I am one of over 100 academics in various disciplines who signed a letter supporting Colorado Amendment 64, a referendum initiative which would legalize marijuana possession and sales in that state for residents over the age of 21, and generally institute a regulatory regime for marijuana similar to that currently in force for alcohol. The […]
Archive | Academia
Do Law Schools Consider Applicants “Holistically”?
By David Bernstein on August 24, 2012 9:05 am in Academia, Affirmative Action, Fisher v. University of Texas, Law Schools
Prof. Mike Dorf has a post at Dorf on Law describing the brief he coauthored on behalf of the Association of American Law School in Fisher v. University of Texas. The gist of the brief is that if the Supreme Court reasons that Texas may not engage in affirmative action preferences because its race-neutral ten-percent […]
Sunstein Back to Harvard
Professor Cass Sunstein, who currently serves as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget (aka the “regulatory czar”) is returning to Harvard Law School, Politico reports.
The Volokh Conspiracy “Faculty”
As Orin notes below, a new study of law school faculty “impact” has been released. Just for fun, I ran the numbers for the Volokh Conspiracy “faculty” who blog at least somewhat regularly. I used the same criterion as the study, limiting things to tenured professors. The result is a weighted score of 1566, below […]
Poll Shocker: Majority of Liberal Law Professors Believe Mandate Is Constitutional
This Bloomberg story, based on a poll of 21 constitutional law professors at elite law schools, is getting a surprising amount of play. The U.S. Supreme Court should uphold a law requiring most Americans to have health insurance if the justices follow legal precedent, according to 19 of 21 constitutional law professors who ventured an […]
Poor Prognostication
Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens writes in today’s NYT: It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists’ insistence, during […]
Top 50 Law Professors on Twitter
The list was compiled by Clare Kaufman, for WorldwideLearn.com. She explains: “The following top law professors dominate the Twitter-verse, either through the wit, volume or audience. Criteria for selection for this list include the quality of the tweets, the number of followers and the most active users.” For whatever reason, I’m not on the list, […]
The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time
Frad Shapiro and Michelle Pearse have published “The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time” in the Michigan Law Review. Top of the list is Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost,” and it’s not even close. The article also includes the most cited articles, by year, from 1990-2009.
New Online Submissions Website for the Supreme Court Economic Review
As some of our readers know, co-blogger Todd Zywicki and I are co-editors of the Supreme Court Economic Review, a peer-review publication that is one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals. Our third co-editor is my colleague Josh Wright, who blogs at Truth on the Market. We are pleased to announce that, thanks […]
Responding to Orin on Warren
Orin quotes Leiter as follows, in suggesting that Elizabeth Warren would not have listed herself as a Native American to benefit from affirmative action: “For affirmative action purposes, all law schools care about are African-Americans and Latinos.” But he also quotes Leiter as follows: “[B]ecause the AALS aggressively polices the racial and ethnic diversity of […]
Elizabeth Warren Update
Plenty of other bloggers are following the story of Warren’s claim of minority status, and I’ll leave it to them. But I did want to reprint the reporting below by Professor Jacobson, because it’s salient to many of the comments to my original post (and kudos to Jacobson for gathering more information than reporters from […]
Texas Taps Mahoney
The University of Texas at Austin has retained Latham & Watkins to defend its affirmative action policy before the U.S. Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas. The team of attorneys on the case includes former Solicitor General Greg Garre and former Deputy Solicitor General Maureen Mahoney. It’s hard to think of a legal team […]
Elizabeth Warren Herself Claimed “Minority” Status
A controversy has broken out in Massachusetts over the fact that Harvard Law School has claimed professor and current senatorial candidate Elizabeth as a minority member of the faculty based on apparent (but as yet unconfirmed) Native American ancestry. The Brown camp seems to think this is big news [update: the campaign has called on […]
Research Agenda Advice from Chuck Yeager
I am currently in the process of putting together a talk for aspiring law professors, as part of an Institute for Humane Studies program. One of the questions that I expect to get asked is how to decide what subjects to write on. I think the best answer is given in Chuck Yeager’s autobiography, which […]
IHS Online Conference for Aspiring Legal Academics
If you are a law student interested in pursuing a career as a legal academic, you may be interested in the Institute for Humane Studies’ upcoming online program for aspiring legal scholars: a series of online lectures on various topics related to getting into legal academia that will be followed by question and answer sessions. […]