March 23, 2004
Legal Discrimination? I Don't Think So.
Discriminations has an interesting post about calls to hire a deaf dean of deaf services at a small California school. According to the school, hiring someone because they were deaf would violate anti-discrimination laws. I am doubtful.
More...More on Global Trade
Pete Du Pont had an editorial in yesterday's WSJ on global trade, attacking the protectionist wing of Democratic (and Republican) politics. Most of Du Pont's ire seemed to be directed against various hysterical responses to outsourcing by American companies. Du Pont made the standard prudential arguments for free trade -- consumers benefit, protectionism can spark retaliations, etc. He waved the bloody shift of the Smoot-Halley tarriff. What he didn't discuss was the issue of global inequality.
More...March 19, 2004
Game Theory and Biblical Hermeneutics
Here is an strange and interesting application of game theory and Nash equilibria.
Responses to Hate-Crime Fraud
Some recent, interesting comments in the blogosphere have discussed the apparent hoax of a hate crime at the Claremont colleges in California. Commenters include David Bernstein and John Rosenberg.
Implicit in Rosenberg's critique (and, I believe, in Bernstein's general critique, though not in this particular post) is the idea that the existence of hate-crimes hoaxes should itself be viewed as evidence that the underlying laws governing hate crimes are generally ineffective or misguided, and perhaps should be modified or repealed. (Indeed, reports of hate-crimes hoaxes may foster a perception that hate-crime fraud is rampant).
While that idea may have some intuitive appeal, I am unconvinced that the existence of hoaxes can really do that much heavy lifting. In addition, I am concerned that overreaction to the hoax, by moving away from any reforms or actions taken to combat hate crimes generally, may be damaging.
More...Hello, Everyone
Hi, everyone. My name is Kaimipono David Wenger (I usually go by "Kaimi") and I'm going to be blogging here along with Nate. In case anyone wants to know a bit of information about me, here is a brief bio:
I'm a 2001 graduate of Columbia law school. After graduation, I clerked for a wonderful District Court judge, and I'm now employed at a medium-large law firm in New York City. I have published two law review articles, Slavery as a Takings Clause Violation, 53 Am. U. L. Rev. 191 (2003), and Nullificatory Juries, 2003 Wisc. L. Rev. 1115 (with David A. Hoffman) (strangely enough, that's the March 2004 issue).
I operated a law-related blog called "Seeking for Righteousness" for some time, though I'll now do my law-blogging here. Also, I currently blog on religious issues over at Times and Seasons, where Nate is one of my co-bloggers. I'm happy to be here, and I can be reached at kaimi [at] timesandseasons.org.
Yet More on Legal Education
Waddling Thunder weighs in with the following "hypothetical."
- Let's say the top twenty New York firms joined together (other parts of the country would set up their own systems) and made a deal with Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and NYU for those universities to act as their exclusive legal trainers. Upon deciding to become a lawyer, you would go through the hiring process rather than the admission process, choose a firm, and then would go to one of those four law schools for two years regardless of major to receive an unremittingly practical education in commercial law and litigation, designed by the law firms and not legal academics. Would this be a good system?
Free Markets: Micro and Macro
There is an interesting editorial about global poverty in the March 11th issue of The Economist. The author argues (correctly in my view) that the abject poverty of much of the world does present a moral challenge to the post-industrial West. He goes on to conclude, however, that most notions of "economic justice" are unlikely to improve the lot of the global poor, since they implicitly rest on the flawed assumption that global wealth somehow magically appears and that the West has grabbed more than its fair share at the expense of the global South. He concludes by claiming that a commitment to global free-markets and development is likely to do more for the poor than will misguided attempts to institute "economic justice." Now I like neo-liberal triumphalism as much as the next guy, so I am sympathetic to The Economist position. But only up to a point.
More...March 18, 2004
Advantages of Law Schools
My post below has garnered a bit of attention. According to David Bernstein of Volokh Conspiracy fame, George Mason Law School has adopted something like the minimalist approach to clinical education that I advocate and has insisted that their students take a basic theory course in -- shocking, this from GMU -- economics. In addition, a law student at UCLA has endorsed the usefulness of "policy discussions that go no where."
John Jenkins thinks that legal theory is airy and useless nonsense that ought not to be taught to "real lawyers." This, of course, solves the problem by definition rather than argument. (Mr. Jenkin's obviously has a future as an atheoretical lawyer; I just hope his clients aren't paying too much.)
De Novo makes the interesting suggestion that theory is less important in transactional practice. I am not so sure. For example, it seems to me that an aquaintence with some of the law and economics literature on contracts, which spends a great deal of time discussing the sorts of incentives that contract rules create for the formation and drafting of contracts, would provide proto-lawyers with a useful bundle of tools for thinking about the incetives that the other party to a negotiation faces.
March 17, 2004
Why Law Schools Should Not Produce Lawyers
Larry Solum's post at the new blog De Novo on what law school teaches has got me thinking about legal education. I actually think that law schools often do their students a diservice by not providing them with more theoretical background. The problem is that legal educators sometimes -- and legal practioners almost universally -- take it as an ideal that law schools ought to turn out lawyers. I think that this is a mistake.
More...Fairness v. Welfare
I have been reading Louis Kaplow & Steven Shavell, Fairness Versus Welfare (Harvard UP, 2002). The basic thesis of the book is that the maximization of welfare (very broadly concieved) should be the sole normative criteria for legal policy. One should not use what Kaplow & Shavell call "fairness," by which they seem to mean any normative theory that does not take welfare as a maximand. Obviously, this is a bit of wierd use of the word "fairness" from a philosophical point of view, but Kaplow & Shavell are economists and use the term in a way that is familiar to economists. I am a long way from finishing the book, but I don't think that their argument is going to work. The problem lies in the basic structure of the social welfare function.
More...March 16, 2004
Fun With Possible Worlds
Francis Beckwith has an argument that Brian Leiter does not really exist. Lawrence Solum responds by arguing that there are an infinite number of Brian Leiters, at least one of whom he suggests might be "a theist who believes in creation science and intelligent design."
March 15, 2004
Good Oman Posts
I have uploaded all of my post from from my old blog. Some of the formatting is off a bit, but all of the text is here. Try searching the site and see what comes up.
More Responses to Religious Arguments
My post on religious arguments by non-believers elicited a whole bunch of responses in the blogosphere over the weekend. What follows is a quick summary and response. Ultimately, I think that I may be pesuaded that my real unease is not the use per se of religious arguments by non-believers, but simply the scarcity of good religious arguments by non-believers. I am still not quite sure. So here is what folks had to say:
More...March 12, 2004
The Dangers of Blogging?
Brayden King has revisited a theme – or worry – that haunts every proto-academic blogger. He writes:
- Of course, the only real worry regarding blogging that has frequented my thoughts is that I might say something that other people will find offensive and/or that will destroy my chances of getting a job. That is the risk of having a public journal like this. I’ve not yet heard of an academic losing a job opportunity because of something he or she said online (although occasionally you’ll hear of someone not getting a job because of an indiscretion occurring during the interview process), but it’s only a matter of time before an academic blog comes back to bite the blogger in the rump. I just hope that I’m not the first victim of such a misfortune. Until then, discreetly yours - the editor of braydenking.com.
More on Religious Arguments
Both Professor Bainbridge and Rick Garnett of Mirror of Justice fame (oh, and he is a prof at ND law school too!) have comments on my post regarding religious arguments by non-believers. Also, Eugene Volokh has an interesting post on fundementalist Christians forcing their views on the rest of us.
March 11, 2004
Using Religious Arguments in Politics
No. This isn't a post about public reason or the legitimacy of using religious arguments in the secular public sphere. Rather, a recent bill board sponsored by PETA in Utah got me thinking about a slightly different issue: The propriety of non-believers using religious arguments in an attempt to influence believers.
More...March 10, 2004
Volokh on Common Law Marriages
Eugene Volokh has some intelligent kibbitzing about the text of Orrin Hatch's proposed marriage amendment. The (current) text of Hatch's amendment is:
- Civil marriage shall be defined in each state by the legislature or the citizens thereof. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to require that marriage or its benefits be extended to any union other than that of a man and a woman.
Advice
The following gets my nodd as the best passage that I have read recently in a law review:
- Writers are often advised to write about what they know. Since this would disable most law professors from writing anything at all, we offer a different suggestion: Write about constitutional law.
March 09, 2004
Judicial Activism and the Vacuous Ad Hominem
In case you missed it, there was a fun kerfuffle yesterday between Jack Balkin, Stuart Buck, Jonah Goldberg, and Larry Solum. (Solum's post collects the relevant links.) Basically the debate boils down to something like this dialogue:
- Goldberg: Liberals are more likely to be judicial activists than conservatives.
Balkin: Not so! Lochner, Dred Scott, Alden, Seminole, etc. are all examples of judicial activism by conservatives!
Buck: Ah, excuse me, but conservatives don't support Dred Scott.
Balkin: It doesn't matter what conservatives now believe, what is important is what conservatives then believed.
Solum: Given that liberal and conservative are really multi-faceted terms whose meaning has changed over time, Balkin's doesn't really seem to be saying anything.
Frankly, in this debate I think that Solum has the best of it and Goldberg has the worst of it. However, it strikes me that Balkin's assertions are even more fundamentally vacuous that Solum (in his diplomatic way) points out. More...
