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]]>Marcus Cole on why the battle is ideological, not merely financial. To which I say: “Go US and Barca!”
]]>Marcus Cole on why the battle is ideological, not merely financial. To which I say: “Go US and Barca!”
Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha has a blistering post on law professors failing to take note — or anyway do anything about — the collapse of the job market for students at non-elite law schools in light of the size of law school tuition. The complaint of the proliferating blogs and other sites [...]]]>
Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha has a blistering post on law professors failing to take note — or anyway do anything about — the collapse of the job market for students at non-elite law schools in light of the size of law school tuition. The complaint of the proliferating blogs and other sites from frustrated attorney job-seekers is that
non-elite law schools are selling a fraudulent bill of goods. Law schools advertise deceptively high rates of employment and misleading income figures. Many graduates can’t get jobs. Many graduates end up as temp attorneys working for $15 to $20 dollars an hour on two week gigs, with no benefits. The luckier graduates land jobs in government or small firms for maybe $45,000, with limited prospects for improvement. A handful of lottery winners score big firm jobs.
And for the opportunity to enter a saturated legal market with long odds against them, the tens of thousands newly minted lawyers who graduate each year from non-elite schools will have paid around $150,000 in tuition and living expenses, and given up three years of income. Many leave law school with well over $100,000 in non-dischargeable debt, obligated to pay $1,000 a month for thirty years.
This dismal situation was not created by the current recession—which merely spread the pain up the chain into the lower reaches of elite schools. This has been going on for years.
Like many of the other professors reading this, I am pretty well immersed in the problems, given that I teach at a mid-tier law school … former research assistants, for example, lacking any real employment prospects. I hold frequent discussions with students both present, just graduated, and several years out trying to figure out what to do, every single week — and I don’t have any very good suggestions. One of the difficulties for my students is that, as a mid-tier DC school, federal government positions have been a traditional route for them. But as job pressures have mounted in private firm jobs in NY and DC, more and more elite law school grads have been pursuing those opportunities and as far as I can tell, crowding out my students.
Even if it turns out that increased regulation across a variety of areas — for good reasons or bad, that’s not my point here — whether financial regulation, health care, etc., means increased employment opportunities for lawyers both in government and out over the longer term, it seems to me that returns to law are going to be less than before.
Kashmir Hill and David Lat of Above the Law have an interesting Washington Post column urging Justice Clarence Thomas to run for president. I know Lat because he was a year ahead of me in law school. He’s a very smart guy, and I have great respect for all the success he [...]]]>
Kashmir Hill and David Lat of Above the Law have an interesting Washington Post column urging Justice Clarence Thomas to run for president. I know Lat because he was a year ahead of me in law school. He’s a very smart guy, and I have great respect for all the success he has achieved as a legal blogger. But I think he and Hill are barking up the wrong tree here.
I see a few positives in a Thomas candidacy. As Hill and Lat point out, Thomas is smart, eloquent, and has significant libertarian leanings. A black Republican presidential nominee might also have great symbolic value, even despite (or perhaps because of) Obama’s historic breakthrough.
Nonetheless, there are very strong arguments against a Thomas run that easily outweigh the positives. First, it would surely reopen the whole issue of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment charges. Whether you think that Hill was telling the truth or not, there is no doubt that the press and public opinion would focus on this issue. It would quickly become an immense distraction, and greatly reduce Thomas’ chances of winning.
On this point, Hill and Lat say only that Thomas “has already survived the nasty political attacks that marked his 1991 confirmation hearings.” He survived them in the sense that he (just barely) got confirmed. But the charges continue to dog Thomas to this day, and a presidential campaign would surely reopen this can of worms. It would have an immensely polarizing effect, and make it more difficult for Thomas to appeal to constituencies that aren’t already predisposed in his favor. We got a foretaste of what might happen when the Hill issue resurfaced three years ago when Thomas published his memoir. That controversy, of course, was nothing compared to what would happen if Thomas became a serious presidential contender.
The second argument against a Thomas run is even more important: he would have to resign from the Supreme Court and Barack Obama would get to pick his successor. I have been very critical of Thomas’ positions on several issues (e.g. — here). On balance, however, he has been one of the most libertarian and originalist justices, and I would be sorry to lose him.
Right now, the Court has a narrow 5–4 conservative majority. If Obama replaces Thomas with a liberal, the balance would flip. Hill and Lat (who is a conservative himself) try to minimize this risk by arguing that “[t]hus far, Obama has not nominated hard-core liberals to the court; his recent choice of Solicitor General Elena Kagan disappointed many on the left.” I remain unpersuaded. Obama’s first nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, has turned out to be a reliable liberal vote. Given her previous record, this should not have been a surprise; on several key issues, such as property rights, she was actually somewhat further to the left than the rest of the liberal bloc on the Court.
Elena Kagan may turn out to be slightly less liberal than the other potential nominees Obama was considering. Still, she is likely to vote with the liberal bloc on most major issues, and is certainly far more liberal than Thomas. The same is likely to be true of any justice Obama nominates to replace Thomas. That nominee may be a bit less liberal than Sotomayor. But he or she will still support the liberals on most issue and will still be very far from Thomas’ positions. This is especially likely if, as expected, the Democrats retain control of the Senate after the November elections.
Hill and Lat also contend that Thomas could make up for the loss of his seat by appointing conservative justices to replace liberal ones if he wins in 2012. However, the combination of an improving economy and the Anita Hill issue will make it difficult for Thomas to beat Obama that year. If circumstances arise that do make a Thomas victory possible, they would also make a win by a different Republican nominee at least equally feasible. If any Republican other than Thomas wins in 2012, he could both hold Thomas’ seat and replace whatever liberal justices happen to retire during his term.
There are other aspects of Thomas’ record and personality that might impede his candidacy. For example, he does not seem to be a person comfortable with the constant glare of media attention that surrounds a presidential campaign. Quotations from his many forceful Supreme Court opinions would probably provide good fodder for clever attack ads (especially if taken out of context).
In sum, a Thomas presidential candidacy strikes me as a bad idea. The only people likely to benefit are liberals who would welcome the opportunity to replace Thomas with an Obama nominee, and anyone who would enjoy relitigating the Thomas-Hill controversy.
Stumbled across this at goodreads.com. I don’t know who wrote it; only that it’s one of the approximately 50 people who read the book in manuscript form, including colloquium participants at NYU and Georgetown. It’s a nice review, and the good news is that the book has undergone additional revisions/editing since [...]]]>
Stumbled across this at goodreads.com. I don’t know who wrote it; only that it’s one of the approximately 50 people who read the book in manuscript form, including colloquium participants at NYU and Georgetown. It’s a nice review, and the good news is that the book has undergone additional revisions/editing since it the review was written, so I expect the reviewer would like the final version even more:
Read in manuscript. This is coming out late this year, I think, though there isn’t a pub date yet [actually, early next year]. Regardless, I think it’s going to make a splash when it does come out, at least within the specialized pond of legal academia and intellectual history.
This book gathers and carries forward a lot of the counter-historical work done to try and roll back a lot of the Lochner v. New York hate we’ve all been spoon-fed in law school. He does a great job with the history of the case and the intellectual tides of the time, with the general goal of arguing that the liberty of contract crowd wasn’t just out for big business over the little guy, but was actually drawing on some long-standing natural law principles. The book then does a whirlwind through women’s rights, the early segregation cases, the early civil liberties stuff like Pierce v. Society of Sisters and forward to reproductive rights and the vilification of substantive due process. He connects up Lochner with a lot of the later civil liberties work in order to literally reverse how most of us presume the line actually runs — from the Progressives, the anti-lochnerites.
It’s a cracking read, as these things go, hampered in places by its revisionist project – it spends too much time on what it’s arguing against, rather than in straight history, and is thus less convincing in places. Still, totally worth it if you’re, you know, one of the slice of people who have any idea what I’ve just been talking about, and the tinier slice who actually give a damn.
Sixty-nine law school deans have signed a letter endorsing Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. According to the Washington Post, “The letter was signed by the deans of most Washington area law schools, with the exception of those at George Washington and George Mason universities.” The letter was signed by [...]]]>
Sixty-nine law school deans have signed a letter endorsing Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. According to the Washington Post, “The letter was signed by the deans of most Washington area law schools, with the exception of those at George Washington and George Mason universities.” The letter was signed by the deans at AU, Georgetown, and Howard. It was not signed by the deans at GW, GMU, Catholic or UDC. (University of Maryand’s law school is in Baltimore, not College Park.)
Not that there’s any particular significance to whether Washington area deans sign or don’t sign this letter. But is it too much to ask reporters to get basic, easily-verifiable facts right?
There are still lots of cases undecided. I’m following the ones having to do with incorporation of the Second Amendment against the states, public university nondiscrimination conditions imposed on student groups, disclosure of who signed a referendum petition, the constitutionality of the appointment procedure for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and limits [...]]]>
There are still lots of cases undecided. I’m following the ones having to do with incorporation of the Second Amendment against the states, public university nondiscrimination conditions imposed on student groups, disclosure of who signed a referendum petition, the constitutionality of the appointment procedure for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and limits on certain speech that helps groups that have been designated foreign terrorist organizations, but there are also many other important ones left. Care to make some predictions, so you can crow (or cringe) when the Term is over? Let’s focus just on what you think will happen, rather on arguments about what should happen.
I just finished testifying on cybersecurity issues to the House Homeland Security committee. The headline from that hearing is likely to be the bipartisan support that emerged for the broad thrust of the Lieberman-Collins-Carper bill that I blogged about earlier and that I supported at the hearing.
Ranking member Peter King (R-NY) announced that [...]]]>
I just finished testifying on cybersecurity issues to the House Homeland Security committee. The headline from that hearing is likely to be the bipartisan support that emerged for the broad thrust of the Lieberman-Collins-Carper bill that I blogged about earlier and that I supported at the hearing.
Ranking member Peter King (R-NY) announced that he would be introducing the Senate bill. Rep. Harman (D-CA) announced that she would support it; in a sweet (and too rare) moment of bipartisanship, Peter King interrupted to say that he would be glad to cosponsor the Harman bill — essentially offering to make it the Harman-King bill rather than the King-Harman bill (and if you think that wasn’t a generous sacrifice, well, you don’t know Washington).
PS Those waiting for me to plug my book may be disappointed. Instead, I want to thank both Ranking Member Peter King and Rep. Dan Lungren — both of whom plugged it far more effectively than I could have.
University of Florida lawprof D. Daniel Sokol has published a very good (and extremely favorable) review of co-conspirator Todd Zywicki’s important recent book Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law (coauthored with Maxwell Stearns), in the Michigan Law Review.
Danny writes that the book is “likely to be recognized as the leading work [...]]]>
University of Florida lawprof D. Daniel Sokol has published a very good (and extremely favorable) review of co-conspirator Todd Zywicki’s important recent book Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law (coauthored with Maxwell Stearns), in the Michigan Law Review.
Danny writes that the book is “likely to be recognized as the leading work on the subject for some time.” Having read it myself, I tend to agree. It’s a great introduction to and analysis of the literature on public choice and its implications for law. The book drives home the implications of the simple but important public choice insights that government actions can be understood using the same tools of economic analysis that economists have long applied to the private sector, and that political behavior is often just as self-interested as market behavior. I would also note that the book has an interesting political balance, since Stearns is generally liberal and certainly well to the left of Todd.
Danny’s review essay also considers some possible additional applications of public choice to legal issues that were not covered by Stearns and Zywicki, especially in the field of international law. As he points out, scholars in the international law field have made very little use of public choice analysis, even though international legal institutions have serious public choice problems that may be even worse than those of domestic political processes in Western democracies. John McGinnis and I have sought to help close this gap in the literature in our work on international human rights law and domestic incorporation of international law.
So holds Blair v. Bethel School Dist., decided Monday by the Ninth Circuit. The result sounds quite right to me:
[M]ore is fair in electoral politics than in other contexts. It is common for political bodies to have internal leadership structures and for members of those bodies to be openly partisan in voting [...]]]>
So holds Blair v. Bethel School Dist., decided Monday by the Ninth Circuit. The result sounds quite right to me:
[M]ore is fair in electoral politics than in other contexts. It is common for political bodies to have internal leadership structures and for members of those bodies to be openly partisan in voting for and against one another for leadership positions. In fact, we expect political officials to cast votes in internal elections in a manner that is, technically speaking, retaliatory, i.e., to vote against candidates whose views differ from their own. Indeed, an internal political leadership election is often a referendum on the majority point of view. Yet, to accept Blair’s argument is to hold that the First Amendment prohibits elected officials from voting against candidates whose speech or views they don’t embrace. Experience and political reality convince us this argument goes too far; the First Amendment does not succor casualties of the regular functioning of the political process.
To lend perspective to this point, we conceive little difference between what the Board’s internal vote against Blair accomplished and what voters in a general public election might do if they too were disaffected by Blair’s advocacy. In other words, it wouldn’t have been controversial in the least — and certainly not a violation of the First Amendment — had Blair’s constituents refused to support his reelection on account of his outspoken opposition to Superintendent Seigel. We see no reason the Board members’ votes here should be regulated in a way that the general public’s are not.
Note that the matter would have been different had the school board removed a member from his popularly elected office, as opposed to a school board’s removing a member from a political office to which it had itself appointed him (as here), or for that matter as opposed to the voters’ recalling a politician that they had themselves elected (which of course they may do, even in retaliation for the politician’s constitutionally protected speech). See Bond v. Floyd (1966), holding unconstitutional a legislature’s expulsion of a member for his speech.