Via Boing Boing comes news of a Voice-stress ice-cream dispenser that increases portions for the miserable:
Demitrios Kargotis unveiled his Mr Whippy machine at the Ars Technica festival in Linz. It's a self-serve frozen custard machine that doles out portion sizes based on the amount of misery it detects in a voice-stress analysis. The sadder you are, the more ice-cream you get.
I think every law school should have one of these!
I was amazed to learn that the ABA apparently withdrew — or at least delayed — the controversial proposed bar pass standard, aka Interpretation 301-6, more than two weeks ago.
Here are some Comments sent to the ABA regarding Proposed Interpretation 301-6: (comments1); (comments2); (comments3); (comments4); and (comments5).
I’ve been unable to find an official notice of the withdrawal, but it’s reported in this Press Release from the National Lawyers Guild.
Previous posts:
Bill Henderson has a really interesting chart up at Empirical Legal Studies: Distribution of 2006 Starting Salaries: Best Graphic Chart of the Year which shows a very bimodal distribution of starting lawyer saleries. As he says,
The sample includes—in order of size—private practice (55.8%), business (14.2%), government (10.6%), judicial clerks (9.6%), public interest (5.4%), and other (2.8%). Half of the graduates make less than the $62,000 per year median—but remarkably, there is no clustering there. Over a quarter (27.5%) make between $40k-$55k per year, and another quarter (27.8%) have an annual salary of $100K plus.
If the chart were a flipbook of the last twenty years, the first mode would be relatively stationary, barely tracking inflation, while the second mode would be moving quickly to the right—i.e., the salary wars. In fact, because of the recent jump to $160K in the major markets, the second mode has already moved even more to the right.
Lots of other interesting comments there too.
It's time to check in on Ave Maria, the Catholic law school with plans to relocate to South-West Florida.
Things were already quite bad at Ave Maria — just how bad can be seen from this Feb. '07 resignation letter from Assoc. Prof. Kevin Lee (“In my estimation the Law School operates in a manner more in tune with Thomas Hobbes than Thomas Aquinas.”). [It's an interesting letter on several levels, not least its assertion of a vision of Catholic legal scholarship as based “in true devotion to Mary.”]
But back to Ave Maria today. Set the scene with the Statement at Mirror of Justice (a blog which I really should read more often); then see the subtly-titled post Dean Runs Amok at AveWatch.org…or read the whole series of entries on that topic.
The full text of the letter sent by Dean Dobranski to the tenured Professor he is trying to fire would be appropriate if the Professor were a suspected ax murderer or rapist. The Dean has yet, as I understand it, to make the charges public (it's not even clear if he's informed the subject of them), but the real offense is thought to be that the Professor “was involved with the faculty's complaint to the school's accreditor, has filed a complaint with law enforcement against Dobranski, and recently called for a renewal of the faculty's earlier 'vote of no confidence' in governance.”
Next, there's the stiff, elegant, letter by Professor Emeritus Charles E. Rice, co-founder and former member of the Board of Governors, in which he urges the current Board of Governors of Ave Maria to fire the Dean, then resign en mass in order to save the school (and themselves).
Fumare, another blog that keeps an eye on doings at Ave Maria, reports that “Professors Lyons and Pucillo have cleaned out their offices and were evicted from the law school this past week.” Evicted? Cf. this Statement from Professors Lyons and Pucillo to AMSL Community.
There is no sign of any of this, however, at Incense, the relentlessly upbeat “independent weblog of alumni & supporters of the many good works of the Ave Maria Foundation, where we accentuate the positive about all things Catholic. Dominus vobiscum.”
Previous posts:
I participated in the Law School's orientation program today by moderating a discussion on the law relating to Guantanamo with the incoming students in section 'B'. I don't teach in the first year but the idea was that students having a teacher who won't be grading them this year would make students more willing to talk.
It was a lively session. I see my role in these events primarily as devil's advocate, so I tried not to telegraph my opinions. Indeed, after class one student told me he was sure I was a liberal, the other that he was sure I was a conservative. I told the class that if they wanted to know what I really think, they'd find it here. So, students wanting to know what I think about the issues will find a hint in my 124 postings on Guantanamo and in the 99 posts on Torture. Since the posts are in reverse chronological order, you should start at the bottom, where you'll find Guantanamo: Our Collective Shame. Posted October 10, 2003 and still true.
Hiring season is approaching — indeed, today is the day that hiring committees get to see the first round of AALS faculty appointments register forms — and the law blogs are full of unusually good advice for lawyers wanting to enter the teaching profession. In recent years I've felt constrained about what I could say publicly about the hiring process because I was a part of a hiring committee. But this year, as far as hiring is concerned, I am just a regular faculty member, so I can speak more freely.
Rather than repeat the general advice you can find elsewhere, I thought I would instead say a few things about a subject I know particularly well: teaching here at the University of Miami School of Law. Although our overall US News rank is very middle-of-the-pack, due mainly to our large size, our faculty has a relatively high reputation rate both in US News and other comparable surveys. But none of these (flawed) indexes really reflect much about what a faculty member's life is like, and thus they are even less useful to an aspiring faculty member than they are to would-be law students.
So, aspiring law professors and future colleagues, I've compiled ten reasons why you should teach here — and three why you shouldn't.
Jotwell Blenderlaw