November 2022
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And now there are four: Georgetown announces it will not participate in US News.com rankings (UPDATED)
Dean Treanor emphasizes the anti-public interest bias of the metrics, something mentioned by other schools. (Thanks to John Coates for the pointer.) MAKE THAT FIVE: Columbia Law School will also not cooperate.
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Federal judge in Florida strikes down as unconstitutional Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act”
Rightly so, and hopefully other federal courts will soon follow suit in other parts of the country where similar legislation has been passed.
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Some realism about withdrawing from USNews.com (UPDATED)
USNew.com is not going to go gently into the good night it richly deserves, even if dozens and dozens of schools withdraw over the next week. 40% of the ranking consists in reputational surveys, that USNews.com controls, and even if the response rate drops, they will use what they can get (as they have done…
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Generation X has more utilitarian leanings than Baby Boomers
That's one curious finding discussed in this video from the Geography of Philosophy project, along with cross-cultural studies about the objectivity of aesthetic judgments, free will, and the Knobe effect: An interesting question is what explains the differences? People born between 1965 and 1984 (Gen X) would in the West would have been living through…
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Richard Painter’s racism problem
(Apologies to readers bored with this saga, but I know many others find this train wreck fascinating–in any case, I haven't remarked on his displays in over six months.) One of the mysteries of Twitter's most unhinged law professor is why he feels the need to falsely accuse others of racism so often. He did…
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Blast from the past: Should one not teach philosophers guilty (or possibly guilty) of sexual harassment?
A discussion back in 2017. My view is unchanged: it is pedagogical malparctice not to teach an author whose work is important to the subject because the author has engaged in personal or professional misconduct (other than scholarly fraud that implicates the work in question obviously).
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Berkeley Law will not cooperate with US News.com, at least this year
Dean Chemerinsky has issued this statement: After careful consideration, Berkeley Law has decided not to continue to participate in the US News ranking of law schools. Although rankings are inevitable and inevitably have some arbitrary features, there are aspects of the US News rankings that are profoundly inconsistent with our values and public mission. …
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Malte Willer DID like Fabrizio Cariani’s book
For our new series of especially favorable book reviews, an excerpt from the conclusion: Cariani's book combines serious and perceptive work in natural language semantics with insightful reflections on the pragmatics, epistemology, and cognition of our thought and talk about the future. While certain foundational theory choices do not strike me as inevitable, the resulting…
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Harvard Law School’s statement on its withdrawal from the USNews.com rankings
I noted yesterday that both Yale and Harvard were withdrawing from the USNews.com charade. Here is Dean Manning's statement on HLS's decision. If over the next week, most of the other top 10-20 law schools withdraw, USNews.com will be in trouble. It would undoubtedly be excellent for legal education if its current master were dethroned: …
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Williamson on Kripke’s legacy
A remarkably accessible essay, that even discusses Kripke's early seminal contribution to modal logic.
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Why billionaires love “Effective [sic] Altruism”…
…at The New Republic. (Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)
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Kudos to Dean Gerken for withdrawing Yale Law School from the USNews.com ranking charade (UPDATE: HLS also dropping out)
Her explanation is here. This creates an interesting strategic dilemma for both USNews.com and other law schools. USNews.com would seem to have good reason to "punish" Yale, much as the EU punished the UK for the stupidity of Brexit: to send a message about the costs, lest other schools follow suit. However, having elevated Yale…
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Why is the Marc Sanders Foundation sponsoring a workshop involving “professional” mentoring directed by the unprofessional Carol Hay?
This is shocking. This Workshop is great and important (I've heard very good reports over the years), but it should not involve someone guilty of very public and irresponsible professional misconduct. I would hope that Professors Sayre-McCord and Lam will do something about this.
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The ten “most regretted” college majors
Some deserving ones on the list, some surprising ones; this is by percentage of those who majored in a subject who would now have picked a different one: 1. Journalism (87%) 2. Sociology (72%) 3. Liberal arts/general studies (72%) [not sure how this is defined] 4. Communications (64%) 5. Education (61%) 6. Marketing management &…
The phrase ‘Does the fact’ naturally invites howls of derision: it’s a fact that every child knows that the Japanese…