Late Monday afternoon, I received a one-sentence email from Liz McMillen, Editor of the Chronicle Review: I just wanted to let you know that we are looking into the questions you have raised in your blog post Friday about Michael Bellesiles’s article for us. Here is some background on Bellesiles’s June 27th article. Here is […]
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Serious Questions About the Veracity of Michael Bellesiles’s Latest Tale
A few days ago, questions were raised first by Big Journalism and then by me about a story that Michael Bellesiles published in the June 27th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education: Teaching Military History in a Time of War. I have now read through every DoD casualty report from last fall for both […]
Michael Bellesiles’s Newest Tale
In its June 27, 2010 issue, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay by Michael Bellesiles, Teaching Military History in a Time of War: Yet the reality of teaching in wartime, most particularly at a working-class college such as Central Connecticut State University, is that war has touched the families of many of our […]
New ABA Accreditation Standards
Via TaxProf, I learn that the ABA Section of Legal Education & Admission to the Bar seeks comments on proposed changes to the law school accreditation standards. I blogged about one of these proposed standards in December, the one that requires law school graduates to have a “knowledge and understanding of … the legal profession’s […]
Corey Robin on Ayn Rand
I just came across this essay in The Nation by one Corey Robin about Ayn Rand. I think Robin is serious, but the piece works best as a satire of a certain type of right-wing hit piece on left-wing intellectuals. Mocking the subject because she has many Hollywood devotees who don’t seem that bright? Check! […]
Evaluating Student Evaluations
In a recent New York Times essay, famous English and law professor Stanley Fish takes aim at student evaluations of professors: [T]hey measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to […]
Ghostwriter Kagan
N.Y. Times: In the Whitewater case, she worked to deflect a Senate subpoena for notes of meetings between the White House and private lawyers. She solicited supportive statements or op-ed articles from former officials and law professors, even ghostwriting or editing some of them. I don’t this reflects badly on Kagan; her job was to […]
Tony Judt, Israel Expert
A certain group of aging and mostly otherwise irrelevant academics have reinvented themselves as prophetic critics of Israel, despite a lack of real knowledge of the relevant subject matter. Mearsheimer and Walt are two; Tony Judt, whose academic specialty is European history, is another. Judt has a rather predictable op-ed in today’s Times, replete with […]
Searle Center Director and Programs Move from Northwestern to George Mason
Great new for George Mason Law School (but unrelated to Eugene’s Searle post below)! From Dean Dan Polsby: It is my sincere pleasure to share with you some exciting news. We’re welcoming Henry Butler home. Henry will join us, beginning in the fall, as Foundation Professor of Law and leader of the law school’s program […]
The Bernardine Dohrn of the early 20th century: The terrorist professor at U of Texas law school
By David Kopel on May 24, 2010 3:56 pm in Academia, Congress, Constitutional History, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Criminal Law, Economic LIberties, Education, Guns, History, Law Schools, Legal Professor, Militia, Rehabilitating Lochner
My DU colleague Thomas Russell, who used to teach at the University of Texas Law school, has a written a paper, available on SSRN, which urges the University of Texas Law School to rename Simkins Hall, a law and graduate male student dormitory named for William Stewart Simkins. Simkins taught equity, contracts, procedure, and related topics at UT for […]
The Case for Abolishing the Bluebook
I am very happy to learn from Senior Conspirator Eugene Volokh that the editors of the Bluebook are apparently regular readers of the VC. While we have their attention, I hope they might be willing to read my 2006 post where I advocated abolition of the Bluebook and its replacement by a simpler citation system. […]
Do Law Schools Seek “Exciting” and “Diverse” Students?
Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley Jr. writes: In fact, law schools strive for an elitism that is quite democratic in comparison with many other fields. As at Yale and Harvard, we at Berkeley seek to build a campus community that is as exciting and diverse as our nation. That means a New Jersey physics […]
Kagan and Diversity Hiring
I admire the fact that Elena Kagan made it a point to hire prominent libertarians and conservatives while she was dean at Harvard. It’s difficult to get many American law schools, dominated by a broadly and comfortably liberal consensus across almost every field, to recognize the importance of ideological diversity among faculty. That’s true for hiring both […]
Isn’t This a Bit Much?
The president went to Harvard, and barely defeated a primary opponent who went to Yale. His predecessor went to Yale and Harvard, and defeated opponents who went to Yale and Harvard, and Harvard, respectively. The previous two presidents also went to Yale, with Bush I defeating another Harvard grad for the presidency. And once Elena […]
Berkowitz on Harvard Law and the Email Controversy
Via Instapundit, my former colleague Peter Berkowitz has an excellent column criticizing Dean Minow’s response to the controversy. One point Peter highlights is that it was a Harvard 3L student who speculated about the genetic basis for racial differences in IQ, but it was Dean Minow who wrote that the student “suggested that black people […]