Recently in Academia Category

Brian Z. Tamanhana of Washington U., St. Louis Law School has this article with the above title on SSRN.  He charges his fellow lefty law professors with hypocrisy and is well aware he will lose some friends.  Here is the abstract:

Future generations will look back at the first decade of the twenty-first century as a pivotal time when a huge economic barrier was erected to encumber the path to a legal career. The symbolic announcement of this barrier rang out when annual tuition crossed the $50,000 threshold, now exceeded at a dozen or so law schools. Including fees and living expenses, it costs well in excess of $200,000 to obtain a law degree at most of the nation's highly regarded law schools and at a number of non-elite ones as well. Law schools thus impose a formidable entry fee on anyone who wishes to follow what, until recently, has long served as a means of upward mobility and access to power in American society.

The University of Chicago Law School has for many years been one of the nation's leaders, and is known to be more open to conservatives (or at least less hostile to them) than the other top schools.  It holds its reunion this weekend.

My last entry concerned Princeton Professor Emeritus Richard Falk, who has been gracious enough to tell us, even as the Boston bombing victims (such as is left of them) are being buried, that they brought it on themselves by living in the Imperialist Leviathan.Now comes Florida Atlantic Professor James Tracy to "correct" Professor Falk.  The victims didn't bring the bombing on themselves, because there was no bombing.  It was all staged  --  an evacuation drill. 

In [Tracy's] blog, which isn't affiliated with FAU, Tracy argues that the amount of damage captured on video cannot be reconciled with the homemade bombs that authorities say caused the damage.

More likely, the tenured professor says, what happened in Boston was a "mass casualty drill."

In an April 23 posting entitled "Witnessing Boston's Mass Casualty Event," Tracy contends that "photographic evidence of the event suggests the possibility of play actors getting into position after the detonation of what may in fact have been a smoke bomb or similarly benign explosive."

You might be surprised to learn that the little boy killed by Jihadist bombers, and the other casualties in that gruesome attack, are mere canaries in the mine of American imperialism.

...generally benevolent, especially when compared to the holy war fevers espoused by national leaders, the media, and a vengeful public after the 9/11 attacks that also embraced Islamophobic falsehoods. Maybe America has become more poised in relation to such extremist incidents, but maybe not. It is soon to tell, and the somewhat hysterical Boston dragnet for the remaining at large and alive suspect does suggest that the wounds of 9/11 are far from healed.

Kent followed my post about Columbia Assistant Professor Kathy Boudin with a post quoting the nephew of one of the police officers whose murder Professor Boudin enthusiastically brought about.

Bill posted last week on Columbia's terrorist professor, Kathy Boudin. Stefan Kanfer has this article at the City Journal on the same subject.  I thought the last paragraph was worth quoting here.

When it became known that Boudin was hiding in plain sight at Columbia, the New York Post interviewed the nephew of one of the police officers shot to death in Nanuet. He reminded readers of the consequences of that long-ago incident: "Nine children grew up without their dads because of her actions." None of this, course, has any effect on Columbia. Associate dean Marianne Yoshioka, who hired Boudin, rose to her defense. Kathy Boudin has been "an excellent teacher who gets incredible evaluations from her students each year," Yoshioka said. "Incredible" does seem the operative word.

Last week I noted the Intellectual Diversity Conference put on by the Harvard Chapter of the Federalist Society.  Video of the conference is now up at the conference webpage.

Q:  What's worse than a bunch of defense-friendly Stanford Law students presenting Gov. Moonbeam with their "study" about the wonderfulness of Realignment?

One repeated concern the student researchers heard from numerous practitioners across the state is the challenge counties face in effectively supervising a new type of offender. As explained by second-year student Mariam Hinds, "Counties are dealing with a more criminally sophisticated and hardened caseload due to the fact that some realigned offenses are more serious than pre-Realignment offenses that would have been sentenced locally and some inmates being released back to the counties from prison on post-release community supervision have serious or violent criminal histories."

We hear a lot about diversity.  Yet the kind of diversity that academia needs most is rarely mentioned.  Nick Rosenkranz at VC notes that the Harvard Federalist Society is doing something about it:

The Harvard Chapter of the Federalist Society is hosting a very important conference tomorrow on intellectual diversity in the legal academy.

Many people realize that legal academia "leans" to the left. But even alumni -- indeed, even major donors -- are often unaware of the extent of the imbalance. At Georgetown, for example, the ratio of liberals to conservatives/libertarians is roughly 116 to 3. At most top schools, the ratio is similar. One might quibble about definitions, but even on the broadest conception of "conservative" or "libertarian" or, let's just say, "right of the American center," most top law schools can count such professors on one hand. In public law, and particularly constitutional law, the disparity is even more extreme.

The conference agenda is here.  I won't make it to Cambridge tomorrow, so I hope this comes out is some recorded form in the not-too-distant future.

I recently posted about good news for legal education, to wit, that Columbia, Stanford and NYU have adopted a program under which military veterans can get a law degree without being charged tuition.

[T]he New York Post reports that Columbia University has honored Kathy Boudin -- the Weather Underground terrorist who spent 22 years in prison for the armored-car robbery that killed two police officers and a Brink's guard -- with an adjunct professorship at Columbia's School of Social Work. Columbia lists her as an assistant professor. Among her listed areas of expertise is "restorative justice." In 2003 Boudin was paroled for felony murder that resulted in a lot of kids being left without dads. I wonder if she has restored any justice to them.

It's not exactly a secret that legal education is dominated by liberals in general and, as regards criminal law in particular, by those sympathetic to the defense.  My alma mater, Stanford, runs a Supreme Court Litigation Clinic that, in criminal cases, uniformly sides with the bad guy.  I don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed to say that the Clinic has been remarkably successful.  

Reaching out to veterans carries multiple advantages for law schools. There are public relations and marketing benefits to helping cover the cost of enrollment for veterans at a time when concerns about rising tuition are running high. The payments can also help schools recruit high-quality students they otherwise might have lost to public competitors without too much damage to the bottom line.

Last year, Orin Kerr published a brief article in the tongue-in-cheek Green Bag.  The article was titled A Theory of Law and provided a high-toned citation for anything a law review author had no other citation for.  A micro-symposium of comments on Kerr's article is now available on SSRN, including a cyber perspective from a long-time computer programmer (moi), titled Cursing Recursion.

'Tis the season for end-of-year assessments, so my contribution is the most interesting book I read in the last year.  It is Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Haidt explores through the lens of evolutionary psychology why people have such fundamentally different views of right and wrong.  The basic thesis is that we are mostly self-centered beasts, competing with other individuals for survival of the fittest, but there is also a streak of loyalty to our group that sometimes transcends self-interest.  This, too, is a product of evolution, as groups that have such loyalty have a competitive advantage over groups that do not.

In Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, there are six elements of the moral matrix:  care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  He then explores how people of different political orientations place differing emphasis on these elements.  Haidt is a liberal, and he unabashedly states that the motive for his research was to help liberals win elections.  He was distressed by John Kerry's dismal campaign in 2004.

Last June brought an end to one of the less appetizing SCOTUS Terms as far as criminal (and other) cases are concerned, but Lance Rogers of the BNA's Criminal Law Reporter does a nice job summarizing them, with commentary  from Jeff Fisher of Stanford's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, Laurie Levenson of Loyola, Bruce Green of Fordham, our own Kent Scheidegger, and yours truly, trying but not fully succeeding to be philosophical about it all.

Professor Hugo Bedau, a leader of the abolitionist movement, died last week at his home in Norwood, Massachusetts.  He was 85.  He spent most of his career as the anchor of the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University.  The New York Times has this extensive obituary, which contains the following, "'He articulated the case against the death penalty as well as anyone ever has,' Paul G. Cassell, a law professor, former federal judge and noted proponent of the death penalty, said..."