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Archive | Academia
John Louth of OUP Guestblogging at Opinio Juris
Some VC readers, particularly academics, might be interested in the guest posts going up this week at Opinio Juris by John Louth, the editor in chief of academic law at Oxford University Press, thanks to the good offices of OJ’s Kevin Jon Heller. Mr. Louth is guest-posting on international law publishing, but much of what […]
Advice for law students: Enjoy your University
A few weeks ago, I returned to my beloved University of Michigan, for a law school class reunion. This time, I stayed an extra day, in order to speak to law students at a lunchtime event on Monday, organized by the U of M Federalist Society. Michigan Prof. Richard Primus provided some thoughtful commentary on […]
Does George Mason Have the Most Conservative Law Students?
The new Princeton Review rankings state that George Mason has the “most conservative students” “based on student assessment of the political bent of the student body at large”. My impression over the years has been that the student body at GMU is more or less evenly split between liberals and conservatives, which I’m pretty sure […]
Congratulations to Brown Law!
The Princeton Review has just released its 2011 law school guide book, “The Best 172 Law Schools,” which includes rankings based upon extensive student surveys. According to their press release (cached here), Brown University’s law school ranked number one in the “best professors” survey category. Congratulations to all our friends on Brown’s law faculty. (Hat […]
Georgetown Law Journal Celebrates Justice Stevens
The Georgetown Law Journal and the Supreme Court Institute have an impressive lineup of speakers this morning for a conference on retired Justice John Paul Stevens. It makes me a bit uncomfortable, however, that (a) the conference is styled “The Finest Legal Mind”: A Symposium in Celebration of Justice John Paul Stevens; (b) the conference […]
DeLong Doubles Down
Brad DeLong responds to my post. As illustrated below the jump, he engages in selective editing and continues to misrepresent the players in this saga. (He also omits links to most of those to whom he’s responding.) Larry Ribstein also comments here.
Why Oh Why Can’t We Have Better EconProf Bloggers?
Would you consider it sound for one academic to attack a paper written by another, calling it (among other things) “obviously erroneous” and “simply stupid,” based upon a third-party representation of what it says? And would you consider it responsible to use the third-party representation of said paper as Exhibit A for questioning why the […]
Addendum on My Intellectual Life at UCLA, and a Note on the New Class
Further to my post below on the passing of Philippa Foot. In addition to the philosophers whom Larry Solum lists as having great intellectual impact on us as undergraduates, for myself and in my own intellectual trajectory at UCLA, I have to add to Larry’s list from outside the philosophy department – the great political […]
Philippa Foot (1920-2010)
With great sorrow, I mark the passing of Philippa Foot, the great Oxford moral philosopher and my teacher at UCLA. I took my first class in ethics from her, and I took every possible other class with her. I will not try to summarize her philosophical method or her importance in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of […]
Ineffective “Law Porn”
I am once again chair of the GMUSL appointments committee, which means I am eligible to vote in the U.S. News law school reputation survey, which means, in turn, that I am once again being inundated with p.r. materials from various law schools. Most of it is done badly, and is at best a waste […]
I’ll Be at Pomona College on Tuesday, October 12 …
… not on my account, but doing the Take the Beloved Daughter Around to Colleges gig. This is embarrassing – in effect proposing oneself – but I will be around Pomona College, and the Claremont Colleges, on Tuesday, October 12, mid-dayish. If anyone there would like me to give a talk on campus then, for […]
Should Conservative and Libertarian Law Students Consider a Career in Legal Academia?
As I’ve noted on this blog before, and despite the occasional contrary protestation, there is no doubt that conservatives and libertarians face discrimination when seeking academic jobs. But that shouldn’t necessarily stop a motivated individual from pursuing an academic career. Here are some additional things to consider: (1) The amount of discrimination one faces is […]
More Women Than Men Earned PhD Degrees in 2009
So reports The Washington Post.
Do We Need to Change Legal Education?
Paul Horwitz summarizes some recent proposals for changing legal education. Like Paul, I’m not convinced changes are needed. As I see it, the basic structure of legal education in the United States works quite well. Every student gets the basic tools of legal reasoning and the common law building block courses in the first year. […]