Navel-Gazing
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A new policy on advertising MA and PhD programs
MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 29, 2026 (as a reminder) Going forward, I am only going to take ads from programs that I think are worth considering (the PGR will be a pretty good benchmark for that, but schools should feel free to ask me). Because many prospective students look to the blog for guidance…
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I am no longer using Twitter, I am back on Bluesky
I will post links to the blog there, so if you followed me on Twitter, please follow me on Bluesky (if you are on Bluesky). I only returned to Twitter last year when the prior blog service provider shut down, and I moved to WordPress, and wanted to popularize the new location. That effort has…
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Farewell to the Twitter/Musk cesspool, back to Bluesky
MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 31 After my prior blog service provider closed last year, I returned to Twitter to help build traffic for the blog at its new WordPress location (this one). That served its purpose–indeed, the blog is now running nearly 250,000 views per month even in summer. So I am returning to…
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Philosophy book sales, a snapshot
I recently got some information from Oxford University Press about book sales. Readers who wonder, “How much do philosophy books sell?” may find this interesting. I should note that Nietzsche books typically do well (by academic standards), since he has a multi-disciplinary audience of interested readers. I should note that many academic philosophy books (including…
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Most cited legal philosophers by D-Index according to research.com (CORRECTED & UPDATED)
We’ve noted the “D-index” (an h-index for discipline-specific journals) calculated by research.com previously. (Their rankings of universities in law are pretty silly, since the faculty lists include deceasd faculty, retired faculty, and faculty who are not law professors.) They clearly don’t count law reviews for D-index, only faculty-edited journals, which is appropriate for legal philosophy.…
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Reduced summer blogging schedule
Although most Northern Hemisphere readers are already done with the academic year, at Chicago (on the quarter system) we still have teaching and grading, the latter into early June. I’ll be reducing the frequency of posting starting now, to help me have the time for the latter obligations. But I will continue to post through…
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“Great” moments in (what is definitely extremely) obscure rock ‘n’ roll: Holy Rockin’ Band, “Guns,” 1981
Continuing last week’s journey down (my) memory lane, I wrote this song after the murder of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. It’s lyrical content is still relevant, given America, alas. (I still haven’t heard anyone say: “ban all guns.”) (As noted in the earlier post, this is a 4-track recording, literally…
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I’ll be at Princeton next Tuesday to give a public lecture on academic freedom…
…thanks to a kind invitation from the philosophy majors. Hope to see some readers there. I got my BA in philosophy from Princeton in 1984, and the only faculty member I had a class with who remains is Mark Johnston (he had just started in Spring 1984, and was quite tolerant of my irresponsibly missing…
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Advertising update
After a slow start to the new blog site, traffic has returned to about 275,000 page views per month, which is almost back to the levels of the old blog site. (The counter on WordPress is different than what I used at Typepad, which seems to have picked up more bots, but I’m unsure). Thanks…
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I’m falling behind on email…
…and will probably not be able to respond to everyone. It’s a very busy quarter for me, with a lot of new preparation (for both my seminar and my Jurisprudence II course). My apologies to those who do not get replies. I still welcome, of course, emails with information and/or links.
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“25 Most Influential People in Legal Education”…
…based on the annual poll by The National Jurist. I’m the highest rank person on the list (at #13) who isn’t a Dean or head of the AALS or LSAC or some other major law school-adjacent organization. I’m just a guy with a blog, which means I owe this recognition to you, loyal readers. Thank…
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Finding older posts, now that the Typepad links are broken (UPDATED)
MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 16 A recent comment on an older post notes, correctly, that old intra-blog links based on the Typepad URLs no longer work, now that all these posts have migrated to WordPress, the current blog service provider. Readers should note that there is a search engine for the blog in the…
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I’m at Columbia’s Law & Philosophy Workshop this week…
…so comment approval may be a bit slow (and posting will be a bit lighter for a couple of days). Thanks for your patience.
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“From a Realist Point of View”: coming in March
That’s Thucydides on the cover! Readers will know some of the distinguished scholars kindly endorsing the book, but may not know the first two: Michel Troper is the preeminent French legal realist, who also introduced legal philosophy to French legal education in the 1970s (and was, I learned, a visiting professor here at Chicago a…
Indeed that remark resonates with our topic, but note that it comes from a very early and never published essay.…