January 2009
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Top 9 Faculties in “Political Philosophy” in the English-Speaking World
In the specialty rankings, faculties are grouped according to their mean score, rounded to the nearest .5. In parentheses after the school's name, the median and mode scores are listed. Within the grouping, faculties are listed alphabetically. Group 1 (1-3) (rounded mean of 4.5) (median, mode) Harvard University (5, 5) New York University (5, 5)…
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“The Internet’s Anonymity Problem”
Saul Levmore, a leading law and economics scholar and Dean of the University of Chicago Law School, has a quite interesting and sensible piece on the abuse of anonymity on the Internet, and the inexplicable fact that, as current law stands, we treat the Internet differently than all other media of communication, including the proverbial…
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More Departures from Academia to the Obama Administration: Lederman from Georgetown, Barron from Harvard
Details here. UPDATE: And it looks like Harvard's Einer Elhauge is on the way to Washington too! That's on top of losing Elena Kagan, Cass Sunstein, and David Barron! AND ANOTHER: Georgetown takes another loss, with Neal Katyal joining Dean Kagan at the SG's office. The good news, of course, is that appointments like Lederman…
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“Why Blogs Are Bad for Legal Scholarship”
It turns out that this little throwaway piece I wrote for a Yale Law Journal Pocket Part symposium several years ago remains "the most popular item" on the Pocket Part site. I guess it is being viewed by lots of angry bloggers or non-blogging skeptics or both!
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Galeano on Gaza
Excellent writing, as always; a choice excerpt: The so-called international community, Does it exist? Is it anything more than a club of merchants, bankers and war-makers? Is it anything more than an artistic name that the United States attaches when it engages in theatre?
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Pedigree and Hiring
Several readers have called my attention to this very curious proposal (well, really a thought-experiment) about blind job dossiers, so that hiring schools would not know where the candidate went to school. This does strike me, I confess, as ideals of "equal opportunity" run amok: of course, race, ethnicity, family pedigree, gender etc. should be irrelevant to hiring decisions, but how could…
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Empirical Legal Studies and the Crises of Capitalism
Looking back and looking forward at the prospects for empirical legal studies. I must confess my skepticism that "empirical legal studies" is a meaningful category: work lumped under this heading is not united by methodology, by social science discipline, by subject matter, or by ideology. It includes the comically pseudo-scientific, the obscurely quantitative, the anecdotal…
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Top Five Philosophy Faculties in the U.K.
These are the results of the "overall" faculty quality survey for U.K. programs. The top five are as follows (mean and median scores followed in parentheses): 1. Oxford University (4.7, 5.0) 2. University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (3.6, 3.5) 3. Cambridge University (3.4, 3.5) 4. University College London (3.2, 3.5) 5. King's…
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Developing a Career Outside the Academy After Earning a PhD
Reader Adam Gies calls my attention to this scholar's account of his experience, which is interesting light of our earlier thread and the comments especially. One (non-fatal) obstacle, it seems to me, to sustaining the "life of the mind" outside the academy is lack of opportunity to teach, since teaching invariably deepens one's knowledge of one's subject.
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Kar from Loyola/LA to Illinois
Robin Kar (legal philosophy, contracts) at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles has accepted a senior offer from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I am pleased both for my friends at Illinois and that we will now see more of Rob at our Law & Philosophy Workshops in Chicago!
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Top 11 Faculties in “General Philosophy of Science (excluding philosophy of the specific sciences)” in the English-Speaking World
In the specialty rankings, faculties are grouped according to their mean score rounded to the nearest .5. The median and mode scores are listed in parentheses after the school name; within a group, the faculties are listed alphabetically. Group 1 (1) (mean of 4.5)(median, mode) University of Pittsburgh (4.5, 5) Group 2 (2-11) (mean…
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Help Filler Fill the List of Lateral Moves for 2009!
Here. Four of the five he lists so far were posted about here. A couple of obvious omissions are Larry Lessig, who is moving from Stanford back to Harvard, and John Witt who is moving from Columbia to Yale. UPDATE: Professor Filler has updated his listing since the original posting, but appears to have fallen for the NYU…
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In Memoriam: Arne Naess (1912-2009)
An obituary is here. As the obituary makes clear, Professor Naess may well have been the first experimental philosopher! He was, of course, well-known among philosophers as founder of the journal Inquiry, but better-known to the general public for his articulation of the view known as "deep ecology." (Thanks to Bill Edmundson for the pointer.)
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Top Nine Faculties in “Philosophy of Language” in the English-Speaking World
In the specialty rankings, faculties are grouped according to their mean score rounded to the nearest .5. The median and mode scores are listed in parentheses after the school name; within a group, the faculties are listed alphabetically. Group 1 (1) (rounded mean of 5.0) (median, mode) Rutgers University, New Brunswick (5, 5) Group…
I disagree with the perspectives described here and wrote with my co-authors on the very real catastrophic potential of AI…