PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

More Reflections on Legal Education

Brian Tamanaha has just posted another interesting post in the discussion about legal education. He writes: Most law schools now follow the elite model, striving to hire faculty and produce scholarship like research universities, when it might better serve the interests of many non-elite law schools and their students to concentrate on training good lawyers. […]

Interdisciplinary Scholarship and the Cost of Legal Education

The other day, I responded to a post by Brian Tamanaha regarding interdisciplinary legal study at non-elite law schools. Brian suggested that non-elite schools reconsider whether they ought to pursue interdisciplinary legal scholarship, and I argued that they should. In a follow-up post, Brian has clarified his argument:

Is Interdisciplinary Legal Study a Luxury?

Over at Balkinization, Professor Brian Tamanaha (St. John’s School of Law) argues that most law schools should abandon their vigorous pursuit of interdisciplinary studies in law: [P]erhaps detailed knowledge of the social sciences—anything beyond rudimentary information every educated person should possess—is irrelevant to the practice of law. It seems evident that one can be an […]

Book Review: Harold Schechter’s The Devil’s Gentleman

Harold Schechter, The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century – Ballantine Books (October 2007) Harold Schechter, an American literature professor at CUNY, has written a gripping account of the criminal trial and appeal of Roland Molineux, a case that grabbed headlines throughout the late 1890s. His book, The Devil’s […]

Book Review: Lawrence Friedman’s Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets

Professor Lawrence M. Friedman (Stanford Law School) Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy (Stanford University Press, November 2007) ISBN: 978-0-8047-5739-3 Professor Lawrence Friedman‘s Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy is a wonderful and accessible history of the norms and law that […]

Statutory Interpretation and Legislative Unresponsiveness

I see it happening over and over again. A legislature passes a statute. A new situation arises, one that doesn’t seem to have been anticipated by the legislature at the time of passing the statute. Judges must interpret the statute, and they often make one of two arguments: (1) had the legislature anticipated the case […]