Legal Humor
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Skeptical academics and journalists reject Koch-Brothers-backed claims of “free speech crisis” on campus (Michael Simkovic)
Few would consider Stanford University left-wing. Stanford University hosts the controversial, conservative Hoover Institution.[1] Stanford has raised more than $40 million from conservative donors. Stanford is a major military contractor. Stanford’s last acting president (and long-time provost) argued for affirmative action in hiring in favor of conservative faculty, deploying barely coded, neo-McCarthyist phrases like “the threat…
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“Legal Monism”
As usual, Larry Solum (Georgetown) has a funny April Fool's joke entry. (I'm not sure this gag will be as successful as the one from 2010, which led to people, especially students, asking me for the article Larry described for years afterwards!) UPDATE: And in the spirit of the day, several readers call my attention to…
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Trump takes out Craiglist ad in search of legal counsel
Very funny. (Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)
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How not to draft a contract
The case of the Stormy Daniels "nondisclosure" agreement.
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Harvard Law School actually advertises its SSRN ranking
It's pretty clear civilization has ended. The SSRN citation ranking is almost as worthless as the download ranking, since it skews very heavily to just a handful of areas that are well-represented on SSRN.
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SSRN download rankings now measure mentions in newspapers
The top 11 "most downloaded" law authors in the last 12 months are eleven tax professors who co-authored two papers on the recent tax overhaul, which garnered a prominent mention in The New York Times, leading to more than 70,000 downloads in the last month. For 10 of these 11 tax professors, these two NYT-plugged…
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Why the “trial by ordeal” actually worked
Amusing, and seemingly plausible, analysis. UPDATE: Daniel Sokol (Florida) points out to me that this short essay is based on a longer article published in 2010 and available here.
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Touchy originalists!
Mary Bilder (Boston College) wrote an opinion piece for the Boston Globe about originalism and Judge Gorsuch. This elicited the following astonishing reply from originalist Larry Solum (Georgetown) on his usually benign and informative Legal Theory Blog. Some of the questions might have made sense were Solum the referee for a scholarly article making some of these…
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Jerome Frank’s argument for the absolute priority rule in bankruptcy
This is classic: Courts of equity have a tradition of aiding the helpless, such as infants, idiots and drunkards. The average security holder in a corporate reorganization is of like kind. This comes from "Some Realistic Reflections on Some Aspects of Corporate Reorganization," 19 Virginia Law Review 541, 569 (1933). (I owe the reference to…
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I answer “Ten Questions”…
…at Law360.com.
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Federalism and Baby Jesus (with a nod to Trump)
Rick Hills (NYU) comments.
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A case study in SSRN downloads, or “Fuck” redux
My former Texas colleague Mark Lemley (now at Stanford) kindly gave me permission to share this little story he posted on Facebook: I have an article with the (admittedly extremely boring) title "Rethinking Assignor Estoppel" coming out in the Houston Law Review. It has been on SSRN for nine months. I have posted about it…
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Professor Bainbridge, corporate “tool”
You knew it was so, didn't you?
I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that