November 20, 2011

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New York Times Financial Advice: Be an Unpaid Intern Through Your 20s (Then Work till You’re 100)

posted by Frank Pasquale

Jason Mazzone has already addressed the main shortcomings of the latest N.Y. Times article by David Segal on law schools. I’d like to situate it as part of a neo-liberal ideology developing at the Times and other scriveners for the powerful.

If you pair the basic message of Segal’s piece (“law students and professors aren’t doing enough to raise corporate profits”) with that of Ed Glaeser’s anti-retirement musings in the same pages (“work into your 90s”), the ideology starts to emerge. Labor economist Mark Price pithily suggested it:

Law schools couldn’t possibly teach the wide range of firm specific skills that law firms need . . . . And yet you have a writer [pushing] propaganda that the big law firms are tired of paying for on the job training.

On the other hand it is at least comforting to know that law firms are not that different from firms in Manufacturing or Health Care[;] that is[,] they would prefer that somebody else pay for the skills that make them profitable.

This is a classic problem of uneven bargaining power familiar since the 1920s.* Why are wages falling while productivity is rising? Because firms realize they can fire current workers, shift their duties (unpaid) to frightened current employees, and reap the profits of having one person do the work of many. It’s another form of “shadow work” that contributes to the time bind so many Americans find themselves in. When 65% of economic gains go to the top 1% of the population, it’s not too hard to discern this dynamic.
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  November 20, 2011 at 1:40 pm   Posted in: Law and Inequality, Law School, Teaching, Technology   Print This Post   Comments (1)

Neuroscience at Trial: Society for Neuroethics Convenes Panel of Front-Line Practitioners

posted by Amanda Pustilnik

Is psychopathy a birth defect that should exclude a convicted serial killer and rapist from the death penalty?  Are the results of fMRI lie-detection tests reliable enough to be admitted in court? And if a giant brain tumor suddenly turns a law-abiding professional into a hypersexual who indiscriminately solicits females from ages 8 to 80, is he criminally responsible for his conduct?  These were the questions on the table when the International Neuroethics Society convened a fascinating panel last week at the Carnegie Institution for Science last week on the uses of neuroscience evidence in criminal and civil trials.

Moderated and organized by Hank Greely of Stanford Law School, the panel brought together:

• Steven Greenberg, whose efforts to introduce neuroscience on psychopathic disorder (psychopathy) in capital sentencing in Illinois of Brian Dugan has garnered attention from Nature to The Chicago Tribune;
• Houston Gordon (an old-school trial attorney successful enough not to need his own website, hence no hyperlink), who has made the most assertive arguments so far to admit fMRI lie-detection evidence in a civil case, United States v. Semrau, and
• Russell Swerdlow, a research and clinical professor of neurology (and three other sciences!).  Swerdlow’s brilliant diagnostic work detected the tumor in the newly-hypersexual patient, whom others had dismissed as a creep and a criminal.

 

In three upcoming short posts, I will feature the comments of each of these panelists and present for you, dear reader, some of the thornier issues raised by their talks.  These cases have been reported on in publications ranging from the Archives of Neurology to USA Today, but Concurring Opinions brings to you, direct and uncensored, the statements of the lawyers and scientists who made these cases happen … Can I say “stay tuned” on a blog?

  November 20, 2011 at 12:39 pm  Tags: law & neuroscience, neuroethics  Posted in: Bioethics, Capital Punishment, Criminal Law, Evidence Law, Health Law, Psychology and Behavior, Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (1)

The New York Times on Legal Education

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Congratulations to Tyler Doggett, whose article on “What is Wrong With Kamm’s and Scanlan’s Arguments Against Taurek” got a shout out in today’s front page story.  I’m not sure, though, that all publicity is good publicity.

  November 20, 2011 at 9:41 am   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (1)

November 19, 2011

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The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Bill of Rights

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’ve reached 1857 in the Bingham book, and I want to raise some issues about the incorporation of the Bill of Rights in a series of posts that will start now and resume after Thanksgiving.  Let me start by drawing your attention to some parts of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was enacted under the Articles of Confederation and governed the territory that became Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin:

“It is hereby ordained and declared by the authority aforesaid, That the following articles shall be considered as articles of compact between the original States and the people and States in the said territory and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent, to wit:

Art. 1. No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments, in the said territory.

Art. 2. The inhabitants of the said territory shall always be entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the trial by jury; of a proportionate representation of the people in the legislature; and of judicial proceedings according to the course of the common law. All persons shall be bailable, unless for capital offenses, where the proof shall be evident or the presumption great. All fines shall be moderate; and no cruel or unusual punishments shall be inflicted. No man shall be deprived of his liberty or property, but by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land; and, should the public exigencies make it necessary, for the common preservation, to take any person’s property, or to demand his particular services, full compensation shall be made for the same. And, in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed.”

Why is this important?  Because many of the provisions of the Bill of Rights are here.  This meant that the states governed by the Ordinance were arguably obliged to obey parts of the Bill of Rights before the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified (at least that’s what Bingham thought). This is an interesting idea that I want to explore further.

UPDATE:  One of the comments points out that a recent Note in the Yale Law Journal addresses this issue.  I have downloaded this and will read it today (the Colts can’t lose this week, so I have more free time).

  November 19, 2011 at 8:43 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law   Print This Post   Comments (5)

Speaking Out About Sexual Abuse

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I have always admired Mark McKenna’s work on intellectual property.  Indeed, he has occasionally commented on this blog. Now I also admire his courage.

  November 19, 2011 at 9:11 am   Posted in: Current Events   Print This Post   Comments (0)

November 18, 2011

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John Bingham and George Armstrong Custer

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’m now writing the portion of the Bingham book that deals with “constituent service.”  (Yes, even he had to deal with lots of people asking for favors.)  The most significant of these requests came from George Custer, who lived in his congressional district.  Basically, John Bingham was responsible for Custer’s career, and they remained friendly until Custer’s death.

Custer wrote Bingham in 1856 asking for a reference letter to get into West Point.  As the young man’s family were all Democrats, that recommendation was unlikely.  But Custer flattered Bingham with letters and took a teaching job in Cadiz (the congressman’s home town) so that he could continue that effort in person. His big “break” came when he fell in love with the daughter of a prominent local Republican.  That man, who didn’t like Custer at all, asked Bingham to give him the reference to West Point to get him away from his daughter.

Bingham became quite fond of Custer.  When he was court-martialed at West Point for misconduct, Bingham interceded and got him a lenient sentence.  During the Civil War, Bingham pushed Custer for various promotions, even asking his friend Edwin Stanton (the Secretary of War) to make Custer a major general when the war ended.  And after the disaster  at Little Big Horn, Bingham wrote a condolence letter to Custer’s father.

Of course, given Custer’s poor performance as an officer, you might say this was not one of Bingham’s best judgments.

 

  November 18, 2011 at 11:49 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (0)

November 17, 2011

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Ok, You Asked For It: A Bit More About Wal-Mart v Dukes

posted by Michael Zimmer

I have been asked why I am so fearful that the Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes foreshadows the demise of systemic theories challenging patterns or practices of discrimination. After all, the case is about class actions. My fear is that, has it done in other areas, the lower courts and the Supreme Court itself will look back and declare that systemic antidiscriminaiton law is as it was described in Wal-Mart. My fear is based on articles by Barry Friedman in the Georgetown Law Review, The Wages of Stealth Overruling (With Particular Attention to Miranda v. Arizona), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1647745, and Margaret Moses’ article, Beyond Judicial Activism: When the Supreme Court is No Longer a Court, 14 U. Penn. J. of Const. L. 161, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract _1781243. Friedman analyzes recoent decisions by the Robert Court that do not expressly overrule precedent but interpet so that nothing but hollow shells are left. Moses shows how the Robert Court reaches out to decide issues to impose the majority’s public policy predilections, thereby underminng precedent, even where the parties did not bring those issues to the Court or where those issues were never decided by lower courts or sometimes even briefed by the parties.

Wal-Mart itself is an exmple of the Court looking back to precedent but in doing so radically distorting it. General Telephone Co. v. Falcon was an earlier class action case in which the Court rejected the “across the board” theory of class actions. The “across the board” theory had approved class actions where a plaintiff, claiming one type of discrimination, could being a class action challenging every kind of discrimination of the employer. Falcon claimed he was a victim of defendant’s hiring discrimination but he tried to bring a class action challenging the employer’s promotion discrimination. After deciding such “across the board” class actions could not generally be brought under Rule 23, the Falcon Court, in a footnote, described two exceptions where a plaintiff could still bring a class action claiming more than one type of discrimination: 1. If the employer used a common test in more than one context, for example if in Falcon General Telephone used the same employment test for both hiring and promotion decisions and 2. if the employer had a “general policy” of discrimination.

The plaintiffs in Wal-Mart did not try to bring an “across the board” class action challenging all the ways that Wal-Mart discriminated. Instead, their action focused on Wal-Mart’s discriminatory pay and promotion practices at its stores. Since the level of pay was significantly influenced by whether an employee had been promoted or not, pay and promotion were closely interwined, unlike the hiring and promotion claims in Falcon. Falcon was inapposite Wal-Mart, yet the Court relied on it to reject plaintiffs class action. The Court turned the two exceptions from Falcon which would allow a plaintiff to bring a class action that reached more than one type of employer discriminaiton into a limit on the scope of class actions involving a single type of discriminatioin. Thus, it now appears that class actions challenging a single type of employer discrimination will be denied unless the employer uses either an employment test or has a general policy of discrimination. Since the Wal-Mart majority was unable to conceptualize the operation of Wal-Mart’s policy granting unchecked discretion to store managers on pay and promotions as a pattern or practice of discriminaiton, my fear is that lower courts and the Supreme Court itself will decide that systemic disparate treatment claims are limited to situations challenging the employer’s use of an employment test or where the employer has a formal, i.e., general, policy of discrimination. That would mean that Teamsters, Hazelwood and Bazemore, which interpreted Title VII to prohibit systemic patterns or practices of discriminaiton, are victim of stealth overruling.

Because the Wal-Mart majority hollowed out class action precedent to truncate class actions, that misuse of precedent forewhadows the use of the language in Wal-Mart to truncate the substance of the systemic theories of discrimination.

  November 17, 2011 at 12:40 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Employment Law, Supreme Court, Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (1)

November 16, 2011

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Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: American Corporate Political Transparency Is 44 Years Behind the UK

posted by Frank Pasquale

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is an Assistant Professor at Stetson University College of Law and the co-author along with economist Dr. Kathy Fogel of Shareholder-Authorized Corporate Political Spending in the United Kingdom.  I am posting her views on American corporate political transparency below [FP]: 

by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy

As I told my law students in a recent class, when I was in law school, no one cared a fig about corporate political spending.  I did not hear about it in Constitutional Law, Corporate Law or Fed. Tax.  It was a non-issue because for the most part, it was banned.  It made sense that back then, the SEC would not have a corporate political spending reporting requirement.  That would have been tantamount to the agency’s asking, “have you committed any federal election crimes?”  Now that such political spending is legal, the SEC should respond to the growing calls for a new disclosure rule.

Much has changed in the years since I was on the business end of a Con Law exam.  In particular, in 2010, the Supreme Court did away with corporate source limits on election ads altogether in the infamous Citizens United case.  The upshot of this case changed not just federal law going back to 1947, but also state laws, some of which dated back to the turn of the twentieth century.

The new normal is corporations can spend an unlimited amount of their treasury funds on independent political expenditures in local, state and federal elections.  This brings us back to the SEC and its utter lack of political disclosure rules.  Because of this gap, publicly-traded corporations can spend in elections without â€?fessing up.  This seems odd given how passionate shareholders are about transparency.

In the summer of 2011, ten corporate law professors petitioned the SEC for a new disclosure rule to rectify this situation.  These professors are both conservative and progressive, yet they all agree transparency of corporate political spending is a must.

Economists have already written in support of the professors’ petition.  Economist Dr. Michael Hadani of Long Island University noted that one of the reasons why shareholders should want more reporting on corporate political spending is that it can backfire.  His regression analysis of over 1,100 companies over an 11 year period found political spending had a negative impact of firms’ market value.

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  November 16, 2011 at 11:53 am   Posted in: Corporate Law, Corruption, First Amendment   Print This Post   Comments (2)

Conference Announcement: Rights Working Group

posted by Frank Pasquale

The conference “Securing Our Rights in the Information-Sharing Era” will be held in San Francisco early next month. From the announcement:

This year marks not only the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, but also 15 years since the passage of the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996″ (IIRAIRA), the bill that established the 287(g) program which later set the stage for Secure Communities program . . . . The government has . . . invest[ed] in enforcement strategies that violate our civil liberties and human rights. As the government has expanded these tactics, it has also invested resources to build a massive, complicated information sharing system where law enforcement agencies are given new powers. Law enforcement can now search through emails, listen to phone calls, track purchases and collect files on people who may or may not be suspected of any crimes. Local law enforcement is enforcing federal immigration laws, engaging in racial profiling and funneling migrants into detention and deportation. These enforcement tactics employed across the country and at the borders in the name of national security and immigration enforcement are affecting the rights of everyone in the United States.

For those interested in an academic treatment of information-sharing, Citron and I wrote this piece last year.

  November 16, 2011 at 10:55 am   Posted in: Civil Rights, Conferences   Print This Post   Comments (1)

Ackerman and Benkler on the Occupied First Amendment

posted by Frank Pasquale

Slate writer Raymond Vasvari recently observed that, “for every uplifting paragraph” of precedent vindicating rights to protest, there are a “thousand cases bending an abstract right to the prosaic realities of protest.” We may never learn the extent to which Occupy Wall Street protesters were classified “enemies within,” and subject to coordinated intergovernmental suppression. But we can observe, with professors Ackerman and Benkler, that the “irony of free speech” is reaching a breaking point:

Whatever else it accomplishes, Occupy Wall Street is revealing distortions in our current understanding of the First Amendment. In recent decisions, the Supreme Court has protected Wall Street’s constitutional right to pour millions into political campaigns. But as presently construed, the First Amendment isn’t an obstacle when it comes to silencing the Occupiers. . . .

Instead of hiding behind obsolete court decisions, big city mayors must recognize that they are on the constitutional front-line. Michael Bloomberg is failing this test when he keeps Occupiers out of New York’s public parks and tolerates the arrests of dozens of protesters, providing an example for similar actions in Boston, Denver, and San Diego. In contrast, Antonio Villaraigoso is showing that leadership on behalf of the First Amendment is well within the realm of the politically possible. Los Angeles has not only avoided arrests, but seems to be expanding available public space as the protest swells. Similarly, the U.S. Parks police are on the right track in giving the demonstrators a four month extension on Freedom Plaza.

How to explain Mayor Bloomberg’s deviance from constitutional ideals? Maybe he’s one of the worried wealthy, realizing that he can only afford another 170 of his trademark $100 million dollar political campaigns with his fortune of $17 billion. Ensconced in an alternate reality of privilege, Bloomberg retails stories of struggling and put-upon banks. It is his very plutocratic disconnection from the daily life of his subjects that makes an extraordinary protest like OWS necessary.
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  November 16, 2011 at 12:30 am   Posted in: First Amendment, Government Secrecy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Technology   Print This Post   Comments (20)

November 15, 2011

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Boston University Law Review, Volume 91: Issue 5 (October 2011)

posted by Boston University Law Review

 

Volume 91 Number 5 – October 2011

ARTICLES

Temporary Insanity: The Strange Life and Times of the Perfect Defense 
Russell D. Covey
Page 1597

Modernizing Divorce Jurisdiction: Same-Sex Couples and Minimum Contacts
Courtney G. Joslin
Page 1669

Federalism, Lochner, and the Individual Mandate
Peter J. Smith
Page 1723

NOTES

Extinguishing Dried-Up Public Trust Rights 
William J. Bussiere
Page 1749

The Incorporation of Democracy: Justice Kennedy’s Philosophy of Political Participation in Citizens United
Jarrod L. Schaeffer
Page 1783

 

  November 15, 2011 at 9:44 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (3)

Journal of Law and Courts

posted by Dave Hoffman

There’s a new venue for peer-reviewed articles about law — the Journal of Law and Courts.  As Chris Zorn explains:

“The Journal is edited by David Klein, of the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics, and published by the University of Chicago Press. The JLC is a double-blind peer-reviewed, single-submission journal, indexed by Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw, EBSCO, JSTOR, and others. While formally an APSA section journal, the JLC aims to be the premier outlet for the publication of work on law, courts, and things judicial from a wide range of perspectives.  More information about the journal and instructions for authors can be found here.

Submissions are being accepted now, via the journal’s Editorial Managerpage. We anticipate publication of the inaugural issue in spring 2013.”

Seems like a great forum!

  November 15, 2011 at 3:41 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   Comments (0)

CELS VI: Half a CELS is Statistically Better Than No CELS

posted by Dave Hoffman

As promised, I’m filing a report from the Sixth Annual Empirical Studies Conference, held 11/4-11/5 at Northwestern Law School.  Several of the attendees at the Conference approached me and remarked on my posts from CELS V, IV, and III. That added pressure, coupled with missing half of the conference due to an unavoidable conflict, has delayed this post substantially.  Apologies!  Next time, I promise to attend from the opening ceremonies until they burn the natural law figure in effigy.  Next year’s conference is at Stanford.  I’ll make a similar offer to the one I’ve made in the past: if the organizing committee pays my way, I promise not only to blog the whole thing, but to praise you unstintingly.  Here’s an example: I didn’t observe a single technical or organization snafu at Northwestern this year.  Kudos to the organizing committee: Bernie Black, Shari Diamond, and Emerson Tiller.

What I saw

I arrived Friday night in time for the poster session.  A few impressions.  Yun-chien Chang’s Tenancy in ‘Anticommons’? A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Co-Ownership won “best poster,” but I was drawn to David Lovis-McMahon & N.J. Schweitzer’s Substantive Justice: How the Substantive Law Shapes Perceived Fairness.  Overall, the trend toward professionalization in poster display continues unabated.  Even Ted Eisenberg’s poster was glossy & evidenced some post-production work — Ted’s posters at past sessions were, famously, not as civilized. Gone are the days where you could throw some powerpoint slides onto a board and talk about them over a glass of wine!  That said, I’m skeptical about poster sessions generally.  I would love to hear differently from folks who were there.

On Saturday, bright eyed and caffeinated, I went to a Juries panel, where I got to see three pretty cool papers.  The first, by Mercer/Kadous, was about how juries are likely to react to precise/imprecise legal standards.  (For a previous version, see here.) Though the work was nominally about auditing standards, it seemed generalizable to other kinds of legal rules.  The basic conclusion was that imprecise standards increase the likelihood of plaintiff verdicts, but only when the underlying conduct is conservative but deviates from industry norms.  By contrast, if the underlying conduct is aggressive, jurors return fewer pro-plaintiff verdicts.  Unlike most such projects, the authors permitted a large number of mock juries to deliberate, which added a degree of external validity.  Similarly worth reading was Lee/Waters’ work on jury verdict reporters (bottom line: reporters aren’t systematically pro-plaintiff, as the CW suggests, but they are awfully noise measures of what juries are actually doing).  Finally, Hans/Reyna presented some very interesting work on the “gist” model of jury decisionmaking.

At 11:00, I had to skip a great paper by Daniel Klerman whose title was worth the price of admission alone – the Selection of Thirteenth-Century Disputes for Litigation.  Instead, I went to Law and Psychology III.  There, Kenworthey Bilz presented Crime, Tort, Anger, and Insult, a paper which studies how attribution & perceptions of dignitary loss mark a psychological boundary between crime and tort cases.  Bilz presented several neat experiments in service of her thesis, among them a priming survey- – people primed to think about crimes complete the word “ins-” as “insult,” while people primed to think about torts complete it as “insurance.”  (I think I’ve got that right – - the paper isn’t available online, and I’m drawing on two week old memories.)

At noon, Andrew Gelman gave a fantastic presentation on the visualization of empirical data.  The bottom line: wordles are silly and convey no important information.  Actually, Andrew didn’t say that.  I just thought that coming in.  What Andrew said was something more like “can’t people who produce visually interesting graphs and people who produce graphs that convey information get along?”

Finally, I was the discussant at an Experimental Panel, responding to Brooks/Stremitzer/Tontrup’s Framing Contracts:Why Loss Framing Increases Effort.  Attendees witnessed my ill-fated attempt to reverse the order of my presentation on the fly, leading me to neglect the bread in the praise sandwich.  This was a good teaching moment about academic norms. My substantive reaction to Framing Contracts is that it was hard to know how much the paper connected to real-world contracting behavior, since the kinds of decision tasks that the experimental subjects were asked to perform were stripped of the relational & reciprocal norms that characterize actual deals.

CELS: What I missed

The entire first day!  One of my papers with the cultural cognition project, They Saw a Protest, apparently came off well.  Of course, there was also tons of great stuff not written from within the expanding cultural cognition empire.  Here’s a selection: on lawyer optimism; on public housing, enforcement and race; on probable cause and hindsight judging; and several papers on Iqbal, none of which appear to be online.

What did you see & like?

  November 15, 2011 at 3:26 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Empirical Analysis of Law   Print This Post   Comments (0)

November 14, 2011

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The Yale Law Journal Online: Bad News for Professor Koppelman: The Incidental Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate

posted by Yale Law Journal

The Yale Law Journal Online recently published Bad News for Professor Koppelman: The Incidental Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate, in which Gary Lawson and David B. Kopel respond to Andrew Koppelman’s Bad News for Mail Robbers: The Obvious Constitutionality of Health Care Reform. Koppelman’s essay argued that the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could be derived from the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause by the same logic that renders federal laws against mail robbery constitutional. Lawson and Kopel argue that contrary to Koppelman’s belief, the Necessary and Proper Clause cannot be used to validate the constitutionality of the individual mandate. To arrive at this conclusion, Lawson and Kopel rely on principles of eighteenth-century agency law, administrative law, and corporate law embedded in the Necessary and Proper Clause.

Preferred citation: Gary Lawson & David B. Kopel, Bad News for Professor Koppelman: The Incidental Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate, 121 YALE L.J. ONLINE 267 (2011), http://yalelawjournal.org/2011/11/08/lawson&kopel.html.

  November 14, 2011 at 11:10 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (4)

Court-Packing and the Child Labor Amendment

posted by Gerard Magliocca

My article on this is now out at 27 Const. Comment. 455 (2011).  There is no web link yet, but here is the SSRN link.

  November 14, 2011 at 8:36 am   Posted in: Constitutional Law   Print This Post   Comments (0)

The Devil’s Dictionary on Attorneys

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Liar, n. A lawyer with a roving commission.

  November 14, 2011 at 8:16 am   Posted in: Humor, Uncategorized   Print This Post   Comments (0)

November 13, 2011

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Introducing Guest Blogger Gilbert A. Holmes

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Gilbert A. Holmes, Professor of Law and former Dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law, as a guest blogger.  Professor Holmes joined the University of Baltimore School of Law in the summer of 2001, serving as Dean until 2007.  He previously served on the faculty of Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, where he was associate dean for academic affairs and budget (1999-2001). Professor Holmes also served on the faculties of Southern Methodist Law School (1995-1996), and Seton Hall University School of Law (1990-1994).  Professor Holmes’ principal teaching has been in family law, contracts, and property.  He was twice named Day Division Teacher of the Year at Texas Wesleyan, and was nominated for Teacher of the Year by the Seton Hall Law Student Bar Association on three occasions.

Professor Holmes has published articles on a range of family law and constitutional issues in such journals as The Maryland Law Review, The University of Miami Law Review, Temple Law Review and the Texas Wesleyan Law Review, and has presented on a host of topics at conferences and symposia across the country. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the National Bar Association, and the Association of American Law Schools. He is admitted to practice in New York and before the United States District Court, Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, the United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court.

Selected Publications

Conversations About the Intersecting Institutions of Marriage, 4 Texas Wesleyan L. Rev. 143 (1998)

The Extended Family System in the Black Community: A Child-Centered Model for Adoption Policy, 68 Temple L. Rev. 1649 (1995)

Student Initiated Prayer: Is It Speech or Religion, and Does it Matter Which, 49 U. Miami L. Rev 301 (1995)

The Tie That Binds: The Constitutional Right of Children to Maintain Relationships with Parent-Like Individuals, 53 Md. L. Rev. 358 (1994)

 

  November 13, 2011 at 9:07 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   Comments (0)

Ira Glass v. Amanda Williams

posted by Sarah Waldeck

If you missed the story Very Tough Love when it aired last March on This American Life, it put a new spin on that old adage about local politics mattering most.  When you are a drug court defendant, the judicial philosophy and temperament of the judge who manages your case matters a lot, particularly since entering the drug court means waiving many procedural rights.  The story, which focused on a drug court judge who had recently won reelection to a sixth term, was remarkable for its laser focus on judicial discretion and how much can go awry when that discretion is abused.  It was also impossible to listen to the story without speculating about how furious the judge must have been when she heard it.

Furious enough, it turns out, to threaten to sue This American Life and reporter Ira Glass for libel.  She sent her letter,  Glass responded, and for a while all seemed to be quiet.

This past week, however, Georgia’s Judicial Qualifications Committee filed a formal complaint against the judge—Amanda Williams, who presides over the drug court in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit.   Among other allegations, the complaint states that Judge Williams jailed defendants indefinitely, ordered a suicidal defendant into solitary confinement for more than two months, and ordered a defendant jailed when he disputed the results of a drug test.

Judge Williams has the opportunity to respond to the charges in writing.  Unless she and the Committee settle (which usually results in a judge stepping aside), the Commiittee will hold a trial-like proceeding on the charges.

We’ll see what happens next.  But if you haven’t been following this, it’s worth clicking on the links to get up to speed.  Reality radio is way more interesting than reality television.

 

Photo Credit:  Krista Johansen

 

 

 

  November 13, 2011 at 1:06 am   Posted in: Courts, Culture   Print This Post   Comments (1)

November 12, 2011

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Women in Big Law

posted by Sarah Waldeck

This week the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) released its Survey on the Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, which compiles data on the professional progress of women in the nation’s 200 largest firms. Most of the reporting on NAWL’s survey results has focused on the decrease in the number of female first and second year associates.  While the decline is only slight—47 percent of first and second year associates are women, compared to 48 percent a year ago—it is the first decrease since NAWL began reporting survey results in 2006.   NAWL speculates that the decline is attributable to changes in law school enrollments, where there have also been slight decreases in the percentage of female students.

The most interesting part of the report, however, discusses where women find themselves in the hierarchal complexities of today’s law firms.  As the NAWL survey points out, large law firms are no longer comprised of simply partners, associates, and a few of counsel.  Instead, firms are a mix of equity and non-equity partners, associates, staff attorneys, and of counsel.  Read on after the jump for sobering highlights about how women tend to fit into organizationally-complex large law firms. Read the rest of this post »

  November 12, 2011 at 8:48 pm   Posted in: Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   Comments (0)

November 11, 2011

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America Invents Act Symposium

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’m pleased to announce that IU–Indianapolis Law School will host a conference on the new patent statute entitled “The American Invents Act:  Patent Law’s New Lease on Life.”  This event will be held on Friday, December 2nd and features a Keynote Address by Judge Paul Michel (retired) of the Federal Circuit, Janet Gongola of the PTO, Professor Jay Kesen of the University of Illinois Law School, and many other distinguished speakers.  If you would like to register, please go to this link for information.

  November 11, 2011 at 2:49 pm   Posted in: Intellectual Property   Print This Post   Comments (0)

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