Of Academic Interest
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Philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who launched the media frenzy about Jason Arday, has been suspended by Ghent University in Belgium…
…pending an investigation into possible “discrimination” against the late Professor Arday. It was Dr. Cofnas’s July 21 substack post that opened the flood gates of media coverage of allegations against Professor Arday, that ultimately led to (what everyone is assuming was) his suicide. While many of the allegations were clearly warranted, the tone and style…
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Tyler Harper on the Arday affair…
…at The Atlantic, and worth reading.
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Some sensible comments on the Cambridge/Jason Arday fiasco…
…from Ato Quayson, an English professor at Stanford who taught previously at Cambridge.
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Illinois Institute of Technology declares “financial exigency” and begins firing faculty, including tenured faculty
Up to one-third of the faculty may be terminated, although in the law school, Chicago-Kent, it appears the number is lower (maybe one-fifth by some accounts). If readers have more details, please email me. The main source of the budgetary crisis is the decline in the enrollment of international students, no doubt due to Trump…
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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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“Law professors as plaintiffs”
A compilation, although it omits some well-known cases (such as Mullenix v. Texas, and Carson v. Texas).
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First the “book club” scam, now the scam of fake editors seeking to learn about your work (UPDATED with another example targeting a philosopher)
AI clearly generates many of the fake “book club” solicitations to authors of new books, and now there’s a new scam: fake editors of actual publishing houses (or impersonating actual academics) soliciting information about an author’s work. One giveaway in the cases noted: the “editors” used gmail and outlook email addresses, rather than university or…
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The end of SSRN
Professor Bainbridge comments.
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The historian Sven Beckert appears to be confused about “capitalism”
That’s the upshot of this long and interesting review of Beckert’s most recent book by the political theorist Corey Robin. I’ve not read Beckert’s book, but welcome comments from those who know more about this topic. Please do not comment unless you have read Beckert’s book or read Robin’s review.
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Someone once described SCOTUS as a “super-legislature”…
…and the recent NYT expose about the origin of SCOTUS’s “shadow docket” suggests he was right. As one reader put it to me in an email about the NYT article: Ultimate vindication of your “super legislature” moniker. Nothing in the story is particularly surprising, but it does establish that what we call the “shadow docket”…
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Louis Michael Seidman and Mark Tushnet have a podcast!
They disagree more than you might expect!
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Whittington v. Moyn
Here and here. Round 1 to Whittington.
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Is a law degree “worth” the cost in terms of return-on-investment?
The answer is still “emphatically” yes. Lawprof Sloan Speck reviews some recent research on the topic; an excerpt: Among eighteen graduate degrees, law provided the third-highest return to earnings (59%) and cost-adjusted returns (41%). Only medicine and pharmacy provided higher returns. Similar patterns held for gains in net present earnings (41% for law) and internal rate of return (22%).…
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Texas A&M Law “on the move”
I’m not talking about its much-improved USNews.com rank, which may help with student recruitment, but doesn’t mean anything. I’m talking about the faculty hiring bonanza that has seen the recruitment in recent years of William Sage (health law) from UT Austin, Neil Siegel (constitutional law) from Duke and, most recently, Larry Solum (constitutional law &…
In addition to many interesting points above, I wonder if welcoming AI into the research process turns off many academics…