June 2004
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An Improving Academic Job Market?
John Oberdiek (Law, Rutgers-Camden) calls my attention to a new Bureau of Labor Statistics study suggesting a sharp upturn in the number of academic jobs over the next decade. A journalistic version of the main conclusions is here. Of course, some will recall that Bill Bowen, former Princeton President, published a study more than a…
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Environmental Ethicist Palmer from Lancaster to Wash U/St. Louis
Clare Palmer (environmental philosophy and ethics) at Lancaster University has accepted a joint appointment as Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and of Philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis, to begin this fall.
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A Brewing Crisis in Judicial Ethics
Via the Curmudgeonly Clerk, I learn of this violation of a lesser-known provision of the judicial code of conduct. (Warning: Although I’m confident in the impropriety of this conduct, I am not an expert on judicial ethics.) See the last paragraph on page 2 and page 3 of the Oklahoma Attorney General’s petition for removal…
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Leading “public intellectuals” in the UK
From Chris Bertram (Bristol, Philosophy), I learn of a listing of 100 “public intellectuals” in Britain compiled by Prospect Magazine, from which they hope to learn, by the scientific method of e-mail voting, who are the top five. There are several philosophers and social/political theorists on the list–A.C. Grayling, John Gray, Mary Warnock, Onora O’Neill,…
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Why is it so easy to get tenure in law schools?
ORIGINALLY POSTED ON AUGUST 23, 2003 ====== So asks a colleague in philosophy, who was recently a tenure referee for a law professor at a very reputable law school who got tenure, notwithstanding what struck the colleague as quite weak work. The answer is somewhat complex, and perhaps a bit speculative, but it goes something…
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Deja Vu All Over Again
In these slow summer months, when I finally have a chance to make real progress on writing projects (now that all grading is done as well), I’m going to be posting a bit less new material, but I thought I’d also repost some items from early on that, based on feedback, seem to be of…
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“Harold Koh is the incoming Dean of Harvard Law School”
So said National Public Radio this morning while introducing incoming Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, an international law expert, for a segment on the Bush Administration’s torture memos. No doubt, this produced much consternation in New Haven and Cambridge, Mass. But as far as the real world is concerned, it appears it’s half-a-dozen of…
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Texas Taliban Hypocrisy Department
Courtesy of Off the Kuff.
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A Declaration Calling for the Resignation or Removal of Attorney General John Ashcroft
The statement and petition are here. Do consider signing.
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“God Bless America”
So says the gifted and incisive Philippino writer Red Constantino in this piece (scroll down). An excerpt: “One ghastly day in May, at close to three in the morning, a US helicopter fires its missiles at the village of Mukaradeeb in western Iraq. ‘Coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided,’…
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Conferences on New Books by Wettstein and Watson
PGR Advisory Board member John Martin Fischer has called to my attention two public conferences that his department at the University of California at Riverside is hosting this coming academic year to celebrate forthcoming books by UCR philosophers Howard Wettstein and Gary Watson. More details, for those who might be interested in these events, are…
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La Trobe in Australia Making Bid for Philosopher Carter at Colorado
La Trobe University in Australia is trying to recruit Alan Carter (political philosophy, ethics, environmental philosophy and ethics) in Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder to be the new Chair of their Department.
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The First-Ever Blogospheric Book Promotional Tour Has Arrived!
Cass Sunstein (Chicago, Law)–whose new book for this year is about to come out–is “guest-blogging” at two different blogs with a lot of constitutional law coverage: Volokh (UCLA, Law) and Balkin (Yale, Law). In both cases, it appears the point is to introduce and promote his forthcoming book on FDR and “the second Bill of…
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The Extreme (not “lunatic,” since we do not want to use words that agitate sensitive right-wing readers, ever) Justice Thomas
Yet more opinion on the issue of the moment; this from Professor Newsom of the law school at Howard University: “I don’t know whether Thomas’ position is extreme or not, as an *abstract* proposition. I do know that the practical consequences of his views would be horrendous for religious minorities. Without Laycock’s understanding of the…
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An Embarrassing Year for the Harvard Law Review
The politicization of the Harvard Law Review, and the concomitant collapse of scholarly standards, keeps getting worse. First, there was “L’Affaire VanDyke,” in which a student editor of the review published an incompetent review of a book defending the constitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design, a review that could not have survived actual cite-checking. Now Harvard…
If knowledge is sociologically conditioned, then what, exactly, happens to the truth-status of the sociology of knowledge itself? This is…