Why the Sunstein Pick is Good For Legal Academics:
Like my co-bloggers, I'm delighted that Cass Sunstein has been selected to serve in the Obama Administration. I also wanted to point out that this is terrific news for other legal academics. Cass currently writes about 120 law review articles a year, all of which place in top journals, amounting to about 30% of the total placed articles in those journals. With Cass working full-time in Washington, I'm betting that his scholarly productivity will plummet. He might write as few as 20 articles a year! That means that there will be 100 more non-Cass placements free every year for the next few years for the rest of us, which gives other scholars a great opportunity to place their articles while Cass is working in government.
Related Posts (on one page):
- "Why We Should Welcome Cass Sunstein,"
- Why the Sunstein Pick is Good For Legal Academics:
- Sunstein as Regulatory Czar:
- Volokh Conspiracy Guest-Blogger Nominated to High Government Office:
- Sunstein to Head OIRA:
Seriously -- see my posts, the rather meager defense of Sunstein against the charge of using ghostwriters offered by Prof. Frank Cross, and the comments of "Big Posner Fan," all under an earlier post, here:
http://volokh.com/posts/1231420422.shtml
I emphasize I have no direct evidence that Sunstein uses ghostwriters, but I've heard opinions to that effect from professors who've personally worked with him and it would be easy for him to deny it (as have, e.g., Posner, and Tushnet to a large degree, both in blog posts) if it wasn't true. It looks like the ball is in Sunstein's court on the issue. Again, see the informative comments from various people on the earlier thread before you dismiss the prospect that Sunstein's a heavy user of ghostwriters.
While your post appears to be "tongue in cheek", and while I can understand that Professor Sunstein's colleagues and friends are delighted with his appointment, I have to be concerned because of his rather ambivalent position with regard to his fellow citizens' right to keep and bear arms.
In my view, anyone who does not trust his fellow citizens is himself not worthy of trust.
In that light, I view him in the same category as Eric Holder.
JMHO.
If Sunstein's wrong on the 2d Am., I can see why that's an important issue if he's nominated to the Supreme Court, but why does it make him less qualified to review the pros and cons of particular kinds of economic regulations? I doubt he's going to be setting gun policy in this position.
Why do you bear arms if you trust your fellow citizens? Afraid of getting mugged by a non-citizen?
There is nothing illegal about using ghostwriters either.
I never heard anything at Chicago about him using ghost writers, and I knew a few of his research assistants, who presumably would have known about it. He may have had people help him with citations, but that isn't unusual in the legal academy, and anyway, from my experiences with him in class he knew the cases off the top of his head, so I'd be surprised if he did too much of that.
Do you have any reason to think he takes credit for others' work other than his amazing productivity?
Well, Stevie Smartass, I don't believe I claimed that I "bear arms".
I'd like to know I had the choice, though.
That does stretch the limits of plausibility. But if true, I feel very, very lazy right now.
120 per year??? That's more than two every week on average, with zero vacation. I don't see how that's humanly possible unless he's just dictating them, stream of consciousness style, and letting other people do all the research, editing, cite checking etc. Even then, it's an amazing, Posneresque level of output. Let's hope it's something in the water at U of Chicago and that Obama picked up a similar energy level from working there.
You know, I saw dog tracks in the snow this morning. I didn't actually see the dog but he had been there.
He writes a law review article good enough for publication in a major journal every three days. Plus, a book a year. Plus teaching.
Some people will believe anything.
The post seems to be tongue in cheek. Otherwise Sunstein would be to publishing what santa claus is to gift giving.
I look forward to reading that sentiment again in Barack Obama's foreword to the 2012 edition of "Dreams From My Father" by Bill Ayers.
The second point is that you guys are going to have to get to work writing your own articles. What are you doing wasting your time blogging? :)
Well, recycling alows you to do that. if you have read one article you have read almost the 120. They are more or less the same.
Copy and paste will also help you.
And of course using a ghost writtter is cheating, illegal or not. And he gained tenure by his works. We are not taking about Jenna Jameson or Paris Hilton Memoirs. BTW, they ackowledged the ghost writter
Nonresponsive. Instruct the witness to answer the question.
There is nothing illegal about using ghostwriters either.
Hadur? Who's that?
Yep.
I think that this total is definitely bad for legal academics. 30% of articles in top journals by one man? Say it ain't so, Joe!
If this is correct, my estimation for the scholarship of law professors has plummeted tonight. There is no way that this would be possible in a rigorously "policed" field.
In my fieled, four or five articles in good journals during a single year would be hugely impressive. Two would keep any dean happy.
Granted, we also have to write books, so that eats up time. But counting chapters as roughly equivalent to articles in terms of effort required, that gets a superstar to perhaps nine or ten.
How thoroughly disturbing.
If my experience was typical, and I have no reason to doubt that it was, the "articles" that Sunstein sends to law reviews are really:
1) 5-10 pages of well-written introduction expressing an interesting idea. The introduction tends to take the form of an essay, with fairly few citations. It is followed by,
2) The body of the article, which, on second read, sounds like stream of consciousness with lots of citations. On second read, it is a mix of (a) stream of consciousness with few if any citations and (b) concepts and citations lifted directly from other articles he's written.
Law reviews accept his articles because he's Sunstein and the well-written introduction reassures student editors that they've got something hot. Even if one notices (2) at the time of submission, it's still a Sunstein article.
Just to be clear, I think he's a brilliant guy, but not because he has the ability to churn out great, carefully written articles in quantity. Instead, it's because he's got so many great ideas that can blossom into strong articles with the care and tending of diligent student editors.
Sunstein Skeptic: this may shock you, but nobody in the real world cares if a law professor uses ghost writers.
By "real world" I assume you mean outside academe. But Sunstein has not been out of academe. Which is the point, because the use of ghostwriters raises issues of academic integrity in the "unreal world" in which Sunstein is currently employed.
I couldn't care less if my postman uses steroids. But I do care if Barry Bonds does so.
A year or two ago, I seem to remember a post by Volokh about the dangers of sarcasm in web posts. Sometimes you just can't tell. I initially thought that Kerr was serious, but the silliness of saying someone wrote a law review article every other working day is pretty clear once you think about it.
That said, this is how Internet rumors get started. I can see Fox and Friends and Hanity starting diatribes with, "It's said that Sunstein wrote 120 law review articles a year. . . ."
I have clearly been pwned.
Hate to pile on, but I wasn't being serious either. I was merely hiring an unwitting Hadur as my ghostwriter, evidently unbeknownst to you - which illustrates my point.
And that Orin Kerr is my sock puppet. Which makes my response to his thread rather more incomprehensible.
On the other hand, if Sunstein focused on writing three articles a year instead of, say, twenty, I imagine that each of those three would be spectacular and worthy of publication in HLR/YLJ in their own right.
For some reason, a number of UChicago profs follow the Sunstein model and submit articles that look like the product of a twenty minute conversation over coffee rather than workshopped and well researched scholarship.
The SG does a lot more than simply don his morning coat and go argue in the Supreme Court. The SG coordinates the Government's appellate efforts as a whole, and is an extremely public policy-oriented position. If Sunstein hates gun rights, he may very well push every appellate issue hard that results in a contraction of gun rights.
Come on, that's hilarious. Almost as funny is that people fell for it.
Not that that's a bad thing. When people run with a "fact" like that, it exposes them to the ridicule they deserve.
If Sunstein had been nominated to be the Solicitor General, that might be a relevant point. But he wasn't. He was nominated to be the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, where he will have no discernible role in setting the federal government's litigating positions.
Often true, but Hannity persists in having a prime time show with a multimillion dollar salary and loyal audience, despite his numerous documented lies and inconsistencies, patently subpar intelligence and vacuous and brutish personality. So he may get the deserved ridicule from some people, but not the deserved consequences of winding up the victim of a televised fraud.
Well, Stevie Smartass, I don't believe I claimed that I "bear arms".
I'd like to know I had the choice, though.
Nonresponsive. Instruct the witness to answer the question.
Well, yer 'onor, it's like this...
The questions which were posed are nothing more than a shabby attempt to lead the witness by resorting to flawed premeses.
a) I do do not "bear arms" in public places;
b) I am not "afraid" of being "mugged"; and
c) I do not consider "muggers" to be my "fellow citizens", certainly not in any moral sense.
If that's not responsive enough for yer 'onor, well, yer 'onor will just have to lump it.
Oh, that's not really clear at all. It's just that certain fundamental issues are sine qua non.
Does anyone know what the OIRA is? From the org chart description, if the gentleman is as good as his reputation, he is overqualified. His 1st recommendation should be to abolish the OIRA.
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