Our Dean, Patricia White, is on Brian Leiter’s list of Nine Transformative Deans in the Last Decade — a list with the intriguing URL of “ten-transformative-deans-in-the-last-decade”. Gotta wonder who the tenth was and what happened to him/her.
Fortunately for us here at U. Miami, in addition to being lauded for her transformation of ASU, Dean White also appears on Leiter’s list of six “Deans to watch in the coming years”.
I’m scheduled to be on a call-in to the NPR Cleveland affiliate around 9:30 am tomorrow morning as part of their morning 9-10am talk show, “The Sound of Ideas.” Here’s the promo for tomorrow’s program:
If government — from your local school board to the U.S. Capitol — operated in secret, how much would you trust it? On the next Sound of Ideas, we’ll talk to open government advocates about the public’s right to know. We’ll offer expert advice on how to access public records and keep tabs on your government. Plus, we’ll explore how technology is helping to make government more transparent.
There will be a live feed of the show The Sound of Ideas: Transparent Government / ideastream – Northeast Ohio Public Radio, and a podacast afterwards.
UM’s Jha lab (in the Psychology Department) has secured a $920K grant to “track the structural and functional brain changes that may accompany participation in short-form mindfulness training courses”.
Scott Rogers, Director of the Mindfulness in Law Program at the University of Miami Law School will be collaborating in the research.
I wonder if law students will be getting their brains scanned?
Image Copyright © XKCD, licensed via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License
I indulged my inner geek last night and made some fairly extensive changes under the hood to the blog. If I did it right — always a dubious proposition — then no changes should be visible to the reader whatsoever, except perhaps that the blog will load a bit quicker.
So please do let me know in the comments if anything seems weirder — or less weird — than usual. Or even if they seem the same.
In an email he has kindly allowed me to quote, my banking expert colleague the FDIC issue as follows:
The FDIC is largely funded through premiums charged to the banks, and has backup authority to reach, essentially, the entire capital base of the depository institution industry. It also has authority to borrow from the Treasury, which it did in late 2008 (after TARP was past), and indeed it was an FDIC guarantee program, NOT the TARP, which mostly stabilized the industry — Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, for instance, became and remained bank holding companies, not to access the TARP (which they were allowed to do without becoming BHCs), but to access the FDIC guarantee program. The FDIC still has outstanding debt to the Treasury from this episode.
For this reason, a failure to raise the debt ceiling is not likely to have any immediate effect on the FDIC’s funding sources. Presumably the matter would be resolved before the lack of Treasury funds would affect the FDIC’s insurance funds.
That being said, bank runs are caused by perceptions, not objective facts. If you can worry about this, I suppose there are at least 250,000 individuals who are less sophisticated, most of them far less so, who can worry too. I don’t know if this could cause a “run” on the banks, because in the envisioned circumstances I don’t think there would be any place to run.
But I don’t think Congress will refuse to raise the debt ceiling. The primary effect of this episode, however, will be to put a question in the back of everybody’s mind about government credit and government guarantees generally. That will affect confidence in FDIC insurance, I think, in the long if not the short run. So on some level I think you are right to worry about it.
Actually, I find that mostly reassuring….
The WSJ reports that Thomas M. Cooley Law School is suing a law firm, and also suing four pseudonymous Internet posters some or all of whom might be former students. This is the first such case I’ve ever heard of.
Cooley has issued a statement, and links to (1) the complaint against the law firm of Kurzon Strauss LLP and two lawyers in that firm, and also (2) the complaint against four John Doe Internet writers styling themselves “Rockstar05,” “Informant,” “Anonymous,” and “Ch Bruns.”.
Cooley claims in its statement that the law firm defamed it “by falsely claiming on Internet websites, social media, and email that Cooley, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) Michigan educational corporation, has defrauded students by misrepresenting its graduate employment placement rates, average starting salary figures, and student loan default rates.” These statements were, Cooley says, part of an attempt to recruit members of a planned class-action lawsuit against it. (There is already a pending class-action claim of this type against Thomas Jefferson Law School.)
The complaints against the four Internet posters aim at the author of the blog at http://thomas-cooley-law-school-scam.weebly.com/, two commentators on that blog, and one commentator on a post at the Huffington Post.
The first issue, however, will be whether Cooley can get subpoenas and expose the identities of the posters. The leading case on this subject is Dendrite Int’l, Inc. v John Doe, No. 3, et al., 342 N.J. Super. 134, 141–42 (App. Div. 2001):
The trial court must consider and decide those applications by striking a balance between the well-established First Amendment right to speak anonymously, and the right of the plaintiff to protect its proprietary interests and reputation through the assertion of recognizable claims based on the actionable conduct of the anonymous, fictitiously-named defendants.
. . . when such an application is made, the trial court should first require the plaintiff to undertake efforts to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena or application for an order of disclosure, and withhold action to afford the fictitiously-named defendants a reasonable opportunity to file and serve opposition to the application . . .
The court shall also require the plaintiff to identify and set forth the exact statements purportedly made by each anonymous poster that plaintiff alleges constitutes actionable speech.
The complaint and all information provided to the court should be carefully reviewed to determine whether plaintiff has set forth a prima facie cause of action against the fictitiously-named anonymous defendants . . .
Finally, assuming the court concludes that the plaintiff has presented a prima facie cause of action, the court must balance the defendant’s First Amendment right of anonymous free speech against the strength of the prima facie case presented and the necessity for the disclosure of the anonymous defendant’s identity to allow the plaintiff to properly proceed.
It may be, however, that NY uses a standard that is less protective of anonymous internet speech than Dendrite.
Jotwell Blenderlaw
