Over the weekend, someone called my office voice mail and left a 228 second message that sounds like a muffled pro tennis match play-by-play.
For a minute there, I thought I had a new social trend spotted in the wild: voice mail spam.
So I called the number from the caller ID.
It's not a social trend. It seems a former student took his young daughter to the tennis match this weekend, and during the match he gave her the cell phone to play with. She happily pushed buttons, it called my office, and I got a recording of a bit of the match.
But I had a nice chat with the dad, who's now a partner in a big local firm and seems to be doing very well.
In college they always used to tell us that the people on work study got better grades because they were forced to manage their time more carefully. Maybe not?
This paper estimates the effect of paid employment on grades of full-time, four-year students from four nationally representative cross sections of the Harvard College Alcohol Study administered during 1993-2001. The relationship could be causal in either direction and is likely contaminated by unobserved heterogeneity. Two-stage GMM regressions instrument for work hours using paternal schooling and being raised Jewish, which are hypothesized to reflect parental preferences towards education manifested in additional student financial support but not influence achievement conditional on maternal schooling, college and class. Extensive empirical testing supports the identifying assumptions of instrument strength and orthogonality. GMM results show that an additional weekly work hour reduces current year GPA by about 0.011 points, roughly five times more than the OLS coefficient but somewhat less than recent estimates. Effects are stable across specifications, time, gender, class and age, but vary by health status, maternal schooling, religious background and especially race/ethnicity.
From the conclusion:
… a 30-hour work week lowers the average grade by one mark, i.e. from A– to B+, compared with not participating in the labor market at all.
These results are consistent with what some college instructors regularly experience: students who blame class tardiness and absence, failure to submit assignments and poor exam performance on their employment obligations. However, the findings of this study suggest that the negative relationship between labor supply and grades is not simply attributable to less academically motivated students working long hours. In that case, the aforementioned hypothetical lackluster students would not necessarily perform better academically if they were prevented from working, which is simply an activity to which bad students devote more time than good students. Instead, students who spend longer hours in paid labor because of preferences or budget constraints related to their fathers’ schooling attainment and attitudes ultimately perform worse in school than they otherwise would.
I wonder to what extent if any these effects are valid for law students — and especially to what extent it is age-related. (And, if we're going to put in special testing for the effect of college-student family stereotypes, why Jewish and not Asian?)
I enjoyed this video, Barbri Girl, from the 2008 NYU Law Revue.
I'm afraid, however, that the reason I liked it so much isn't simply that it's sort of funny, and at its start so true to life. No, it's because there's a legal issue embedded in here — probably unintentionally — regarding whether anyone has grounds to sue over this video. And that just seems so appropriate given the subject matter.
See, the song on which this skit is based is the wonderful/awful “Barbie Girl” by Aqua, a Danish-Norwegian pop-punk band. The song was the subject of a major trademark lawsuit by Mattel.
A video accompanying the original song is available on YouTube. I'm pretty sure I saw a much less camp, and somewhat harder-edged, performance of it back when the song was being litigated — something vaguely like a studio version of the start of this — but maybe I'm imagining things.
Getting back to the law, Mattel was basically handed its head on a plate by the 9th Circuit. In a decision sure to be in every IP casebook, Judge Alex Kozinski not only said the song was protected as a parody under the First Amendment but concluded the decision with the admonition that, “The parties are advised to chill.” See Mattel Inc. v. MCA Records Inc., 296 F.3d 894 (2002).
But here's where the fun starts: “Barbie Girl” was clearly a parody of the Barbie image. This video, however, is not. But that's ok because as “BAR/BRI Girl” the trademark being parodied isn't Mattel's so they have no grounds for suit.
As for BAR/BRI themselves, they can't sue, for the same reasons that Mattel's suit against Aqua was baseless.
But here comes the (weak, legal) joke: the people who have a potential right of action against the NYU law students in the Barbri Girl video are Aqua! It's a real stretch to say that the Barbri Girl video is a parody of Aqua's song. [Contrast Barbri Girl with this “Ugly Girl” parody song, sometimes attributed to Weird Al Yankovic, here supported by some Sims 2 Machinima.] Rather, BarBri Girl appropriates the tune (and more) of Barbie Girl for a satirical purpose other than parody of the source. And — unless copyright law has changed since I last looked — that sort of satire isn't necessarily a protected First Amendment use of a copyrighted tune, cf. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994); Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books USA, 109 F.3d 1394 (9th Cir. 1997).
But don't panic. Despite using the whole tune, and some of the look and feel of the original video, Barbri Girl is probably fair-use anyway, since the use is not commercially motivated and indeed is arguably for nonprofit educational purposes, and will have no “negative effect … upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” (per the Supreme Court in the 2 Live Crew decision).
And most importantly, I don't think Aqua is going to sue.
By the way, none of this stuff is going to be on the bar exam.
According to an article by Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, the US has a series of floating prisons in which people are held and questioned in a law-free regime. See US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships for the grisly story.
A few snippets:
According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.
Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.
…
Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.
“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been 'through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”
(My emphasis — can this really be true? Is this 'secret prison' number including all the Iraqi detainees in camps in Iraq, or is there some other network of major camps?)
The Guardian article is based on a forthcoming report from an NGO called Reprieve. The Clive Stafford Smith quoted in the article heads Reprieve-UK, which describes itself as follows:
Reprieve provides frontline investigation and legal representation to prisoners denied justice by powerful governments across the world, especially those governments that should be upholding the highest standards when it comes to fair trials.
Reprieve lawyers represent people facing the death penalty, particularly in the USA, or when those facing execution are British nationals. And we represent prisoners denied justice in the name of the ‘War on Terror’, including those held without charge or trial in Guantánamo Bay and the countless secret prisons beyond. None of these prisoners can afford to pay for representation.
It has been said that you can judge a society by how it treats people accused of violating its laws. Through the example set by the world’s most influential nations, fundamental human rights principles stand or fall across the world.
Reprieve uses international and domestic law as a tool to save lives, deliver justice and make the case for world-wide reform.
