B.J. Diggs (1916-2003) A brief profile is here. When memorials are available, they will be posted here and to the Update Service of the PGR.

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Thanks to Steve Bainbridge for pointers to this site, which reports my “political compass” here. I’m delighted to note that, according to the Political Compass site, I’m closer to Gandhi, while Steve is closer to Hitler and Thatcher!

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Once again, a writer in the NY Times calls the Philosophical Gourmet Report “the bible” of prospective graduate students, which is either unfair to the bible or the PGR, I’m not sure which. But the author raises some interesting issues that will have to await time for a serious post in a couple of days…

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Sitting for a dozen hours on airplanes yesterday and the day before allowed me to read, with some care, among other things, the November 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly, their first annual issue on “College Admissions.” Overall, the articles on this subject are extremely informative; I can’t recall better articles on these subjects by journalists.

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John Hart Ely (1938-2003) The NY Times obituary is here, which contains a useful discussion of his best-known contribution to constitutional theory, Democracy and Distrust (1980).

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…I’m on a plane tomorrow, to talk to the folks at George Mason Law on Tuesday about “Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant to Law.” (Evolutionary biology/pscyhology is the hot fad among right-wingers in the legal academy right now, preying on the impressive scientific ignorance of law professors; I’m doing my part to make

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here, where the tediously reactionary Professor Reynolds is handed the rope and then hangs himself with it (i.e., posts it). (The last "paragraph" of the rope [about married men] is irrelevant, by then Professor Reynolds is long gone.) (What a misfortune, and injustice, for the University of Tennessee College of Law that Reynolds should now

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The four external finalists to be Dean of Boalt are: Christopher Edley from Harvard; Edward Rubin from Penn; Tom Sullivan from Minnesota; and Stephen Yeazell from UCLA. (Yeazell is also the sole external finalist for the Cornell Deanship; there are two insiders in contention there as well.) This is a surprising list, and for one

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Number of visitors topped 600 for the first time yesterday, more than two-thirds having been here previously. Daily average for visitors has topped 450. I’d throw a party for all you nice folks, but my house isn’t big enough.

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…according to Reporters Without Borders. Seems generous. (And US ranks 135th for Press Freedom in the countries it’s invaded and is now managing as client states.)

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The now infamous Sushi Memo is here. I’m relieved to report that the Paul, Weiss partner who instructed a paralegal to spend time researching local sushi restaurants is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center. Georgetown has a mandatory public interest service requirement for both its students and its faculty. This obviously doesn’t stop some

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…from a former law student turned philosophy PhD student here; and …from the Curmudgeonly Clerk here.

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Mark Greenberg (philosophy of mind, philosophy of law), currently on tenure-track at Princeton, has accepted a joint law and philosophy offer from UCLA, to start next fall. That will give UCLA one of the strongest clusters of law-and-philosophy faculty in the US (besides Greenberg: Seana Shiffrin, Steven Munzer, and David Dolinko are all doing work

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I have largely refrained–and will continue to largely refrain–from entering political debates in the blogosphere, especially with the hopeless folks at the Volokh Conspiracy (apart from Eugene’s always knowledgeable and often penetrating analysis of First Amendment questions, the quality of “political” comment and analysis there is not, shall we say, “cosmopolitan”). But I can not

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Michael Dickson, a quite highly regarded, though still relatively young, philosopher of physics in the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Indiana University at Bloomington has accepted an appointment at the University of South Carolina (his undergraduate alma mater) for next year. Dickson, who has rebuffed offers and entreaties from even stronger departments than

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Professor Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami Law School writes: “I sometimes tell my classes that I don’t adopt the Socratic method because if I did they might feel obligated at the end of the semester to make me drink hemlock…”

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So everyone who’s seen a movie about law school in America knows that law professors use something called “the Socratic method.” The professor asks a student a series of questions about some court case (which the students have read), eliciting the facts, the court’s decision, and the reasoning behind it. The professor sometimes tries to

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Guess who said the following: “The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today.” “Communism was the brainchild of German-Jewish intellectuals” “The Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” “How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary

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Before the Yale Law faculty sued Rummy over the military’s discrimination against homosexuals (and, more precisely, the requirement that Law Schools cooperate with military recruitment, notwithstanding their own anti-discrimination policies), the Penn Law faculty filed suit first. Their complaint is here: Download file.

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10/19 UPDATE: I’m moving this to the front, since various corrections/additions have been made in some of the entries (Harvard, Columbia, Pittsburgh, among others). ============== The following summary of faculty moves and hirings at ranked PhD-granting programs that transpired since the last edition of the Report (from fall 2002) is intended to allow prospective students

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Although almost every American PhD-granting department now includes reasonably detailed placement information on its website, there are still some stragglers. One of the oddest is Columbia University, which even recently updated and redid its whole web site, though it still includes this wholly misleading information on job placement: “Recent graduates of the Ph.D. program have

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Thanks to the Malaysian Prime Minister, anti-semitism is the issue de moment (a full “jour” is too long for the blogosphere), which brings us to the irrelevant Gregg Easterbrook–another one of the horde of neocon blatherers–who has now apologized for his anti-semitic remarks. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s the least of it. For

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So says the Malaysian Prime Minister, anyway (for all the details, and lots of good links, see Drezner). But if we rule the world, how come I can’t: (1) find the perfect school for my 2nd-grader? or (2) find an Italian restaurant in Austin that wouldn’t be car-bombed by the Mafia in New York for

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I found this data courtesy of my site counter service interesting, but perhaps no one else will (but that’s what my “navel-gazing” category is for!): Country of Origin This page lists the domains from which your traffic originates. Please note that some domains do not have a precise geographical meaning ; Network in particular is

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Forty-four members of the Yale Law School faculty have filed a lawsuit in federal district court challenging, on constitutional and statutory grounds, the Department of Defense demand that the Law School permanently rescind its nondiscrimination policy as applied to military recruitment, notwithstanding the military’s exclusion based on sexual preference. You can read the complaint here:

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Here’s a choice observation by the Curmudgeonly Clerk about “comments” sections in the blogosphere (the remarks might have been generalized I suspect): “Being a reader of many blogs with comments, I cannot say that I find anything useful about them as a general rule. Those who comment frequently seem to be emotionally and/or intellectually stunted

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Even though the Law School at Wash U/St. Louis announced in its alumni magazine–which it then sent to every law professor in America–that distinguished political scientist Matthew McCubbins from the University of California at San Diego would be joining the faculty…I now have it on good authority that McCubbins is not moving to Wash U

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Thanks to the Texas Taliban, and their allies nationally, not to mention the PC censors, school teachers are apparently giving up on the official “approved” school textbooks altogether, as discussed here.

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Having recently accepted an invitation to give a plenary address at the annual meeting of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain next September 10-12 (at the University of Sussex, for UK readers who might be interested), I was reminded of the unusually large number of interesting scholars working on and interested in Nietzsche in

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Excellent essay here, with lots of apt shots at the conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute and others who are making a career out of lying about the theory of evolution.

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Let’s be clear: there are lots of compelling reasons for civility in the context of collegial, social, and pedagogical interactions (indeed, in the latter context, it is absolutely obligatory). None of that is at issue here. There’s even a reasonable case for civility in genuine intellectual disputes among intellectuals and scholars. That’s not at issue

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…according to a study by a colleague in economics, reported on here. So that explains it. I thought I was a good teacher, and it turns out it’s just my good looks.

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Here’s a gem of an e-mail from the Texas Eagle Forum, the folks who take the Texas Republican Platform really seriously: From: Cathie Adams To: eagletx@bgcs.net Subject: YOU CONSIDER HOW EVOLUTION SHOULD BE PRESENTED IN TEXAS TEXTBOOKS Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 20:34:10 -0500 Friends, Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) member Terri Leo wants

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…strike a blow for ignorance.

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There was considerable interest in the posting on the best philosophy journals, so consider this a sequel. Interest in the best presses for philosophy, at least among students, is more often a matter of trying to gauge faculty quality (via proxies like where they’ve published), though as with journals, there is interest too among philosophers

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CalPundit has a pithy and pointed account of the main highlights of the official agenda of the Texas Taliban as expressed in the “platform” of the Texas Republican Party. The only good news is that many of the Texas Republicans who hold elected office ignore it.

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“The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one’s virtues as well as of one’s strongest inclinations, self-adaptations, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank–all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world–and

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This must certainly be the question most-often asked by students thinking about careers in law teaching (well, after the question, “How do I get in to law teaching?” but I’ve answered that question at length elsewhere). As it happens, there are three public sources of information on the subject, which don’t give an exhaustive answer,

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Can there be any doubt that this is the most informative, timely, insightful and valuable blog site anywhere in Cyberspace? And you thought he was just a mild-mannered conservative Catholic corporate law expert.

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There is some discussion in the blogosphere about Paul Krugman’s tendency to make claims about the “motives” of Bush & co. One reasonable defense of the practice comes from Crooked Timber. The discussion, however, brought to mind an issue that arises with respect to what Paul Ricoeuer dubbed “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” the practice of

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