Posts about Legal Academia by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
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:
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 […]
In an earlier post here [link no longer available], Dave Hoffman adds another quibble about Brian Leiter’s citation rankings of law professors. Several others have voiced criticisms about the rankings, including Mary Dudziak and Brian Tamanaha. In the comments to Dave’s post, Marty Lederman and Brian Leiter get into a debate about the rankings, with […]
So you want to be a law professor, and you survived the dreaded AALS “meat market” in Washington, DC. You’re now sitting by the phone, waiting anxiously for a phone call for a second date. The phone rings . . . and you’ve got a callback! Now what?
I’ve written a short essay (about 20 pages), entitled Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate, for an upcoming symposium on surveillance for the U. Chicago Law Review. The symposium website is here [link no longer available]. The symposium looks to be a terrific event. The event will be held on June 15-16, 2007 (registration information is available […]
Professor Anuj Desai (U. Wisconsin Law School) has posted his forthcoming article, The Transformation of Statutes into Constitutional Law: How Early Post Office Policy Shaped Modern First Amendment Doctrine, on SSRN. Anuj’s paper is a fascinating history of the early Post Office and how statutory protection of letters influenced constitutional law. From the abstract:
I’ve long been unhappy with the typical law school exam format. The entire grade for the class is based on one 3-hour in-class essay exam. The problem with this format is that many students aren’t particularly adept at writing very quickly under immense time pressure. So the exam tests, in part, the ability to write […]
Typically, when we think of the constitutional criminal procedure that regulates government information gathering, we think of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But many government investigations involve collecting information about speech, association, religion, and the consumption of ideas. The NSA surveillance of telephone calls, for example, involves speech. National Security Letters can be used to […]
Anybody familiar with Fourth Amendment law knows that it is utterly incoherent. In his new paper, Four Models of Fourth Amendment Protection, my colleague, Orin Kerr (GW Law School) argues that this incoherence is actually a good thing. He attempts to sort out the muddle that currently exists in Fourth Amendment law into four models. From […]
Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha (law, St. John’s) writes: A few months ago I found myself in a fix over a book review I had committed to. When the Editor asked me to do the review, I readily agreed because I have known the author (in a collegial way) for many years, and I admire his […]