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:Continue Reading
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 excellent lawyer without knowing any of this interdisciplinary stuff, while it is not obvious that learning this will make a person a better lawyer. A stronger case can be made that this information might improve the performance of judges, but a more efficient way to deliver this benefit is to set up classes (in economics, statistics, etc.) for sitting judges—programs which now exist.
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 Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century (2007) is a page-turner, and it reads almost like a novel.
I’ve been invited by the Washington Post to host an online chat on the Washington Post website about privacy, free speech, and anonymity on the Internet. The chat will take place from 11 AM to noon EST today.
The discussion will cover the Megan Meier case, which I blogged about several times (see here and here for example), as well as broader issues related to my book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. You can participate in the chat, or read along, here.
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 shaped reputation over the past two centuries. Friedman’s book builds on some of his earlier work on norms and law in the Victorian era which I found immensely useful as I wrote my book, The Future of Reputation. Whereas my book mostly explores the present and future challenges to protecting reputation, Friedman’s explores the past. His book is written in a lively and engaging style, and it is fascinating.
PEW Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on online privacy called Digital Footprints by Mary Madde, Susannah Fox, Aaron Smith, and Jessica Vitak. The report provides some very interesting statistics.
1. People are starting to google themselves. According to the survey:Continue Reading
In this post, I’ll be responding to a few more reviews of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. This is the third installment (for more responses to reviews, see Part I and Part II).
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 at bar, it would have clearly addressed it by encompassing or excluding it under the statute; the court should interpret the statute with its best guess about how the legislature might have addressed the new situation had it been aware of it when it created the law; or (2) the statute must be strictly construed; if the legislature really doesn’t like how the strict application of the statute’s language applies to a particular situation, then it can change the law.
From CNN comes yet another story about people who disclose too much information on their blogs and social network websites:
Over at the VC, Eugene Volokh has an excellent post criticizing convictions of individuals under state wiretapping laws for secretly recording their encounters with the police. He quotes Commonwealth v. Hyde, 750 N.E.2d 963 (Mass. 2001), which states: