discusses Meet the Fokkers; I haven't seen the movie, so I can't speak to it. But I doubt that it truly represents self-loathing. And I suspect that asking Jewish writers to focus on whether their stories are bad for the Jews will just lead to bad Jewish writing.

in the USA Next gay wedding photo case, at least if this blog account is accurate.

The judge issued a temporary restraining order against further airing of the ad, apparently on the theory that the ad infringes the same-sex spouses' right to control the use of their likenesses (the right of publicity or the right to block misappropriation of likeness). I argue below that the right of publicity doesn't cover the use of people's likenesses in political ads, and I remain quite confident of that. But even if the plaintiffs potentially have a good damages claim, an injunction of such political ads before a trial on the merits — based not on a final judgment that the speech is unprotected but on a mere finding of likelihood of success — is an unconstitutional prior restraint.

Mark Lemley and I give more details in this article. I should say that some lower courts have authorized such preliminary injunctions in the past, but I think they were quite mistaken as a matter of First Amendment law. I hope USA Next promptly appeals; they have a very strong claim here, both under the First Amendment and under substantive right of publicity law, which is on their side.

Thanks to David Kravitz and Jason Walta for pointers to the story about the injunction.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A $25 million lawsuit was filed today against right-wing front group USA Next and political consulting firm Mark Montini International for stealing an Oregon couple’s wedding photo and using it without permission in a high-profile gay-bashing ad designed to drum up support for social security privatization. . . .

The suit alleges that the use of the couple’s image without permission constituted an invasion of privacy, was libelous, violated their right of publicity and constituted an intentional infliction of emotional distress.

In one version of the USA Next ad disseminated widely on the Internet in February, and aired repeatedly by television news programs and newspapers nationwide, the couple’s image, superimposed with a green checkmark, is side-by-side a picture of a US soldier with a red “X” across it. Below the photos is the phrase “The REAL AARP Agenda.”

I've read the Complaint and the case seems like a pretty clear loser:

1. The plaintiffs claim that the ad libeled them and placed them in a false light by "stating directly or by implication that the plaintiffs are unpatriotic American citizens who do not support the United States military while our nation is at war." But I don't think reasonable viewers would understand the ad that way.

   They would understand the ad as claiming (whether accurately or not) that the AARP doesn't support the military enough. They would understand the ad as implicitly claiming that gay marriage is bad (an opinion that can't form the basis for a libel claim). But nothing in the ad suggests to reasonable viewers that the men don't support the military. So there's no false statement about the plaintiffs, and thus no libel or false light claim.

2. The plaintiffs claim that the ad appropriated their likenesses in a way that benefited USA Next and Montini commercially. But political ads, even ones that help raise money for a group (or that earn the political consultant money), are treated as fully protected speech under the First Amendment, and not as the less protected "commercial speech." Such political ads are also generally not covered by the misappropriation of likeness tort, just as other fully constitutionally protected but commercial uses — news reporting, biography, fiction, and so on — are not covered. The misappropriation tort generally covers, with very few exceptions, only commercial advertising (rather than political advertising) and merchandising, such as T-shirts, action figures, and the like.

   The closest case I've found to this is Battaglieri v. Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan Court of Appeals case from 2004 that involved the unauthorized use of a person's name (whether it's name or likeness doesn't matter) in a political fundraising ad. And the court held that the ad was constitutionally protected against a misappropriation tort claim, even though "it was also a clear request for charitable contributions to support [defendant's] work."

   Also, though the lawsuit was filed in the District of Columbia, the general rule in misappropriation cases is that courts should apply the law of where the plaintiff lives. Here, that's Oregon, and the leading Oregon case on this — Anderson v. Fisher Broadcasting Companies, Inc., 712 P.2d 803 (Ore. 1986) — reads the misappropriation tort quite narrowly, basically applying only when the defendant "exploits a distinctive economic value of an individual's identity or image beyond that of other similar persons for purposes of associating it with a commercial product or service." I don't think that USA Next would be covered by this definition, since it's selling political ideas, not a commercial product or service.

3. The plaintiffs' invasion of privacy claims are just their false light claims and their appropriation claims; for historical reasons, both of these torts have often be labeled "invasion of privacy." They have no separate claim of invasion of privacy by wrongful disclosure of private facts. I think Oregon courts probably don't recognize such a claim, see Anderson; publishing a photo of people kissing in public isn't treated as such an invasion of privacy, Gill v. Hearst Pub. Co., 253 P.2d 441 (Cal. 1953); and in any case the plaintiffs aren't making such a claim.
4. The plaintiff's intentional infliction of emotional distress claim is also a pretty clear loser. Courts generally limit the tort to outrageous conduct, and set the outrageousness bar quite high; I doubt this would qualify as outrageous enough. Moreover, when the claim involves speech on matters of public concern, courts generally reject the claim on First Amendment grounds. (The Supreme Court has only held that statements about public figures on matters of public concern are generally immune from emotional distress liability under the First Amendment, and that decision didn't speak about statements about private figures on matters of public concern. But its logic would apply equally to such private-figure public-concern statements, and lower courts have indeed rejected emotional distress liability in such cases.)
5. Curiously, the strongest claim against USA Next would be a copyright claim brought by the copyright owner, which seems to be the Portland Tribune newspaper (or perhaps the photographer, if he was a freelancer and kept the copyright). But the copyright owner isn't suing (though it suggested that it might); the maximum damages in the copyright case would be $150,000, not $25 million; and USA Next would have a decent fair use defense (though it's hard to evaluate the likely strength of the defense, given how vague the fair use doctrine is).

So my sense is that the gay couple should lose, and will lose if the case comes to court, and USA Next will and should win. I sympathize with the plaintiffs' upset here, and I think it was rude for USA Next to drag the plaintiffs' picture into a political cause that they don't support. But, at least setting aside the copyright question, USA Next was behaving within its legal and constitutional rights.

based on a seemingly very thorough database (we're talking many entries per day). Cool and scary. Thanks to Neil Reinhardt for the pointer.

This story says yes:

Ynet has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.

“They're detached from reality and suscep[ti]ble to influence,” the army says.

I'm not sure how accurate the story is; for instance, a few paragraphs down it says:

"One of the tests we do, either by asking soldiers directly or through information provided us, is to ask whether they take part in the game," he says. "If a soldier answers in the affirmative, he is sent to a professional for an evaluation, usually a psychologist."

More than half of the soldiers sent for evaluation receive low security clearances, thus preventing them from serving in sensitive IDF positions, he says.

"Automatically given low security clearances" isn't the same as "more than half . . . receive low security clearances" (though it's not clear whether the denominator in the latter statistic is all people referred for evaluation, or just D&D players); and this is the sort of inconsistency that makes me uncertain about the rest of the story's claims.

Still, if the story is accurate, it seems odd. Maybe D&D circles have changed a lot, or maybe the ones I was in were unrepresentative — or maybe I'm a lousy judge of who's detached from reality and susceptible to influence. But my sense is that most D&D players are perfectly fine people. Geeks, mind you, but geek is good.

On the other hand, the Israeli military is supposed to be pretty sharp; doubtless it has the normal share of bureaucratic folly, but I'd assume that most of their judgments about soldierly quality are better than my judgments. So, who knows, maybe they're right.

Thanks to Dylan Alexander and Michael Koh for the pointer.

(Say, wasn't that a character I used to run when I was a Dungeons & Dragons player in high school?)

Prof. Volokh,

We were just informed about your blog post today about anti-semitism and racism on the site (your blog entry is being discussed at http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=147012&forum_id=2).

We think your assessment was accurate: those threads are a very small fraction of the site, and even in those threads the overwhelming majority of posters are responding to the racists harshly. However, there are some additional points we'd like to make:

1) The site is clearly divided into on-topic and off-topic filters. We are very strong believers in the freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas. This is why we allow off-topic discussion and almost never censor content, no matter how abhorrent it may be. However, we understand that not everyone wants to be exposed to such discussions. Some might simply want to browse the site for threads directly relating to law school, employment, etc. Go figure. Hence the on-topic/off-topic filters – the default option is on-topic mode, and in order to see the offensive material in question, one has to pro-actively enter off-topic ("expert") mode. If an individual does not want to be exposed to discussion of politics, sports, or racism, all that individual has to do to avoid 99+% of that content is stay in school-related mode.

2) That said, some posts do slip through the cracks. We trust our users to classify threads as school-related or off-topic, and although the overwhelming majority classifies their threads appropriately, on a daily basis you can expect at least one or two threads to slip through the cracks. This is usually not a big deal, but over a period of months it can add up, as you can see by the number of threads that appear in school-related mode when you search for racist terms. However, keep in mind that typical users are not going to see a flood of those threads when they go to the site. The only time you'll see twenty or so racist threads on the site is if you proactively search for them, which is what your colleague took upon himself to do when he used the search box to search the entire site specifically for those various racist terms he came up with.

3) The very reason our student-run community has been so much more phenomenally successful than all of its competitors, in its single year of existence, is that it respects the merits of the free, uninhibited exchange of ideas. In fact, one finds overall a much deeper and much more mature level of insight in a community where the ugliest depths of human opinion are confronted, rather than ignored. And the majority of the school-related content on the site speaks to that fact. That is our community; take it or leave it.

4) This community, which for the above reasons has been the object of ongoing controversy, has given birth to some truly noteworthy academic studies. Just today, one of the administrators, Anthony Ciolli, released a working paper on the determinants of law school national employment placement at elite firms (available at http://www.autoadmit.com/studies/ciolli). Another respected member of the community, Aaron Chalfin, this past November published a study on how law schools are ranked by current and prospective law students, which received much attention across the law school admissions community (available at http://www.autoadmit.com/studies/chalfin). There is no other admissions discussion board on the Internet whose members possess such a collective body of knowledge and wisdom, and we attribute that to the hands-off moderating philosophy we have discussed in this letter.

Anthony Ciolli, Jarret Cohen Administrators

Naturally, I can't speak to the merits of the site (though Xoxohth was quite a guy, 18/00 dexterity, 16 intelligence, . . . — or am I confusing him with Fafhrd), but I thought I'd post the operators' response.

UPDATE: Two correspondents have admonished me that only strength could be 18/00, not dexterity. That's not how I remember playing it (and recall that the rules of D&D were always flexible), but a quick google search reveals many more strength 18/00s than anything else 18/00. Naturally, this is very important for understanding the proper social response to racism and anti-Semitism on law student discussion sites.

From a Reuters story:

Former [Sex] Pistols bassist Glen Matlock has called for swearing on British television to be curbed . . . .

As a teenager, Matlock co-wrote some of the Pistols' most enduring anthems like God Save The Queen and Anarchy In The UK. He left the group early in 1977 and was replaced by Sid Vicious.

Sid Vicious could not be reached for comment.

(OK, I made that last sentence up, but it's true!) Thanks to reader Michael Greenspan for the pointer. Note: No need for e-mails that start with "Never mind the Volokhs . . ." -- Greenspan has preempted you.

A reader writes, apropos my comment about tell LEXIS and WESTLAW erors:

Look at 42 C.F.R. 441.303(f)(1), on LEXIS:

The annual average per capita expenditure estimate of the cost of home and community-based and other Medicaid services under the waiver must not exceed the estimated annual average per capita expenditures of the cost of services in the absence of a waiver. The estimates are to be based on the following equation:

D+D minutes > G+G minutes .

The symbol ">" means that the result of the left side of the equation must be less than or equal to the result of the right side of the equation.

D = the estimated annual average per capita Medicaid cost for home and community-based services for individuals in the waiver program.

D minutes = the estimated annual average per capita Medicaid cost for all other services provided to individuals in the waiver program.

G = the estimated annual average per capita Medicaid cost for hospital, NF, or ICF/MR care that would be incurred for individuals served in the waiver, were the waiver not granted.

G minutes = the estimated annual average per capita Medicaid costs for all services other than those included in factor G for individuals served in the waiver, were the waiver not granted.

First, notice that this inequality is called an equation, but let's let that pass. [EV: The word "equation" is in the CFR, not in the LEXIS version.]

Second, see how the greater than symbol is defined, for those readers who don't know math, to mean less than or equal to.

Third, why are two of the quantities called "D minutes" and "G minutes"? The definitions are similar to D and G, respectively, so that "D + D minutes" and "G + G minutes" are both total costs of something. So I figured out that they must be primes, which the translation to LEXIS must have converted into "minutes."

You can check the text of the regulation [here] and you'll see that, indeed, it is a less than or equal sign, and primes. [EV: I had trouble pulling up the PDF, but I trust my correspondent, and the text version

Finally, check the regulation on Westlaw (where I've often found there are fewer mistakes), and you'll see that they have it exactly right.

I'm pleased to say that my correspondent assures me that he is indeed reporting this to LEXIS. But let this be a warning to us all . . . . (And, yes, I do rely on LEXIS and WESTLAW versions of many documents myself, and count on cite-checkers to check them against the print versions, unless something strikes me as really wrong or the matter is extremely important. I try to be careful, but there are limits.)

Max Boot's column about Iwo Jima made me think of the Marine Corps, and reminded me of an incident a few years ago. I was having dinner with a think-tanker in D.C., and I noticed a pin he was wearing. He noticed me noticing, and asked me if I knew what it was.

The pin, which was small and had no legible writing, most obviously contained a two-dimensionable representation of the globe, with an eagle above it. But then I noticed that behind the globe was an anchor. "Is it related to the Navy?," I asked, entirely innocently. (Like many in my circle, I've had very little exposure to the military.)

Being an honest fellow, he had to admit that it was, in a sense -- but the way he bristled made it clear that he thought the relationship was something that was very minor, and that obscured much more than it revealed. Then I realized my error.

Max Boot, who has written on military history, has an op-ed on this subject, which struck me as interesting, both for its historical substance and its conclusion:

No [criticism of the decision to take Iwo Jima] was heard at the time, in part because of the rah-rah tone of World War II press coverage but also because Americans back then had a greater appreciation for the ugly, unpredictable nature of combat. They even coined a word for it: snafu (in polite language: "situation normal, all fouled up"). It's a shame that so many sentimental tributes to the veterans of the Good War elide this unpleasant reality, leaving us a bit less intellectually and emotionally prepared for the trauma of modern war.

"Avoid the passive voice!," writers are often told. That's good advice — but it shouldn't, I think, be taken to extremes.

Passive voice is bad for three reasons: (1) It tends to be less engaging, (2) it usually adds a few more words and some extra grammatical complexity, and (3) it tends to obscure who's actually doing something. "The dog was bitten by the man" is an example of passive voice bringing less verve, and requiring more words, than the active. "Mistakes were made" is the cliche example of passive voice as obfuscation or barrier to analysis.

But sometimes passive voice is just fine, especially when you want to focus on the object of the action rather than on the actor. Here's an example I ran across a while back: A draft said:

Neither we nor the government need sit idle when evil ideas are spread.

Someone suggested that it be changed (more or less) to:

Neither we nor the government need sit idle when people or groups spread evil ideas.

The original was in the active voice, but the "when" clause was in the passive. The replacement is entirely in the active.

But is the new version really better? It's actually a bit longer and more complex, because it adds a reference to the actor. The addition isn't just a single word, but the phrase "people or groups." The new phrase is relatively bloodless, and I suspect somewhat less vivid than "evil ideas."

More importantly, the new phrase needlessly shifts the reader's focus from the substantively important noun phrase — the "evil ideas," which are the reason that we must act rather than sitting idle — to the less significant "people or groups" that spread the ideas.

Now maybe there's some other value to the edit that I'm missing. But I do think that the partly passive original is more effective than the wholly active replacement.

UPDATE: An interesting item on passive voice in technical documentation.

I had an exchange with another lawprof that I thought might be worth airing, since it deals with the genuinely difficult question of the proper private, nongovernmental response to evil speech (which as it happens is the broadest version of the subject of my forthcoming law review article on "Deterring Speech: When Is It "McCarthyism"? When Is It Proper?). The lawprof wrote to me:

I read with some horror, and admiration for Eugene's forthrightness, the exchange with the NeoNazis who began "counting Jews" on the UCLA law faculty. These fringe nuts are a bit scary, but I must confess I find the following even scarier, since it involves the kids who are or may be our students: http://www.xoxohth.com/main.php?forum_id=2&hid=0&qu=jews

Click on a few of the threads that are called up, and you'll see what I mean. This purports to be a prelaw discussion site, and it appears a large number of applicants and current law students post there. If the appalling anti-semitism isn't enough, then try the racism: http://www.xoxohth.com/main.php?forum_id=2&hid=0&qu=nigger

or more here: http://www.xoxohth.com/main.php?forum_id=2&hid=0&qu=blacks

Perhaps if you called attention to this, the site's managers might "clean up" the content a bit? And perhaps students might be encouraged to move to the more mature and civil prelaw sites, such as www.lawschooldiscussion.org.

Here's a slightly cleaned up portion of my response, which I sent to the lawprof by e-mail:

Thanks very much for the kind words, and for the pointer — these are pretty appalling posts. But my sense from just a casual look was that (1) these threads are actually a small fraction of what is posted on the site (or so it seems from a quick look at http://xoxohth.com/main.php?forum_id=2 to see the most recent posts), and (2) in the few threads that I've seen, others are responding to the neo-Nazis, quite aptly and harshly. This is probably to the good, since (A) maybe a few of the idiots will be shaken out of their idiocy — not very likely, but it happens sometimes, and it's ultimately the only way of effectively fighting the problem, it seems to me — (B) and since decent readers will realize that these opinions are out there, and that it's important to respond to them. So it doesn't seem to me to be particularly wrong for the site managers people to maintain this as an unmoderated discussion board (I assume that it is).

I should stress again that I find these questions of what is the proper private response to be quite difficult, and my views on the subject are generally much more tentative than my views on many First Amendment questions. Nongovernmental entities may and often should do things that the government may not; and their ethical rights and obligations are often more complex and context-sensitive than what we'd expect from the law.

Also, if the discussion board decided to filter out rude statements in order to make the discussions more valuable, or even to filter out evil ideas because they don't want their property used to promulgate such ideas, I wouldn't object: I think they're ethically entitled to do this, and there's no reason to condemn them for it.

But I don't think they're ethically obligated to engage in such filtering, for the reasons in the start of my quote: Providing a forum for these posts, in a context where they can be quickly responded to, may actually be something of a public service.

UPDATE: My former student Raffi Melkonian writes:

I'm a long time user of the xoxo board. Your response to the lawprof . . . .is quite right. Sure, there are a wide range of stupid, racist, and otherwise unpleasant posts on the board. But it also provides a valuable service for law school applicants, facilitated by the higher traffic such openness (even to evil speech) provides. . . .

I confess that I haven't been following this closely, so I have no independent opinion on this; but Julian Ku (Opinion Juris), who specializes in international law, is on top of it. A brief summary:

I noted rumors/reports of this below, and now the New York Times confirms that the U.S. has withdrawn from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The Optional Protocol is the provision granting the International Court of Justice compulsory jurisdiction over disputes under the consular relations treaty and the basis for Mexico's (and Germany's) applications to the ICJ. If the U.S. has indeed legally withdrawn from the Optional Protocol, then the ICJ can no longer hear future cases brought by other countries with foreign nationals similarly situated to Mexico's nationals.

For Julian's observations, go here.

Law Review Lara loves contractions. She thinks they make articles seem more colloquial and thus accessible. She also loves other locutions that she hopes add verve and punch to her articles, for instance starting sentences with "But"'s, and a bunch of other little things. (Talking about herself in the third person is an affectation that she loves only for this column, not for her other work.) She may, of course, be entirely wrong — maybe instead of getting clarity, she's sacrificing credibility. But she's written quite a few law review articles, and if she hasn't changed her mind by now, she's not terribly likely to.

So ask yourself: If you decontract 100% of her contractions, what will Lara do? She'll probably stet or otherwise reject all those changes. It's her article, and she likes it her way. Other authors who are committed to their styles will do the same.

But if you decontract 50% of her contractions, she'll probably accept most, perhaps nearly all, of the changes. She'll assume that you've actually invested real thought into the matter, rather than just applying a flat rule with which she disagrees. She'll think you've found those contractions that seem excessive, distracting, or otherwise inapt, even from the viewpoint of someone who is following her style. And since she realizes that outside editors often have a better sense of future readers' reaction than the author does, she'll often defer to your editorial judgment.

In fact, Lara wants you to suggest changes. (She doesn't like commands, unless her work is genuinely mistaken, but she likes suggestions.) It's just that she wants you to suggest changes that will be useful. "Here's how we'd rewrite your article in our writing style" is not useful. "Here are the particular places where we think your writing style, which we know you generally want to stick to, doesn't work and should be revised" is very useful.

So if you see that an author is deliberately and repeatedly using some locution, feel free to ask her up front whether she'd be willing to have you systematically remove it. If she says yes, great. But if she says no — or, more likely, if you don't ask her — then decontracting every single contraction is wasted work for you (and needless work for her). Use your judgment to decide where you think this usage works and where it doesn't, rather than just applying a flat rule that you suspect the author has no interest in following.

UPDATE: Reader Greg Schwinghammer writes:

As a former editor-in-chief of the University of Miami Law Review, I loved your advice to editors on keeping with the author's writing style. Dead on.

When I took over at Miami, there was an ingrained culture — certainly not exclusive to Miami — in which the student editors treated the authors as adversaries. I heard a lot of complaining about the articles, and suggestions the authors were stupid. At the time, we were about 18 months behind in our production schedule. I think the complaining was partly to justify our inability to move articles through the process.

I was elected not because of intellect (by a long shot!), but because I had been an Army officer and managed people. The first step to demand respect for the authors as customers. We were blessed with three students who had each spent ten years as journalists, so were gifted writers and appreciated careful editing.

For the articles in the worst shape, we just powered through and got them done. We caught up (publishing the April 1996 edition in April 1996). Part of the reason for success was working with the authors, rather than resisting them and avoiding open communications with them.

It always amazed me that students considered themselves so superior to the authors just because the students made law review. Especially at U/Miami. Don't get me wrong — I am proud of my degree and would put the top students at Miami against students from anywhere, but the students with the attitude seemed never to notice that the authors were not exactly 1Ls. Most were accomplished and successful.

I hope law review editors take your advice.

FURTHER UPDATE: Just to make it clear, Lara doesn't think that her correspondent's story reflects standard operating procedure at all law reviews (or is intended to reflect it). Most law reviews are quite respectful of authors. Lara's regret is that even those law reviews that respect authors still sometimes categorically apply inapt stylistic rules that change an author's voice, and thus make the cooperative author-editor endeavor less effective than it might be.

When law review editors check quotes against the original sources, they often find that the WESTLAW or LEXIS versions have glitches. I've sometimes been told this by law review editors.

If you find that, why not report it to WESTLAW and LEXIS as well as to the author? That will cut down on future errors by others. WESTLAW and LEXIS say they take such information seriously, and make the corrections. For LEXIS, click on the Feedback link in the upper right hand corner and fill in the form. WESTLAW says they prefer reports by phone -- call 1-800-REF-ATTY. And please pass this message on to others.

Interesting, though technical, discussion at Opinio Juris, here and here.

Charles Lembke writes: "I suggest the more interesting word origin stories be called 'entomologies' until they've been thoroughly debugged."

The First Amendment protects speech, and the Supreme Court has made clear that it protects Internet speech as well as offline speech. Under the logic of the Court's First Amendment cases, bloggers should be as protected as larger media speakers (whether they're offline larger media, or online, such as Slate or Salon).

But First Amendment protections have their limits. For instance, it's not clear whether the First Amendment lets journalists refuse to testify about their confidential sources; some courts of appeals say yes and some say no. What's more, it is clear that this journalist's privilege, if it exists, has its limits: If the sources' identities are really necessary for a criminal case or perhaps even a civil trial, journalists can be ordered to turn them over.

Likewise, the Supreme Court has held that corporations may be barred from spending money to support or oppose political candidates; I think that decision was wrong, but the Court did decide this. And the decision's logic suggests that even media corporations could be barred from engaging in such speech.

That's where optional speech protections come in: It turns out that many states have statutes (or state constitutional provisions) that do protect a journalist's privilege. The California statute, which is at issue in the recent Apple trade secret litigation, provides very broad protection: It categorically prohibits courts from holding any "publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication" in contempt for refusing to name his sources, no matter how important the information may be. Likewise, federal campaign law, which generally bans certain commentary on candidates by corporations, has a "media exemption" that lets "any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication" comment about candidates even if it is owned by a corporation.

I'm going to be writing an article in the next few months on optional speech protections, and especially how they apply to the new media. But the short point I want to mention here — both as to the California journalist privilege and the election law media exemption — is that many of the laws already cover blogs and other online media sources. Even a purely literal reading of the laws gives us that: The law isn't limited to newspapers or magazines, but covers all "periodical publications." (This would also be the proper reading of the proposed Free Flow of Information Act, discussed by Michelle Malkin.)

The law doesn't apply to one-shot publications, such as books. (Maybe it should, but it doesn't.) It doesn't apply to sporadic publications, such as occasional newsletters or posts, with some unpredictable number of months elapsing between each. It doesn't apply to communications to a few acquaintances, which probably don't qualify as publications. But if someone posts items every day, or even several times a week, and reaches a significant number of members of the public, then he's producing a periodical publication. That's just the literal, and sensible, meaning of those provisions.

I realize that the drafters of these laws probably didn't envision the Internet, which wasn't a major communications medium at the time. But they used particular language that is not inherently limited to words on paper. The literal meaning of the language does include all periodical publications; unless it's changed, that's how it should be read.

Nor is there, I think, any sound policy reason to read the words more narrowly, no reason to distinguish The New Republic from Slate.com, or a newspaper columnist from Instapundit. But I'm not resting the argument on policy alone: Here both the text and the policy cut in favor of equal protection for speech by offline publications, online professional publications, online amateur publications, and things in between.

Now I'm not positive that courts will in fact take such a view -- I'm arguing here that it's the right interpretation, but I realize courts may disagree with me. It makes sense to urge drafters of news to be more explicit, and to make clear that online media as well as offline media, and amateur media (and semipro media) as well as professional media, are covered. But if one can't get that, for instance because the statute has already been enacted and simply covers "newspapers, magazines, and other periodical publication," then one should argue that the statute does by its terms cover blogs, and one would be correct to so argue.

Finally, let me dispose of two technical objections, which I mentioned in an earlier post: (1) Some dictionaries define "periodical" as meaning less often than daily, but that's not the majority definition, and it's not apt in this context, since "other periodical publication" shortly following "newspaper" suggests that newspapers, many of which are daily, are periodicals, and therefore that "periodical" includes daily publications. (2) One can argue that "periodical" requires a fixed period between items, such as roughly 24 hours or 7 days, and that therefore blogs that sometimes have posts 5 minutes apart and sometimes 15 hours apart don't qualify. But I don't think that periodical requires such fixed intervals — publishing at least once a day should be as periodical as publishing exactly once a day at a fixed time — nor would such a definition make much sense.

So far here, here, here, and here. I must admit that I was the proximate cause of this: I was quoted (though somewhat incompletely) in an article about white supremacist groups and free speech in the wake of the murders of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother; a white supremacist e-mailed me, and let's just say that I wasn't overly friendly to him. I regret that this has gotten my colleagues involved in all this, but this is America and I'm not going to be nice to Nazis to try to get them to go away.

So, yeah, we're Jews. Yeah, we're overrepresented on university faculties, in law and medicine, in the Senate, on the Supreme Court. Speaking of Nazis, we were overrepresented on the Manhattan Project, too.

The most powerful country in the world, America, is one of the ones that has been most open to Jews. Look at the most anti-Semitic countries in recent history: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Arab world. Right up there at the forefront of civilization and power, aren't they? Is it all the workings of The Conspiracy? Or is it just that the sorts of idiots who hate Jews do other idiotic things, too?

I'm looking for interesting or amusing epigraphs for various sections of my First Amendment textbook — quotes from books or poems that touch on the topic but from a nonlegal perspective. Here are some examples:

1. From the section on advocacy of violent conduct:

   They never told the [raging] crowd to [flay] a woman’s hide,
   They never marked a man for death—what fault of theirs he died? --
   They only said ‘intimidate,’ and talked and went away --
   By God, the boys that did the work were braver men than they!
   Their sin it was that fed the fire — small blame to them that heard --
   The boys get drunk on rhetoric, and madden at a word — ...
   If words are words, or death is death, or powder sends the ball,
   [They] spoke the words that sped the shot — the curse be on [them] all.
   -- Rudyard Kipling, “Cleared”

2. From the section on Communist advocacy:

   Sam Goldwyn said, ‘How’m I gonna do decent pictures when all my good writers are in jail?’ Then he added, the infallible Goldwyn, ‘Don’t misunderstand me, they all ought to be hung.’ Mr. Goldwyn didn’t know about ‘hanged.’ That’s all there is to say.
   -- Dorothy Parker, Interview, in Writers at Work

3. From the section on fighting words:

   Trampas (Walter Huston): “Now who’s talkin’ to you?”
   Virginian (Gary Cooper): “I’m talking to you, Trampas.”
   Trampas: “When I want to know anything from you I’ll tell you, you long-legged son-of-a-—.”
   Virginian pulls out gun.
   Virginian: “If you want to call me that, smile.”
   Trampas: “With a gun against my belly I — I always smile.”
   -- Owen Wister, The Virginian

Can any of you suggest such epigraphs that are related to various free speech issues, religious freedom issues, church-state issues, and the like? If so, please post them in the comments. Thanks!

UPDATE: Let me a bit more specific: I'm not looking for stirring defenses of free speech, or other aphorisms about how religiosity or speech or skepticism or whatever else is important. I'd prefer things that are funny or wry, or that otherwise illustrate some aspect of the topic without simply announcing an ideological position. The Kipling quote shows that I don't mind things that do express a view, though even that was meant as a commentary on one particular form of incitement, not about free speech theory generally.

If you're a first-year student who's planning to participate in a law review write-on competition (the sort that gives you an assignment to do over a week or two), start preparing several weeks beforehand. If your competition is in a couple of weeks, over Spring vacation, start now. If it's right after exams, in mid-May, start in early April. (Lara realizes she should have told the Spring vacation competitors about this a few weeks ago.)

Yes, it’s extra work, at a time when you’re already swamped with work. But just as an athlete needs to prepare well before the competition, so do you. The write-on competition will require specialized cite-checking and writing knowledge that you probably haven’t fully learned. Use the time before you compete to acquire that knowledge.

Here are the basic tips (borrowed from Academic Legal Writing (second edition), written by Lara's close personal friend):

1. Many law reviews grade you in part on your knowledge of proper citation style. (Some have a separate citation formatting, proofreading, cite-checking, and editing test; many check the accuracy of your footnotes in your write-on paper.) Ask your law review which citation style manual it uses, and whether it has any supplemental instructions explaining how its style deviates from the standard manual. Read the citation style manual several times. Make it your bathroom, bus, or exercise bike reading.

   Mark (with post-its, for example) those items in the citation manual you found most surprising, and that you think you’ll most need to be reminded of during the competition. By reading and marking the manual, you'll (a) get a good sense of the rules; (b) understand the general logic behind the rules (not all the rules are explicable using a general logical principle, but some are); and (c) see enough citation examples that you might more easily notice when something departs from the citation rules. Pay particularly close attention to the rules related to (1) cases, (2) statutes and constitutions, (3) articles, (4) books, (5) short forms, and (6) citation signals.

2. Ask your law review what style manual it uses, and read that, too, marking the surprising items.

3. Read a good general writing manual, such as Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, at least once.

4. See whether past competitions are available. Read them, just to get a feel for what’s going on. If some model answers are available, pay particularly close attention to them.

5. If the past competitions include practice editing and proofreading tests, do as many of the practice tests as you can; compare your results against the answer keys, if those are given. If there are no answer keys, compare your answers against those of some friends of yours who are also doing the practice competitions. (You can’t work together with people on the actual competition, but there’s no problem with cooperating on practice projects.)

6. Go over any comments that you’ve gotten on your past written work, such as the papers in your first year legal writing course. Most writers make the same mistakes repeatedly. Figure out what your weaknesses are, so you can avoid them while doing the write-on.

   Your writing instructor will likely be happy to help you with this. Writing teachers like it when you come to them out of a sincere desire to improve your writing; and they often have specific advice that they’ll be glad to pass along.

7. Plan ahead to make sure you have no other obligations during your write-on competition. If it’s during Spring vacation, try not to do your class outlines that week—do them before, or save them for later. If you’re working part-time, see if you can take the week off, and make up the lost time before or after. If you have children, do what you can to get the other parent or someone else to spend more time with them during the competition.

   Try to avoid leaving town to see friends or family, even if it is Spring vacation. You might intend to do lots of work when you’re on the trip, but it’s hard to work when you’re around people you haven’t seen in months, and who understandably want your company. Going out to dinner with friends is fine; everyone needs a study break. But try to avoid more demanding commitments.

   The writing competition requires you to do something that’s new to you, under considerable psychological pressure, in a limited time. You’ll want to finish your draft as early as possible, so you can edit it as many times as you can. You really might need most of your waking hours to do this. Even if you’ve found that the first year of law school hasn’t been as time-consuming as you were initially told, this week will be quite a burden.

   If, however, you can’t get out of your other obligations for the week, don’t use that as an excuse to just sit out the competition. It’s possible for you to do well even if you also have to travel, work, study, or mind the kids that week -- it’s just easier if you can focus solely on the competition.

Those who want to read an article about us in Russian can do so here. (It's in Russkaya Reklama, a Russian-language newspaper in the U.S.)

See how well you do on this quiz, which I think is unusually well done visually.

I just got a political e-mail that began with:

Where did the word "picnic" comes from?

It was typical to have a picnic on a Friday evening in Oklahoma. The word was short for "pick a nigger" to lynch. They would lynch a Black male and cut off body parts as souvenirs. This went on every weekend in this country, and it was all across the county. . . .

This set my myth-detection antennae a-quiverin', and sure enough this is yet another usage myth, much like the claims that "nitty-gritty" originally referred to debris (including dead bodies) in the holds of slave ships, or that "handicapped" stems from handicapped people supposedly begging with their caps in their hands. In fact, Snopes says it's a myth, and the dictionaries I've checked note a perfectly innocent etymology for the word.

This reminds me of two tips I thought I'd pass along:

(1) Lots of the most interesting etymological claims that are bandied about on the Net and in the popular press are bunk. (The old chestnut about "fuck" being an acronym from "for unlawful carnal knowledge" is another example.) I don't know why this is especially common for etymological assertions, but that's what I've found. But don't trust any etymological claims -- especially the interesting ones -- unless you verify them in a reputable dictionary (and maybe not even then).

(2) More broadly, if you're tempted to forward such a claim -- etymological or not -- check it out. Check it on Snopes. Check it in a reference work; there are plenty available for free online. And this is especially so if you're making a broader political point, as my correspondent was. Why ruin your credibility at the outset, by passing along long-debunked errors?

Reader Ben Wickert asks:

As a law professor, have the beliefs you express on your blog been challenged by students, whether in class or out? How do you express yourself without causing too much controversy? Or, perhaps, is that not even a concern of yours?

The answer to the first question is "no." It's too bad, since I think students should talk more to their professors, and argue with them (politely) when they disagree. This is s best done outside class, unless for some reason the blog post is squarely on-topic to the current class discussion. But if a student came up to me and said he disagreed with something I've blogged, and wanted to discuss it, I'd be delighted. As to expressing myself, I'm happy to cause controversy, if I think I'm right. I am especially careful with particular posts that I think will be controversial, to make sure that I'm indeed correct -- I don't want those sorts of controversies in which I end up looking like a fool. But creating the kinds of controversies in which I say something accurate yet controversial is, I think, part of my mission as an academic. And it's fun.

By the way, if any teacher-bloggers (whether in higher education or in K-12 education) have any interesting stories about students reading your blog posts and reacting to them, please post them in the comments.

More on the law of blogging -- a reader asks whether under Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (emphasis added), experts have to disclose all the blog posts they've posted in their area of experties:

(2) Disclosure of Expert Testimony.

(A) In addition to the disclosures required by paragraph (1), a party shall disclose to other parties the identity of any person who may be used at trial to present evidence under Rules 702, 703, or 705 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.

(B) Except as otherwise stipulated or directed by the court, this disclosure shall, with respect to a witness who is retained or specially employed to provide expert testimony in the case or whose duties as an employee of the party regularly involve giving expert testimony, be accompanied by a written report prepared and signed by the witness. The report shall contain a complete statement of all opinions to be expressed and the basis and reasons therefor; the data or other information considered by the witness in forming the opinions; any exhibits to be used as a summary of or support for the opinions; the qualifications of the witness, including a list of all publications authored by the witness within the preceding ten years; the compensation to be paid for the study and testimony; and a listing of any other cases in which the witness has testified as an expert at trial or by deposition within the preceding four years.

My quick guess is that blog posts need not be disclosed, unless they are detailed enough to form part of the witness's "qualifications" (which is highly unlikely, though a post that's as detailed as a scholarly article might qualify). The requirement, after all, is not simply to disclose all publications, but to disclose "the qualifications of the witness, including a list of all publications."

Yet I'm no civil procedure expert, so I can't be positive. If you have actual knowledge about this legal question (and not just speculation about the text, or opinions on what the law should be), please do post about it in the comments. Again, though, please limit this to specific legal knowledge that you have on the subject. I don't mean to be a martinet about this, but that's the way comments on such posts can be really useful.

A friend of mine just reminded me that the generally accepted spelling is "haled before a court," not "hailed before a court." I usually use "haled," I think, but in a recent post (which I've since corrected) I used "hailed" instead. I blame Justice Douglas, since my sentence tracked his dissent in Beauharnais v. Illinois, which used "hailed." Impressionable law students: Don't get sucked into that usage yourself.

Note that I'm generally a descriptivist on usage, so I resist many claims that a common usage is "wrong." But "hailed into court" is still used very rarely by courts, compared to "haled into court," so I'm not sure it's really common usage yet.

Moreover, it's especially important for lawyers not just to be right, but to look right. Even if you have a good descriptivist argument to defend your using "hailed," the safer bet is to write "haled."

I wanted to echo Orin's recommendation of Rick Hasen's item on the FEC and blogs. Rick is a leading election law scholar, and a very thoughtful fellow, as well as the leading election law blogger. He tends to be more pro-regulation than I am, but I find his work to be much worth reading.

One small disagreement I have with Rick's piece: He writes that "As a matter of policy, bona fide on-line journals and political bloggers such as Hugh Hewitt, Andrew Sullivan, or Joshua Marshall, should be treated the same as the New York Times and David Brooks" (I agree so far) but then says that "Online corporate-owned journals like Salon.com, however, do not appear to fall within the literal ambit of [the] 'media exemption' [to restrictions on corporate speech about candidates] nor do any blogs that are owned by corporations, because the exemption on its face applies only to broadcasts, newspapers, and periodicals."

I think that, literally, blogs are periodicals. They are published fairly regularly, rather than intermittently, and they reach more than a few people; that makes them "periodical publication[s]." (The relevant exemption comes in 2 U.S.C. sec. 431(9)(B), "The term 'expenditure' does not include--(i) any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication . . . .")

It would be good to clarify FECA to make clear that Weblogs and online magazines are exempted. But I think that, properly -- even literally -- interpreted, "other periodical publication" already includes blogs (except perhaps ones that publish intermittently and very rarely).

(Note that some dictionaries define "periodical" as meaning less often than daily, but that's not the majority definition, and it's not apt in this context, since "other periodical publication" shortly following "newspaper" suggests that newspapers, many of which are daily, are periodicals, and therefore that "periodical" includes daily publications. Also, one can argue that "periodical" requires a fixed period between items, such as roughly 24 hours or 7 days, and that therefore blogs that sometimes have posts 5 minutes apart and sometimes 15 hours apart don't qualify. But I don't think that periodical requires such fixed intervals -- publishing at least once a day should be as periodical as publishing exactly once a day at a fixed time -- nor would it make much sense.)

I have only a layman's knowledge of Rachel Corrie's life and death, but my tentative sense of the matter is close to that expressed in this Dennis Prager column. I would not have, for instance, named an award after her — but others obviously disagree, as the mass e-mail that I reproduce below shows. (Note that this e-mail was forwarded to me by a reader; I have no reason to doubt its authenticity, and I have confirmed that the purported sender is indeed involved with the Award.)

Subject: [RFP] Matthew Abraham is 2005 Rachel Corrie Award Winner

I am extremely pleased to announce that Matthew Abraham, assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, is the recipient of the 2005 Rachel Corrie Award for Courage in the Teaching of Writing. The award, now in its second year, is sponsored by the Progressive SIGS and Caucuses Coalition (PSCC) of CCCC, and will be presented at the PSCC annual Wednesday evening event at CCCC. This year the event will take place March 16 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. (See the CCCC program for exact location.)

It happens that March 16 is also the second anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death. As Matthew Abraham's work has much in common, in its focus and its spirit, with Rachel's, presenting him with the award that night will be a both a wonderful way to once again commemorate the life and deeds of the young woman/student who took what she learned extremely seriously, as well as to recognize the young man/scholar/teacher who is bringing Palestine onto the radar screen of a new generation of students--and that of his rhetorician colleagues.

As the numerous supporting letters for Matthew that flooded my mailbox attest, he has earned this distinction through his work in all three areas in which most of us are evaluated for tenure: teaching, scholarship, and service.

From bringing Ann Coulter's writing, as well as progressive voices, into his undergraduate rhetoric and writing class (so that "students will learn about those aspects of argumentation that currently fuel cultural and political debate within the U.S.") to creating a graduate course called "Rhetoric in the Public Sphere: Intellectuals, Writing, and Social Change" (in which he asks students questions they most likely haven't encountered in their other courses, such as "What does it mean to 'speak truth to power'?" and "Why is the word 'advocacy' a dirty word in academe?"), Matthew Abraham has taken the field of rhetoric and writing to a place where it vitally matters. As a former colleague of his at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania wrote to me about his teaching: "[I]f Rachel placed her body between the Caterpillar monster and the little house she was trying to protect, Dr. Abraham's work places his professional future between the profession's crushing institutional silence over Palestinian suffering and the forces that would enforce this silence at the peril of the profession's conscience.... Not only did Matthew open students' minds to the complexities of the situation in the Middle East through assigned readings, supplemental lectures, and planned participation in debate (he was a charismatic teacher; I observed in his classes the awe and admiration with which he was regarded by his students; he appealed to youth's idealism, and he won!)--not only that, but also he led us, the faculty, out of our entrenched timidity and moral isolation toward the path of commitment and activism...."

Matthew was taking risks in his scholarship at least as far back as the time he wrote his dissertation (actually, not very long ago)--which was, in his own words, "an analsyis of the controversial academic scholarship of Lani Guinier, Edward Said, Paul de Man, and Norman G. Finkelstein." His publications include "The Rhetoric of Academic Controversy after 9/11: Edward Said in the American Imagination" in JAC and "Supreme Rhetoric: The Supreme Court, Veiled Majoritarianism, and the Enforcement of the Racial Contract" (forthcoming in an anthology from the U. of Illinois Press). As a colleague in his department wrote to me, "Dr. Abraham has presented a critical perspective of the ways in which the academic elite fashion a treasonous discourse that places scholarship in the service of U.S. sovereignty and power, a discourse that all too often masquerades as professional practice in academe." Even his current department head wrote about him with admiration: "When [Matthew] came here for his job talk, he presented himself and his scholarly agenda without soft-pedaling it....There's always pressure on new hires to be quiet and to fit in.....[Matthew] doesn't keep quiet and he hasn't changed his political commitments to please me or anyone else. He's kept on with his work even though it means that he has to put up with the extra pressures that come with ideological tests."

Many who read this announcement will recall that Matthew was the instigator of petitions on behalf of several intellectuals whose academic freedom has come under fire, including Ward Churchill and Tariq Ramadan. According to all accounts, Matthew has also been brilliantly innovative as an organizer of intellectual events--even when under threats of cancellation and boycott. Timothy Brennan, Professor of Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, and English at the University of Minnesota, wrote to me of the 2003 panel Matthew organized for the MLA called "The Rhetoric of Resistance: The Intifada and the Literary Imagination": "It was very well-attended and widely debated--a local triumph..... The word 'intifada' had never before appeared on the program of the MLA." Victor Vitanza and others wrote glowingly of Matthew's work as a guest moderator for an online Pre/Text symposium with Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein that dealt with the responsibility of intellectuals. Vitanza wrote of Matthew's handling of sometimes difficult--sometimes outright rude--questioners and commentators that he "disarmed the...people by being knowledgeable about what was being counter-questioned and by displaying a grace under fire that few have the ability to demonstrate publicly....His interperseonal skills are the best I have witnessed."

The star participants were no less laudatory about Matthew's role. Finkelstein wrote to me, "Although Corrie set the bar of courage at a nearly impossible peak for others to scale, I'm confident that, to the extent that anyone can, giving the award to Matthew would appropriately honor her memory." Chomsky wrote, "Abraham not only organized the symposium, but was also its guiding participant. The leading themes were topics that particularly concerned Edward Said--and Rachel Corrie. That takes a good deal of courage in the public domain in the US, including an academic setting. It includes extremes of abuse and vilification, and for younger people, threats to possible appointment; and in fact more direct threats, including death threats, many taken seriously by police on campuses and in communities....Abraham handled all of this with skill, care, sympathetic understanding, and admirable courage. The same has been true of other initiatives of his in defense of freedom of speech and academic freedom, and of suffering people. It is an admirable record, one of which, I am confident, Rachel Corrie would have very much approved, as I do, very much....In brief, I cannot think of a more worthy candidate."

I think I'll let Chomsky have the last word. Please join us in honoring Rachel and Matthew as we present this award--as well as for two hours of discussion with other CCCC progressives--at the Wednesday night CCCC convention session "Affirming Action: A Roundtable by the Progressive SIG/Caucus Coalition (PSCC) and the CCCC Diversity Committee" on March 16, 5-7pm, in San Francisco.

Harriet Malinowitz

Chair, Rachel Corrie Award for Courage in the Teaching of Writing Committee