Posts about Legal Academia by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
Brian Tamanaha (law, St. John’s), has written a provocative article called The Perils of Pervasive Legal Instrumenalism. He observes that “[a]n instrumental view of law–the idea that law is an instrument to achieve ends–is taken for granted in the United States, almost a part of the air we breathe.” Such a view, however, creates a serious problem: […]
I received many thoughtful comments on my earlier post about abolishing the Bar Exam. Most of the arguments for retaining the Bar Exam involve the need for erecting a barrier to attorneys being licensed.
Despite my enjoyment of the Bar Exam as a work of jurisprudence, I believe that the Bar Exam should be abolished. It prevents mobility among lawyers, making it cumbersome and time consuming to move to different states. It does not test on actual law used in legal practice, but on esoteric legal rules, many of which are obsolete, […]
What is the most widely read work of jurisprudence by those in the legal system? Is it H.L.A. Hart’s The Concept of Law? Ronald Dworkin’s Law’s Empire? No . . . it’s actually the Multistate Bar Exam. Almost all lawyers have read it. Although the precise text is different every year, the Bar exam presents a jurisprudence that transcends the specific […]
Since this blog is read by many new law profs, I thought I’d recommend information privacy law as a course you might consider teaching. (I have a casebook in the field, so this is really a thinly-disguised self-plug.) Information privacy law remains a fairly young field, and it has yet to take hold as a course taught consistently in […]