November 2022
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UCLA Law will not cooperate with USNews.com, at least this year
The letter from Interim Dean Russell Korobkin, which makes a number of good points about the more general problems with what USNews.com does, that other Deans have not noted:
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Did Bankman-Fried and his parents need $121 million worth of property in the Bahamas?
I do wonder how his friends in the "Effective [sic] Altruism" movement thought about choices like these.
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Blast from the past: Smoking habit a liability on the job market?
Back in 2008, with discussion.
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Ronald Dworkin on Bill Moyers in 1987
This was one year after his book Law's Empire, and also the year of Robert Bork's failed nomination to the Supreme Court, which put originalism as a "method" of constitutional interpretation front and central in public discourse. He mostly talks about "applied" issues (which, with Dworkin, is just as well, since he makes a hash of…
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Lateral moves, 2012-2022
Professor Lawsky at Northwestern has an interesting analysis of data compiled here over the years.
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“Effective [sic] Altruism,” Longtermism…and now the FTX crypto-currency disaster
Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the now disgraced FTX founder, was perhaps the most famous proponent of "Effective [sic] Altruism." His financial and legal troubles–he may even face criminal liability–don't show much about E[sic]A beyond what we already knew: that it appeals to the super rich (vide the right-wing Elon Musk) because it seems like they're doing something…
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New online and “open access” philosophy of physics journal…
…published by LSE Press, and edited by David Wallace (Pittsburgh) and a who's who of philosophers of physics.
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“Billionaires are not our saviors. They are our mistake.”
A well-done excoriation of the philanthropy ruse (of which "effective [sic] altruism" provides the latest rationalization): [B]illionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps.…
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Michigan Law becomes 7th school to decline to cooperate with USNews.com rankings (UPDATED: also Duke and Northwestern)
Dean West's announcement is here. UPDATE: Two more: Duke and Northwestern. (Thanks to John Coates for the pointers.)
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Since that great business genius Elon Musk seems to be destroying Twitter…
…I have decided to set up a Mastodon account, where all tweets are cross-posted, for those readers who use either Twitter or Mastodon.
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Universe, “Rolling,” 1971
ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 21, 2016 It doesn't get much more obscure than the one-and-only album by Universe, recorded on the spur of the moment in Norway after their van broke down. The whole album, with echoes of Cream, Traffic, and Ten Years after, is classic British rock-blues, with a countrified edge. Here's one standout tune:…
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Since that great “business” genius Elon Musk seems to be destroying Twitter…
…I have decided to set up a Mastodon account, where all tweets are cross-posted.
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Stanford is out…
…but makes it pretty clear that if "the methodology is seriously overhauled" they may be back. Meanwhile, this NYT story reports that some schools–for example, Boston University and George Mason University–are not planning to withdraw. Both have done well in recent iterations of the USNews.com exercise, and without a brand name like "Harvard" to fall…
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The war on academic freedom in Florida continues, however
A VAP in Florida writes: One thing that many are not fully aware of is that the SUS BOG (State University System Board of Governors) has independently incorporated a provision into the system’s regulations that is modeled on the [Stop WOKE Act] tself but is supposed to be enforceable independently as an employment provision. This…
I only just learned of Barry’s passing, and I’m enormously saddened at the news. I wrote my PhD on his…