Mark Kleiman wonders why so many of his ideological compatriots are driven to fits of rage by Megan McArdle, noting the fevered reaction to her recent column on the Sandy Hook shooting and potential policy responses. (See also here.) Though Kleiman would not endorse everything in the piece, he thinks it’s “one of the more […]
Archive | Academia
Showcase Campuses, Built With IOUs
The title of the post is drawn from today’s front-page NYT article by Andrew Martin, subtitled “Degrees of debt, a reckoning for colleges.” It’s the sixth part in a sobering series on college costs and debt – earlier articles mostly focused on the personal debt taken on by students and their parents, while this one […]
Video of University of Iowa Ideological Bias Case
A University of Iowa law student alerted me that video of Wagner v. Jones, the lawsuit against the University of Iowa law school alleging ideological discrimination against a conservative legal writing instructor, is available here. The student also writes: “While I do not know Ms. Wagner, I know, and have taken classes from, a number […]
David Friedman on Exams
Exam time is coming up at George Mason and most other law schools. Here’s a good comment on exams by famous law and economics scholar David Friedman: I like to say that being a professor is better than working for a living, except when grading exams. One reason is that grading exams is a pain. […]
Jurors in Bias Case Believe University of Iowa Engaged in Ideological Discrimination
The Des Moines Register ha an interesting article following up on the lawsuit against the University of Iowa law school alleging ideological discrimination in hiring. The judge declared a mistrial because the jury was deadlocked. According to interviews with jurors, however, there was genuine agreement that Teresa Wagner was denied a position because of her […]
Are Law Schools Violating Antitrust Law?
Thom Lambert at Truth on the Market thinks U.S. law schools may be engaged in anticompetitive (and illegal) practices with regard to lateral recruiting. Apart from harming individual employees, non-poaching agreements occasion a societal harm: They preclude labor resources from being channeled to their highest and best uses. To poach a competitor’s star employee, you […]
What Should You Do When Someone Incorrectly Cites Your Academic Work?
At CoOp, Lawrence Cunningham ponders how academics should respond when someone else incorrectly cites their work. Wonderful as it is to be cited, being cited incorrectly poses a dilemma. If your article is referenced for a proposition it does not support, what should you do? Should you alert the author of the piece or the […]
Presidential Preferences of George Mason Law Students
As co-blogger David Bernstein notes, the two of us conducted anonymous online presidential polls of our Constitutional Law I classes. Here are my results, for a poll conducted over the weekend just before election day: Barack Obama (Democrat): 29 Mitt Romney (Republican): 18 Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party): 2 Jill Stein (Green Party): 1 Other: 0 […]
Heresy in the Legal Academy
Former VC guest blogger and UCLA law professor Richard Sander is a political liberal who has done some pioneering work on affirmative action mismatch: essentially, if law schools (and other educational institutions) dip too far into the applicant pool to fill their diversity goals, many of the purported beneficiaries of preference policies wind up being […]
Why Libertarian Law Professors Tend to Support Romney
As Jonathan and Ilya have recently pointed out, Reason Magazine’s writers are overwhelmingly voting for Gary Johnson, or they are not voting at all. By contrast, most libertarian law professors of my acquaintance are supporting Romney. (And even back in 2008, when some libertarians supported Obama, this was a distinct minority position among libertarian law […]
The Third Year of Law School and a Comment on Credentialing, Education, and Grades in Higher Education
One of the more practical debates over the law school business model asks about the third year of law school. Is it actually necessary – and even if, in principle, it might be a good idea, is it at the prices law schools now charge? If it is kept – which seems pretty likely for […]
Morriss on Tamanaha
Many commentators have praised Brian Tamanaha’s Failing Law Schools for its unflinching (and much needed) look at the state of legal education. Without question, Tamanaha was among the first to sound the alarm about legal education, and Failing Law Schools is an important book. But does Tamanaha go far enough? My former colleague Andrew Morriss […]
Ward Farnsworth’s ‘The Legal Analyst’, and a Note on the Hegemony of Economics in Academic Law
When I came back to posting here at Volokh after a summer away with family duties, I mentioned that I had found more time for reading than posting, and that I wanted to share a few books with readers. In this post, I want to raise one I believe particularly useful for my introductory course […]
Constitutional Law Professors: 87% Support Same-Sex Marriage, But Only 54% Believe It Is Constitutionally Mandated
By Dale Carpenter on September 7, 2012 11:08 am in Academia, California, Constitutional Law, Sexual Orientation, Supreme Court
Eighty-seven percent of constitutional law professors back marriage for same-sex couples, and 7 out of 10 believe the federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, but only a slight majority of 54% think the federal Constitution requires states to recognize same-sex marriages. That’s the result of a survey of 485 constitutional law professors that I […]
Harvard Cheating Scandal
The Associated Press reports on a massive cheating scandal at Harvard: Harvard University is investigating whether dozens of undergraduate students cheated on a take-home exam last spring. School officials said they discovered students may have shared answers or plagiarized on a final exam. They declined to release the name of the class, the students’ names […]