September 2005
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Friday Poem: “Forgotten Not”
Forgotten Not Street whose image I unlockBat from kidnapped household mopIts dangling hairpiece neatly loppedRubber ball with heart of kangarooPink as birth and always trueBorrowed glove that served for twoOld vacant lot that had no nameAnd all the boys who running cameTheir voices ringing round the blockThat held our private hall of fame I want…
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LawDragon’s List of 500 Leading Lawyers in America
What better way to attract attention to a new magazine than to produce an idiosyncratic list, based on no discernible criteria, of the top 500 lawyers in America? That’s what the new LawDragon magazine has done. Most of those on the list are practitioners and jurists, of course, though two dozen or so academics make…
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How *Not* to Write about Phenomenology
Taylor Carman (Philosophy, Barnard/Columbia) has instructive things to say about a recent, not very satisfactory book on Merleau-Ponty. Many of the faults Professor Carman finds in the book under review–e.g., "These sentences [from the book] seem to be spinning their wheels, repeating and recasting Merleau-Ponty’s jargon, rather than advancing our understanding of either the texts…
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The Voice of the Self-Appointed Keeper of the Virtues: Abort Black Babies to Reduce Crime
William Bennett, well-known reaction formation, strikes again. (The thesis he mangles, by the way, was first put forward by Chicago economist Steven Levitt and law professor John Donohue, now of Yale; the linked discussion of Bennett’s proposal for racial genocide mentions only Levitt.) Of course, Mr. Bennett doesn’t ultimately endorse racial genocide; after all, abortion…
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Imperialist Schemers Confront Popular Opposition
Some excerpts from a new study: A new poll finds that a majority of Americans reject the idea of using military force to promote democracy. Only 35% favored using military force to overthrow dictators. Less than one in five favored the US threatening to use military force if countries do not institute democratic reforms. The…
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“Give Back the (Bush) Tax Cut”
An amusing post-Katrina political statement created by two law professors, Robert Hockett at Cornell and Daniel Markovits at Yale. Most striking is the site’s tax cut calculator which makes transparent what a giveaway to the very rich the Bush tax cuts were (of course, we knew that, but this makes it concrete).
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Sextonish Watch: New York University School of Law (Again!)
The Sextonism Watch goes back to the source, as it were, with this week’s nomination from a professor who asked not to be named. From the NYU Law School’s announcement of its new capital campaign, the nominator singled out two remarks: "The funds will be used to increase the size of the faculty by continuing…
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Question du Jour
Via the always amusing and merciless Dadahead: "[A]pproximately what percentage of right-wing bloggers do you suppose are really and truly out of their minds? I mean, not just ‘crazy’ in the way all right-wingers are crazy, but actually padded-room-worthy, certifiably, batshit insane."
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An Interesting Canadian Perspective on Appointing Supreme Court Justices…
from Allan Hutchinson, legal theorist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.
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Merrill on Kelo (the Eminent Domain case from last term)
You presumably knew that Thomas Merrill at Columbia Law School (whom Chicago, Texas, Penn, and others all tried to hire when it became clear he would leave Northwestern a couple of years ago) was a first-rate legal scholar. Here’s an illuminating example of his work, which corrects a variety of misunderstandings that have swirled around…
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On the day the next Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court will be Confirmed, Let’s Recall Why He Shouldn’t Be
We have been here before: judges–and especially appellate judges, and especially Justices of the Supreme Court–are inevitably confronted with a range of issues on which they must make moral and political judgments, and thus it makes perfectly good sense to evaluate them based on their moral and political views. A particularly powerful case against confirming…
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Republican House Leader DeLay Indicted by Austin Grand Jury
This is all over the media in the U.S. this afternoon (an example). Congressman Tom DeLay, from a Houston suburb, is, quite possibly, the most heinous man on the public stage in America right now. In a civilized nation, he would be some fringe figure of the far right, heading up a party with a…
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Shill for the Discovery [sic] Institute Debates Distinguished Legal Scholar
Here. My colleague, Professor Laycock, is perhaps the nation’s preeminent academic authority on the law of religious liberty, who is unusual in having represented almost all sides in religious liberty cases (he was the primary drafter of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, for example, but also represented a group of clergy contending that "under God"…
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On the History of the Socratic Method
Interesting remarks posted by my colleague Emily Kadens in an earlier thread deserve a wider audience: [T]he Socratic method as it has been used since about the 1940s is not how it was originally designed by Langdell and James Barr Ames. Originally, the professor used Socratic method to get the students to test whether the…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii