Almost five years ago, I wrote a post arguing for the abolition of the Bluebook, the standard system of legal citation used by most law journals. As I argued there and in several subsequent posts (e.g. here), I think the Bluebook is vastly more complicated than it should be, and creates an enormous waste of […]
Archive | Academia
Asian-Americans and Affirmative Action
As co-blogger David Bernstein notes, Fisher v. Texas highlights the ways in which today’s affirmative action programs victimize Asian-American students for the benefit of groups that often have not endured the kind of massive systematic discrimination inflicted on blacks, and indeed may have suffered less historic discrimination than the Asian-Americans themselves. I previously wrote about […]
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Upholds University of Texas Affirmative Action Admissions Program
By Ilya Somin on January 20, 2011 2:49 am in Academia, Affirmative Action, Constitutional Law, Racial Discrimination
In yesterday’s opinion in Fisher v. Texas, the US Court of Appeals upheld a University of Texas affirmative action program in admissions, applying the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which held that racial diversity in higher education is a “compelling state interest” justifying the use of racial preferences to ensure that there […]
The Perils of Reusing Questions from Past Exams
Above the Law has a post about various law professors who recently got into trouble by reusing questions from past exams. When some of their students got hold of the previous exams and used them to study for the new one that included some of the same questions, all sorts of difficult issues arose. For […]
Why Scholars’ Motives Should be Irrelevant to Our Evaluation of their Scholarship
At an American Association of Law Schools panel that I took part in at this year’s annual conference, we briefly discussed the question of whether scholars’ motives for writing an article should be relevant to our evaluation of its quality. Often, people make claims such as the following: “Professor X only wrote that article to […]
AALS Hot Topics Panels I Will be Speaking at this Week
For those who may be interested, I will be speaking at two “Hot Topics” panels at this week’s AALS faculty conference, both on Thursday, January 6. The first will be on “Ideological Diversity and Discrimination in American Law Schools,” along with John McGinnis (Northwestern), Bill Nelson (NYU), James Phillips (UC Berkeley), and panel organizer George […]
Alito in Hawaii
In today’s mail, I received a promotional postcard (part of the genre known as “law porn”) announcing that the University of Hawaii School of Law “Welcomes 2011 Jurist-in-Residence U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr., January 24-28, 2011.” I suppose that I’m meant to be impressed that Justice Alito is visiting the law […]
21st Century Jobs 1: Higher Ed ROI Planning?
(Note: In a series of posts running until around the New Year, and maybe beyond, I plan to rampantly speculate on new jobs and career tracks that might emerge in the next years and couple of decades. Straight from my fevered brain to VC!) The higher education bubble – both undergraduate and professional education – […]
Herbert Wechsler
Biographies about law professors aren’t very common — we’re not that interesting or important — but if I could pick a professor to be the subject of a biography it would be Herbert Wechsler. Wechsler was a long-time Columbia professor who managed to be at the center of a lot of major legal disputes in […]
Practicing Lawyers vs. Legal Academics
Bridget Crawford wonders why practicing lawyers don’t much like legal academics. Professor Bainbridge offers an explanation. Rick Garnett responds with some qualifications. UPDATE: More at Legal Ethics Forum.
Share, Oh Readers, My Shock and Dismay …
To find myself watching the Michael Crichton 1995 movie, Congo, with Beloved Wife – which is not a bad movie and I’m a fan of the late MC, may he rest in peace, but – contemplate my shock and dismay to see the film describe the laboratory as being at Berkeley, and then all the shots […]
Diversification and the Market for College Admissions
Help me out with thinking this through; I’m unsure about what I suggest below and would like to figure it out. (To commenters: I’m particularly interested in how to model the strategic behavior here – I’ve suggested that it could be thought of by reference to stock portfolio diversification theory, but as several have pointed […]
Tod Lindberg Assesses the Presidency at Midterm, and My Query about Academics in Government
Tod Lindberg, editor of the Hoover Institution journal Policy Review, offers in the Weekly Standard an assessment of the President at the mid-term … President McCain, that is. It is incisive, rather than played for laughs, and characteristically shrewd in its implied judgments. But as long Tod is speculating, let me speculate in a different sense. […]
A Celebration of 35 Years of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars
I am privileged this week to be in attendance at a marvelous conference at NYU celebrating the 35th anniversary of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, with Professor Walzer himself in attendance, and a host of luminaries among moral philosophy, law, and other fields. I don’t really have internet access at the conference, and the […]
Virginia’s Worst University Speech Code?
By Ilya Somin on November 2, 2010 4:56 pm in Academia, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Speech at Colleges and Universities
Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Barton Hinkle has a column surveying speech codes at Virginia public universities {HT: co-blogger Todd Zywicki]. It turns out that George Mason University may have the worst of a bad lot: Free speech is one of those values to which everyone gives lip service. Nearly no one considers himself pro-censorship. Yet as […]