Wishing Professor Paul Oh and his team the best of luck in the DARPA Robotics Challenge!

Not that very long ago, UNLV was lucky enough to persuade Professor Paul Oh to join our faculty.  He and his team are about to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and I'm rooting for Hubo (now the "Metal Rebel") to win.

I've been fascinated by Hubo ever since Jinger Zeng of Skyworks Aerial Systems told me about how amazing Professor Oh was and how well he mentors his students.

Here's an excerpt from UNLV's official announcement about the finals:

The Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering robotics team is just a week away from the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) June 5-6 at the Fairplex in Pomona, California.  UNLV will compete against 24 of the world’s top universities and research agencies in an attempt to show how robots could assist first responders in disaster relief – with millions in prize money on the line.  

UNLV’s “Metal Rebel” – a 5 ft. 5 in., 175-pound humanoid robot - will test its mettle against the likes of MIT, NASA and Lockheed Martin in simulated disaster courses where it may have to:

·       Drive a vehicle

·       Climb stairs

·       Traverse rocky and/or debris-filled terrain

·       Turn valves and use power tools

Our student/faculty team is led by Dr. Paul Oh, Lincy Professor for Unmanned Aerial Systems and a renowned expert in robotics and autonomous systems. Oh is a former program director for robotics at the National Science Foundation and is helping UNLV and Nevada become a national leader in the booming autonomous systems industry.

We'd love to see you in Pomona cheering for our team in the grandstands and representing UNLV in scarlet and gray, but if you can't make it out to Pomona, we'd still appreciate your support.

Teams will compete both Friday (6/5) and Saturday (6/6), and the competition will stream live at roboticschallenge.org The competition schedule will be finalized just before the competition, and we’ll follow with details next Thursday afternoon on when to you can see Team UNLV in action.

Interesting new scholarship on academic freedom and social media.

See here.  My buddy Michael LeRoy, who does very cool work, wrote it. 

The Dave Goldbergs of the world may be rare, but they're out there.

Everything I've read about Dave Goldberg, including this New York Times obituary, indicates that he was an extraordinary person, and my heart goes out to his family.  Equal relationships should be the norm, but I hear that they're not.  The marriages and partnerships of my friends sure seem equal, and maybe that's an artifact of the fact that many of us "partnered up" later in life, after we knew who we were and what we wanted in a mate.  But Victor and Jeff, Whitney and Beth, Cathy and Laura, Nettie and Luc, Ted and Amy, and many of my other friends evince a love and a respect that leaves both people in the couple feeling supported and nurtured.

And I sure lucked out with my Jeff:  he's spurred me on, moved (three times!) for me (and taken two extra bar exams in the process), given me useful criticism and, as much as anyone can with me, tried to keep my ego within normal limits--all with good humor and wise advice.  I can't imagine my life without him, which is why I feel for Sheryl Sandberg and their children.

Best managerial advice ever (UPDATED).

There's a great article by Paula Krebs in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education's Vitae section (here).  In it, she talks about the importance of working on difficult issues by first imagining why the person sitting across the table from you has formed her views.  The idea of assuming that the other party to a negotiation has principled reasons for her position is a good way to see any difficult issue as an issue to be solved collaboratively.

Here's my favorite quote from her essay:

Since transitioning out of the faculty and into administration, I've had to work hard to learn how to shut up and listen.  My job, I've discovered, isn't to solve the problems.  It's to understand them and then work with the people affected to come up with ways to solve the problems.

Every time I have tried to solve a problem when it's presented to me, I've created more problems.  So I'm learning to talk to more people, to ask more questions, to listen to the answers.

That's darn good advice for us all.

UPDATE (5/4/15):  This post also gives good advice, as does this article.

Want to change a student's life?

One way to do it is to fund awards like this one, this one, or this one.

Most of us know people who have or had struggled with cancer.

And this book is one such journey (with a very happy ending):  all of us who know Geoff and Autumn Berman were pulling for them as Geoff beat cancer.  (And yes, I'm one of the people mentioned in the book, but that's not why you should get it.  It's a good read and will give you a feel for what this type of experience is like.)

Geoff:  We're glad the sun is up and you're vertical.  It is a good day!

R.I.P., Betty Willis.

An icon who created icons.

Impressive op-ed from the FBI Director.

He's right.  See here.

Man, I wish I could go to this conference....

The 15^th annual workshop on Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship, co-taught by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, will run from June 15-June 17 at Washington University in St. Louis. The workshop is for law school faculty, lawyers, political science faculty, and graduate students interested in learning about empirical research and how to evaluate empirical work. It provides the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies, and to use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data.

Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop. Registration is here. For more information, please contact Lee Epstein.

Aha! A new problem w/Congressional politics--or is it? (UPDATE)

I like what Congressman Crescent Hardy is saying about Yucca Mountain ("let's explore if there's any scenario in which having Yucca Mountain be the nuclear waste repository might make sense for Nevada"), but I can't reach him via email because I don't live in his district.  His email bounces back with a "ask your own Congressperson" response.  I get the point that Congresspeople should pay attention to their own constituents first, but it seems to me that blocking communication from outside the district leaves each representative a little too insular.  Why not just sort the emails by "in district" and "out of district"?

Oh, and Congressman Mark Amodei: This post is for you, too.  Do Congressional rules not let you hear from other Nevadans?

Another news clip about my talk(s) in Bogota.

Here, and here's the original post.  I'm still just amazed that I was asked to speak, and I'm so grateful to Superintendent Reyes!

Congrats to Randy Gordon and Maks Del Mar!

Maks's new book (co-edited with William Twining), which has an essay by my buddy Randy Gordon in it.  You can get the book here.

Bravo to Steve Lubet for keeping this UCLA story front and center.

Hat tip to the Faculty Lounge for this post.

One of the best days of my life--my trip to Bogotá.

Two days ago, I had the great honor of giving two talks on behalf of the Superintendencia de Sociedades in Bogotá (more info about the talks here) at the request of the wonderful* Superintendent Francisco Reyes.  Superintendent Reyes hosted a seminar in the morning (organized by the talented Diana Silva), and he also hosted a talk in the afternoon.  I was able to visit with members of the bench and bar and heads of companies after the morning's presentations, and the questions that they asked after my talk made the experience even better.

The trip had its funny moments:  I was a little tired that day, having missed my connection to Bogotá by five minutes (United did a lot of maintenance on the plane that was picking us up in Las Vegas--a lot of maintenance), so I hung out in Houston for nine extra hours and arrived in Bogota at 5 a.m. on the day of the presentations.  Maybe the sleep deprivation is a good excuse for what happened in the afternoon:  when I was giving the second presentation, I didn't notice the earthquake** that everyone else in the room noticed quite readily.  When the audience got up and walked out of the room after about 2/3 of my presentation, I thought:  "Wow--this talk is not going well...."  (Years of living in San Francisco, and I didn't feel an earthquake???)  The building evacuation was orderly, with everyone knowing where to go and everyone quickly accounted for by floor.***  After the "all clear," I gave an abbreviated rest of the talk.  The classic part?  I'd asked, earlier that day, if Bogotá had earthquakes.  Bravo for life's little ironies.

Bogotá has some wonderful museums, and I was able to see the Gold Museum, which was flat-out amazing, and tour Plaza de Bolívar.  So with the experience of meeting great people, being able to visit again with Superintendent Reyes, having a chance to tour a bit of Bogotá, eating two memorable meals, and enjoying everyone's friendliness (and their ability to talk in fluent English, given that I have yet to learn Spanish),**** I can say that my trip was one of the best I've ever had.  I'm still floating on air (as you can probably tell from this post).




____________________
* And multi-talented:  he is also a very gifted musician.
** Yes, it was a 6.6 quake, but its center wasn't in Bogota, so the news media wasn't quite, um, accurate in its reporting of the earthquake experience in town.  Some buildings were affected, though, but not ours.  Ours was built to withstand a quake, and it did.
*** We could learn something from their emergency procedure training.  Ours is typically not as well organized.
**** And a chance to hear Superintendent Reyes play keyboards and drums.

A few UCLA undergraduates have hit an all-time low.

Steve Lubet's Faculty Lounge post on the issue is here.

Brava, Jean Sternlight!

My wonderful colleague Jean Sternlight just won a prestigious award from the ABA (see here).  Brava, Jean!

Jim Thomson and Jesse Sussell have done an interesting new study on Congress's increasing polarization.

I'm lucky enough to be able to claim Jim as a colleague here at UNLV--and he's marvelous.  Check out his bio, which only scratches the surface of why he's so cool.

You can read the summary here, and here's the paper (Are Changing Constituencies Driving Rising Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives?). 

Passing of a legal ethics giant: Monroe Freedman.

What an amazing person.  Hat tip to The Faculty Lounge for this sad but important news.

It's exciting to see something on my fees wishlist become a reality.

I've written about developing behavioral prompts to encourage lawyers to bill timely and accurately, and LinkedIn just pointed me to an article (here) discussing software that helps lawyers do that. 

Best line in today's NYT op-ed about the value of college.

The op-ed is here.  And my favorite bit?

That brought [Professor] Hall to her own answer about college’s mission: “It is for developing the muscle of thoughtfulness, the use of which will be the greatest pleasure in life and will also show what it means to be fully human.”

R.I.P, Marvin Chirelstein.

Just heard the sad news.  Marvin Chirelstein made Federal Income Tax comprehensible for me when I was a lost law student, trying to figure out how "philosophy of tax" (interesting, and the bulk of the course that I took) meshed with "actual Federal Income Tax" (which is what I knew would be on the exam).  I read his Federal Income Tax paperback (now in its 12th edition) and made a vow to myself that if I made it through the course with a decent grade, I'd name a child after him. (That little factoid probably explains part of the reason that Jeff and I don't have kids:  Marvin Rapoport Van Niel?  Chirelstein Rapoport Van Niel?  See--that's quite a burden to put on a little tyke.)  Lighthearted remembrance aside, I just wanted to go on record to say that Professor Chirelstein was one of the greats, and I know he'll be missed.

More Enron-ization of rankings.

As TaxProf Blog reports (here), UMKC has had an outside audit (here) to uncover rankings shenanigans.  What should we learn from examples like this one?  The same thing we should've learned decades ago: people respond to incentives.  For the best examples of perverse incentives, see this Freakonomics post.

Chilling series, but important to read.

So grateful to CNN for this particular series.

Why Lucy Kellaway rocks, part n.

Here. 

Cross-posting about the team that makes a good leader better.

Here.

More shameless self-promotion.

A nice mention of our second book in the Survival Manual series (here).

Why I switched from Fitbit to Vivofit--a customer service story (UPDATED YET AGAIN)

I like fitness trackers.  I like measuring things, and I don't expect the trackers to have pinpoint accuracy.  They exist as motivational devices and to show trends, and--generally speaking--they're good at those two things.

I said "generally speaking" because the Fitbit Charge did not serve those purposes well.  The first Charge I had lost battery life at an alarming rate.  After extensive back-and-forths with Fitbit, I finally got a replacement.  The charge worked well, but the sleep portion had two modes (normal and sensitive), neither of which captured my sleep accurately.  I know that my average sleep isn't 8+ hours (unfortunately), and I know that it's not 4 hours (thank goodness).  So, after a spate during which Fitbit wouldn't even sync my (over- or under-estimated) sleep, I gave up, ordered a Vivofit from Garmin, and asked for a refund.*

The refund process has been awful.  Obviously, each "team" (person?) at Fitbit doesn't keep a running customer log.  I got steadfast refusals to refund, one "yes, we'll refund, and here's where you send the old one" email," several "oops--we didn't mean to send it" emails, another "we acknowledge that we've sent you a refund authorization" email, and finally a "we don't care that we sent you a refund authorization--we're still not going to refund you the price, but, hey, thanks for returning it" one.  So Fitbit has my old tracker, and I'm out the money for the Fitbit.

I told Fitbit that my response to this frustration would be to blog about my experience, to tweet about it, and to post reviews, and that's what I intend to do.

Lesson to anyone dealing with the public, part 1:  keep a customer's file in one place, so that you don't whipsaw the customer with contradictory emails.

Lesson to anyone dealing with the public, part 2:  the Internet has a broad reach, and anyone with a keyboard can weigh in (for better or worse) on the company's service.

Fitbit?  Given your decision not to play fair, I'm going to spend some time this morning before work making sure I circulate this blog post as widely as possible. 

UPDATE:  my Amazon review of Fitbit went live this afternoon.

Just as a contrast, one of my Amazon packages was late in getting to me, and Amazon not only credited my account to make up for the late shipping, it also extended my Amazon Prime membership for a month--all because of a one-day-late shipment.  In case you're keeping score, that'd be:

Amazon Customer Service--an infinite number to indicate its truly superior customer service.
Fitbit Customer Service--an infinite negative number to indicate just how bad its customer service actually is.

UPDATE on 1/31/15:  I've been informed that Fitbit has mailed my refund check, but that's after--I kid you not--no fewer than 10 emails from Customer Service refusing to do so, then saying that the refund was coming, then saying it wasn't, etc., etc.  It's a bit like that scene from Noises Off:

Lloyd: [Barging in from the house] What the *...* is going on?
Belinda: Lloyd!
Frederick: Holy cow!
Poppy: I didn't know you were here.
Lloyd: I'm not. I'm in New York. But I can't sit out there and listen to two minutes, three minutes, one minute, two minutes!
Belinda: Lloyd! We're having big dramas back here!
Lloyd: We're having big dramas out *there!* This is a matinee, Love! There are senior citizens out there! "The curtain will rise in three minutes," we all start for the gents! "The curtain will rise in one minute," we all start running out again! We don't know which way we're going!

Fitbit emailed me to let me know that it was my fault for the miscommunication:  I had had the temerity to email Fitbit from two different email addresses, and Fitbit was incapable of realizing that one customer could have two addresses.  Res ipsa.
____________________
* I even actually revoked my acceptance, but Fitbit didn't want to bounce THAT sentence to its lawyers.

Really cool workshop on conducting empirical legal scholarship coming up this summer at CERL/Wash U.

See here for info.  I can't make it to this one, but I'm hoping to do one in the future.  I've heard great things about it.

I'm pretty sure that's not the correct use of the word.

Now that I'm back from the AALS Annual Meeting, I remember what I liked about going in years past (seeing old friends; making new ones) and what I didn't (a lot of puffery and jockeying for status).*  But the topper this year was the indiscriminate use of the word "scholar," as in "I'm a scholar of ______."

I'm comfortable with people self-identifying as professors (after all, that's our title), or saying that their area of study is X, or suggesting that they're focusing on X.  I love hearing what someone's researching, just as much as I love hearing about what that person's doing in terms of teaching (or, for that matter, his or her hobbies).  And I love batting around ideas just as much as the next person.  I got some great suggestions about some of my projects from friends at the conference. 

But saying "I'm a scholar"?  Um, that's something that the person reading the scholarship gets to decide.  

Why is it that I think that we can call what we do "producing scholarship," but that referring to ourselves as scholars is a bad idea?

Answer #1:  It's pretentious.

Answer #2:  Just as you can't make something "interesting" by declaring it thus, you can't be a scholar just because you're writing something in a particular area.  Trust me:  the best scholars don't toot their own horns that way.  Some of the most amazing folks in academia are jaw-droppingly modest.  Let your readers decide how good your work is--not you.

Just sayin.'

_____________________
*  I seriously went through Faculty Recruitment Conference flashbacks when I checked into the hotel this year--and my own FRC experience was way back in 1991.

Bad customer service winner of the week--Ulta.com.

Apparently, Ulta, "we promise to answer your question in 24 hours" does not mean what you think it does.  Ten days and waiting, and you already shipped the order for which I had questions without first answering the questions.  BAD JOB.

Our amicus brief in ASARCO was filed yesterday.

And it's here (and here). 

Why doesn't Fitbit trust its customers?

I have a Fitbit Charge.  I have that, instead of the Jawbone, because my Jawbone broke repeatedly and had to have a soft restart about once every two weeks.  Now I have the Charge, which would be better, if it held a charge longer than 2-3 days.  It's supposed to hold a charge for 7-10 days.  Either Fitbit's engineers don't have the same understanding of "7-10 days" that I do, or mine's not working.

What I did like about Jawbone was, each time I needed a replacement, the company trusted me enough to send me out a new one before asking me to send back the old one.  Fitbit refuses to do that, even though the issue of the charge failure is well-known.

Bad customer service, Fitbit.  BAD.

Dear Tim Cook: Steve Jobs wouldn't have bollixed up the Genius Bar this way.

So now, apparently, I can't just make a Genius Bar appointment.  I have to go through too many hoops, including having to override the Support Page itself and, well, lying to Apple to get to a human.

NOTE TO APPLE:   Moving things around because a techie thinks that a change might be cool is not a good justification for change.

Wishing my beloved Marine Corps a very happy birthday today.

Happy 239th birthday, Marines!

Steven Davidoff Solomon's interesting take on why law schools won't close.

Here.  I especially liked his point about why incentives favor bailing out law schools rather than closing them:

[A] closed law school is worth little, or most likely nothing, to creditors. The value is only in the revenue stream it produces and perhaps its building. (You could say the books also, but these are increasingly fewer.) And these days, that revenue stream is down 20 to 40 percent, meaning that if law schools were for-profit businesses, most would be failures.

A troubled law school is like Dracula: hard to kill. Creditors will not do so because even keeping a struggling school alive means there is some possibility of repayment.

On the other hand, those closed law school buildings might be valuable to universities, as they can be repurposed for other uses, freeing up different space on campus for things like expanded research space.  So law schools that aren't free-standing should still be nervous if they're underperforming. Now is not the time for complacency.

I loved this post about the boycott.

See here.  (Hat tip to my dad for sending it to me.)

Happy birthday, John Cleese!

And here is his lecture on how to be creative.

A nice shout-out in a book review.

See here.  Thanks, Sue Liemer!

Congratulations to the wonderful Kathleen Lyon!

Full story here, but here's my favorite paragraph:

The 10^th and final Distinguished Service Award is presented to Tax Division Office of the Assistant Attorney General Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Kathleen E. Lyon for her extraordinary work in drafting the Program for Non-Prosecution Agreement or Non-Target Letters for Swiss Banks (Swiss Bank Program).  The department has had ongoing investigations into the use of foreign bank accounts to evade U.S. taxes, and the Swiss Bank Program was designed to encourage Swiss banks not already under investigation to cooperate with the department’s efforts.  Ms. Lyon was instrumental in drafting the terms of the Swiss Bank Program.

Brava, Kathleen!

For my friends who aren't on Facebook--a recap of a happy event last month.

Yep, that's 1st place in the USDC Rising Star Smooth, B Division.  YAY!

Dear Financial Times newspaper: you win; I give up; I will not renew my subscription.

I have tried--and tried, and tried, and tried, and TRIED--to renew my newspaper subscription.  I can't reach a human; when the "human" calls me back, the phone call abruptly terminates after a few seconds; and the website for renewals won't record my credit card, no matter how hard I try:

I give up.  I won't read my beloved Lucy Kellaway any more.  I won't enjoy the weekend section, or the reports on business schools, or the editorials.  (Well, I often didn't enjoy the editorials that much, anyway.)

Please note that THIS PARTICULAR [firstname] [lastname] is calling it quits with your newspaper. 

Assuming that what this professor says is true (and I have no reason to think that it's not), I'm standing with him in solidarity.

See here.  Universities are supposed to be places in which divergent views can be heard with respect and intelligent debate.  That means that BOTH sides of a debate must be heard, not just the "popular" side.  Hat tip to Instapundit for alerting me to this story.

Guess who gets to hang out more in the Lee Business School now?

Yep--I'm now an Affiliate Professor of Business Law and Ethics in the Lee Business School.  YAY!

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a former AALS president says that some law schools should close.

Here's the article.  I agree with Michael Olivas about this point, which is why I said the same thing in 2012.

Another wonderful Lubet post about the Salaita issue.

See here.  What I liked best about this post is the point about trying to see things from other points of view.  Too often, we assume that anyone who disagrees with us has to be wrong--and intentionally so.  I prefer to do what Steve Lubet does, and at least ask whether I might be missing something in my own take on an issue.

UNLV's State of the University Address.

It's here.  And for my buddies, the stuff about me starts around 1:24:18 or so.

And another feel-good story....

See here.

Awesome young inventor....

See here.  And his mom's awesome, too!

UPDATE: Why I am no longer a Democrat (the short version).

There's a longer explanation having to do with feeling as though I no longer belong in the mainstream of Democrats, but the shorter--and more immediate--explanation is that I am sick of political calls on our home phone.  They're invasive, and they do nothing to change my political views.  I've heard that if I change my affiliation to "non-partisan," these calls will stop.  We'll see.

UPDATE (10/3/14):  My protest pales in comparison to this wonderful Bloggess post.

Some great tips on writing.

See here.

An important report on how universities, private business, and the government can work together to improve research.

See here.  And Rice University's own Neal Lane was one of the co-chairs of the report.  (Go, Owls!)

If you're as opposed to the boycotts of Israel as I am, please read on.

From my friend Danny Sokol: 

Dear Colleagues:

The following statement is being circulated on numerous campuses to be released  in the next week or so.  We are trying to get signatures prior to it being posted, although people will also be able to sign up after it is posted.

If you are interested in singing, please drop a line indicating your approval to William Jacobson at Cornell Law, (waj24@cornell.edu) from your university/college email account. Note your title and affiliation. 

Also, feel free to share this with colleagues who might be interested.

The text of the statement cannot be changed at this point.  It is, by nature, a compromise statement intended to focus on core principles, not politics. I think it is very mild and broad. 

Here is the text of the statement:

We, the undersigned academics, vigorously support free speech and free debate but we oppose faculty or student boycotts of Israel’s academic institutions, scholars and students. 

 Our opposition is rooted in the following core principles. 

1.       Academic freedom:  The BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement discriminates against Israeli institutions, professors, and students for no other reason than their nationality and the policies of their government. Thus BDS violates the very principle of academic freedom.  Academic boycotts such as those promoted by BDS activists “are antithetical to the fundamental principles of the academy, where we will not hold intellectual exchange hostage to the political disagreements of the moment,”according to a statement signed by 300 university presidents in 2007, and additional statements written by over 250 university presidents last year in response to the ASA boycott of Israel. The American Association of University Professors, other academic organizations, and more than forty Nobel Laureates have opposed all academic boycotts for this reason. 

2.       Truth:   The factual record does not support the accusations and narratives of the BDS movement. Many are based on overstatements, cherry picked evidence, outright falsehood, or on disputed or highly biased data. 
3.       Peace: The two-state solution – which guarantees to both parties mutual recognition -- enjoys the endorsement of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Arab League. By demonizing and seeking to isolate one of the two parties to the peace process, the anti-Israel BDS movement sets itself apart from the global consensus for peace.

4.       Access to World-leading Scholarship:  BDS would have the practical impact of undermining academic cooperation and would deprive universities significant Israeli contributions in many academic areas, especially scientific research. It appears that such a loss is immaterial to the leaders in the BDS movement.

 This statement is not a response to any particular BDS effort on campus, but rather to the growing wave of such efforts by academic professional associations and so forth. The idea is to get out ahead of such efforts with a broadly subscribed statement.

Thank you.

Prof. Eugene Kontorovich

Northwestern University School of Law

Am I a bit OCD about writing? Why, yes. Yes, I am.

Proof?  My latest proofreading affidavit for my students (here).

Dear Apple: fool me once, shame on you; fool me EIGHT TIMES, shame on me.

I give up.  I have owned eight of your Airport Time Machines.  Eight.  And the number of them that have failed catastrophically?  EIGHT, including the replacement one that the Apple Genius gave me yesterday (w/o a receipt, even though I asked).  I have no way of returning it for credit now, so you've cost me a couple of hundred bucks--or over a thousand bucks, if you count ALL of the ones I've purchased.  NO MAS.

Bravo, Steven Lubet!

His post over at The Faculty Lounge is superb in its dissection of the Salaita issues.  My only tiny quibble is that I'm totally ok with Illinois's decision not to hire Salaita.

Academic freedom for folks who don't yet have jobs at an institution.

I've been reading the back-and-forth on Professor Steven Salaita, and I've just finished reading a piece on David Frakt in The Atlantic.  According to the article, Frakt was the person who was thrown out of his deanship interview at Florida Coastal (by the President!) for talking about Coastal's students' likely success rate and the relationship of the success rate to the students' debt load.

From what I've read about Salaita (including reading his own tweets myself--some of which made me physically ill), his "uncivil" comments are not merely "uncivil."  Some of his comments are extremely vicious, and I think that some of the comments are also anti-Semitic.  So this professor is not a hero to me, by any means.  

Salaita has a complete right to say what he wants, thanks to freedom of speech.  I don't have to like him.  I don't have to listen to him.  But he has every right to say what he wants to say, and to say it in the way that he chooses to say it, even if I perceive some of what he's saying as exceptionally nasty.  The First Amendment protects him, and I'm glad that it does.

Whether academic freedom does, though, is not as easy a question.  (I've written a little something on this:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1544932, which reviews Matthew W. Finkin & Robert C. Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom.)  I think that the issue is complicated.  "Academic freedom" doesn't protect every outburst.  It protects statements that people make while teaching and writing in their fields, but (to take some extreme examples) it won't protect someone who insists on teaching that the world is flat or that babies come from storks.

The more I spend time on social media, the more I think that people show their real selves there, and they show their real selves yet more when they post anonymously (though, of course, it's impossible to track down who the anonymous posters are).  Salaita's "real self" seems to me to be that of a bully--and a bully who would make his Israeli and Jewish students very, very nervous about whether he could be fair to them.  I would be as nervous about hiring him as I would about hiring a professor who posted screeds against any other group:  Arabs, Catholics, Mormons, single mothers (the list goes on and on).

But what interests me more is the difference between the outcry about Salaita and the absence of much outcry about Frakt.  Both people were prevented from getting their jobs because certain people didn't like what they were saying.  Frakt was, from what I've been reading, saying some perfectly sensible things about law schools and should have--at the least--been allowed to finish his deanship interview.  Salaita was saying some horrible things, but because they were rants against Israelis and Jews, his statements were more "socially acceptable" to the people who are aghast that the University of Illinois didn't approve his hiring.  That's a pretty awful contrast, in my opinion.

So I have to wonder:  where was the anger about cutting off Frakt's interview, and what is the difference between the two stories?

UPDATE:  I really liked this commentary.

Thanks, Above the Law, for the shout-out!

We were tickled pink to see this mention of our Law School Survival Manual today (check under "Books"). 

Best parody EVER.

Here.

Shameless self-promotion, part n.

We're touting our book, Law Firm Job Survival Manual, as part of this interview (here).

One of many reasons that I like Mark Yudof.

Here.

My article on incentives and default rules in law firms is out at last!

See here.

LexisNexis must not want me to use its services.

I have changed my password seven times in two days.  It doesn't matter what password I use--LexisNexis will not let me log in.  I give up--I will never use that service again.

Um, not a great group to have as "friends"....

See here.

Leave it to TaxProf Blog to show that law profs can be cool. Or at least funny.

Here.  Seriously, this video is worth watching.  ROFL.

OK, it's throwback MONDAY today.

I was talking about the Rice T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project with some colleagues today and thought I'd share it with all of you.  My favorite test, of course, was the Turing test.

Two of my newest favorite things, both from my buddy Walter Effross.

Walter always finds me interesting and valuable things to read (and now I can thank you publicly, Walter!)--and here are two of my favorites.  One's a commencement address, and the other is a story about how the Rolling Stones refused to boycott Israel.  Both involve a discussion of courage.  (And, for what it's worth, both stories illustrate the power of standing for something bigger than yourself, rather than the cowardice of lobbing anonymous hateful comments across the Internet.)

Shame on you, anonymous commenters.

I read Above the Law pretty regularly, and I have to say that I'm saddened by the tenor of the comments overall.  I know that the comments are unmoderated, and I don't blame Above the Law for them (or any blogs that allow anonymous, unmoderated comments).  What I don't understand is the mentality of people who write hurtful, anonymous things about people they don't know (or, for that matter, people they do know).  What is it about anonymous commenting that gives people the license to be so horrible?  (I'm guessing that the commenters have never been on the receiving end of any of the drivel that they're posting.  I have been, and it's an awful experience.)

R.I.P., Bob Faiss.

See here, here, here, and here.  Bob was a giant in his field and a true gentleman.  I will miss him.

Bravo, Mayor (well, former mayor) Bloomberg--well done!

This whole idea of students protesting commencement speakers because they don't like the proposed speakers' politics bothers me, which is why I appreciated Mayor Bloomberg's commencement address so much.  I've experienced commencement speaker protests myself.  (Sarah Weddington was our commencement speaker during my first year of dean at the University of Houston Law Center, and I invited her because she was someone who was effective as a lawyer, in the Texas Legislature, and in the Carter Administration--and I consider her a friend.)

Law graduates who didn't appreciate her work as the lawyer in Roe v. Wade protested.  She had to worry about death threats at graduation.  (So did I.)  Even though she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, she came through and did a superb job at graduation.  The protesting students limited themselves to wearing gold lapel pins symbolizing baby feet, which was a perfectly legitimate and respectful form of protest.  I was proud of them.

Another commencement speaker at UHLC triggered a one-person protest by a student who believed that the speaker had insulted his family at a trial.  That particularlized protest, based on a personal interaction and not on a difference of philosophy, was different in kind.  We excused the student from commencement and gave him his diploma in a separate ceremony.

I know that there is a limit to the idea that students' protests shouldn't be taken into account when a university invites a controversial speaker--there are some speakers who are so reprehensible that giving them a public forum just seems wrong.  But for the life of me, I can't come up with the line-drawing that would make it clear when a speaker should be disinvited. Although I would likely know it when I saw it ("it" being the case for disinviting someone), my instincts aren't so superior that I would be comfortable using my own judgment as the appropriate benchmark.

Overall, though, universities can't be places where students learn to listen to others' viewpoints and learn to debate ideas respectfully, then where will they learn how to do that?

Airline inconvenience insurance? Count me in.

The Wall Street Journal gave me the heads-up on this new insurance (here). I can't find the insurance on the company's website yet, but I'm intrigued.

I can't decide if this story is more ridiculous or horrifying.

I was going to make some flip remark about the events reported in this story, like how I'm too busy controlling the banks and Hollywood to control academia as well, but frankly I'm just tired of the coded anti-Semitism that so few people are condemning.

Life lessons for all of us--from the Navy SEALS and TaxProf Blog.

See here.  Worth reading all the way through.

Dear Mr. Whelan of the National Review:

Wow.  Our faculty letter and our Dean's letter must have really struck a nerve with you.  (See also here and here.)

Before I respond to you, here's some background on me:  I'm a moderate--not liberal, not conservative.  Moderate.  I married into a military family (husband/father-in-law/brother-in-law are former Marines; sister-in-law was career Air Force; late mother-in-law was Army).  I interviewed for a Rehnquist clerkship.  I'm probably not what you envision when you think about liberal faculty members in law schools. 

I signed the faculty letter because I believe that it's important to remind the profession that we can have meaningful conversations about controversial issues--issues about which good-hearted and smart people can disagree--in a civil manner. Here's what our letter said:

RESPONSE BY MEMBERS OF THE BOYD SCHOOL OF LAW FACULTY AND
STAFF TO ALAN LEFEBVRE’S “MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT”

As members of the faculty and staff of UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law, we were dismayed to read the May 2014 Nevada Lawyer column by Alan J. Lefebvre, written in his capacity as President of the State Bar of Nevada. We fear that the tone of Mr. Lefebvre’s undignified column brings disrespect on the Bar and undermines principles of professionalism that we endeavor to instill in our students.

Mr. Lefebvre’s ostensible subject was Nevada’s prohibition on same-sex marriage. He disparaged the conclusion by Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and endorsed by Governor Brian Sandoval that the ban cannot be defended in federal court. There are reasonable debates to be had about how our state’s officials should respond to a rapidly shifting legal landscape. But such debates require a climate of mutual respect. The mission of the State Bar of Nevada is, in part, to “elevate the standard of honor, integrity, and courtesy in the legal profession” and “to promote a spirit of cordiality” among lawyers. In our roles as faculty and staff at Nevada’s only law school, we want to pass these values on to our graduates. It is thus regrettable that Mr. Lefebvre’s essay consists largely of insults, ad hominem attacks, sarcasm, and sectarian references that are simply inappropriate for the leader of an important institution in a vibrant and diverse state.

We recognize that issues like marriage equality naturally inspire passionate responses. But in the legal profession passion must be expressed with dignity and thoughtful analysis. Mr. Lefebvre’s column was lacking in the civility that should guide the behavior of every Nevada attorney. It is a serious disappointment for such indignity to emanate from the leader of the state bar.

What we were trying to convey in the letter is that it is perfectly legitimate to express disagreement--passionately but still politely--with our attorney general's position, but that we wanted to keep the discourse civil.  Our dean's letter, too, was respectful in its approach.  Your column?  Not so much, frankly, with its sneer about us being a "fourth-tier school" (not true, and also not very nice of you).

I'm not a "delicate flower," as your column suggests.  I'm happy to engage with you on this issue, publicly or privately.  Maybe we could come away from a conversation with a better appreciation of each other's point of view.

Oh, and your reference to "one well-informed source [who conveyed to you that]: 'Even by the standards of the modern American law school, the Boyd School of Law’s faculty is remarkably intolerant of dissent. Opponents to the Orthodoxy are either evil or ignorant, take your pick'"?  That's not been my experience.  I've found my colleagues to be exceptionally civil in their discourse, even when they disagree with each other (and including when they disagree with me).  So we have your anonymous person who blasted our school, and we have me, with a completely different take on Boyd's atmosphere.  That's an n of two, which is too small a sample size for an outsider to form an opinion. 

Let's see if you and I can engage in a sincere conversation that rests on a basic assumption:  you've thought long and hard about your views, and you have good reasons for holding them, and I've thought long and hard about mine, and I have good reasons for holding them, too.  Maybe a conversation might give each of us more fodder for thought.

Thank you, Dan Filler and Faculty Lounge !

What a lovely, lovely post (here)!

I am having a very good day.

Cox Cable Customer Service--sigh....

So far today, I've spent almost two hours on the phone, on the web, and in live chat with Cox.  Things that went wrong today:

1. The "plug-and-play" new wireless router didn't plug.  Or play.  At least not until I bounced my complaint up to a manager.  That took 40 minutes.
2. The Cox salesperson who sold me the router said, "You can talk with Netgear and rename your router and change the password."  Netgear, on the other hand, said that I should talk with Cox.  Cox said that I should talk with Netgear.  Maybe the two of them have some sort of bet going as to which one can drive me crazy first.  Hint:  It's a tie.
3. We're switching to Contour on Wednesday.  We were planning to watch the old DVR'ed shows before Wednesday, when suddenly the DVR said that we didn't have a DVR plan.  (Oh, and we don't have any cable channels, either, right now.)  We've rebooted, to no avail.  Ah, but I've been listening to beautiful classical music for, oh, 16:35 so far.

So all of the other services about which I've complained over the years?  I think that Cox has all of you beat cold.

Well done, Clark County Republican Party!

You dropped the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman; you dropped your pro-life stance; you added sexual orientation to the list of protected categories.  I'm not all the way to your side of political philosophy yet, but I'm a lot closer than I was.

Your turn, national GOP.  Let's see you do what the Clark County Republican Party did.

President Karen Gross on ten ways to make colleges more friendly to veterans.

It's just marvelous (here).

UNLV's Psychology and Lawyering Conference webcasts are posted.

Here's the site, and here's our panel's session. 

The Akron Law Review ethics symposium issue is out.

See here.  I was there for the symposium, and it was wonderful from start to finish.  My article, The Client Who Did Too Much, is here.

Normally, Southwest Airlines is awesome at customer service (UPDATED).

Not this time, though:

UPDATE:  Verity Kugelmann at Southwest reached out to me, investigated, and gave me a much better feeling about Southwest in general.  Thanks, Verity, and thanks, Southwest!

My salute to George Carlin's partial score schtick, in light of the upcoming USNWR rankings.

This obit describes Carlin's joke about partial scores.  And in a salute to Brian Leiter's open letter requesting that deans not report overall ranks, plus the fact that I'm not a dean and I don't have early access to the rankings, here's mine:

Boyd School of Law:  ____.

The Dewey indictments and cognitive biases (updated).

This morning's NYT brings the story of the criminal indictments of some of the people at Dewey & LeBeouf (here).  If the emails referenced in the story are real, then the downfall of Dewey is even more Enronesque than I'd originally thought.  Here's an example:

In another exchange in June 2009, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Canellas joke about the law firm’s outside auditor, who was fired by his company for reasons unrelated to his auditing assignments. Mr. Sanders remarks to Mr. Canellas, “Can you find another clueless auditor for next year?” Mr. Canellas responded: “That’s the plan. Worked perfect this year.”

Today's WSJ brings more news of the emails (here):  

According to the complaint, Mr. Sanders emailed Dewey's then chief operating officer on Dec. 4, 2008, expressing concern about the firm's cash-flow problems. "I don't want to cook the books anymore," Mr. Sanders allegedly wrote in the message. "We need to stop doing that."

Why lawyers (and, for that matter, law professors) persist in emailing proof of unsavory words or deeds is a matter involving social science as much as it involves issues of character.  Why might partners at a law firm (1) decide to doctor the books or (2) ignore some clear signs of economic distress?  

I don't know the people who were indicted.  But I do know that there are a variety of cognitive biases that can cause very smart people to talk themselves into very dumb decisions.  The partners who may have been involved in a fraud and its cover up could have talked themselves into their actions because of a misguided belief that they were protecting the firm (cognitive dissonance).  The partners who could have put 2 + 2 together to ask some sharp questions of the law firm management ("why are we paying all of this money to get these laterals, and how can we afford this?") could have been waylaid by both social pressure and the diffusion of responsibility phenomenon.*  My point is that we need to watch cases like Dewey to study not the venality of people but the way in which cognitive biases affect their actions.


UPDATE (3/10/14):  Bernie Burk has a great post over at The Faculty Lounge about the indictments (here).
_________________
* I discuss Enron and Dewey in a forthcoming article, Nancy B. Rapoport, “Nudging” Better Lawyer Behavior: Using Default Rules and Incentives to Change Behavior in Law Firms, 4 St. Mary’s J. L. Ethics & Malpractice ___ (forthcoming 2014).

My latest piece came out in Green Bag.

See here.  The essay links the original plans for NYU's law school with current issues in legal education.

My husband's Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle experience with his U.S. Bank/REI card.

So my hubby and I are fine with credit cards monitoring suspicious activity and putting freezes on our accounts when something looks fishy.  That's great customer service.

What isn't great customer service is when a bank freezes transactions that shouldn't be frozen after specific instructions from the customer himself.

Jeff regularly flings himself out of perfectly good airplanes for fun.  He does this once a month, at the same place--and he has done so since Memorial Day Weekend.

Lately, US Bank/REI has decided that, wherever Jeff is, his credit shouldn't come with him--the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Bad Customer Service.  Every month, he tries to charge something at the jump site.  Every month, his account is blocked.  He calls the bank and explains the situation; the bank agrees that the charges shouldn't be blocked; Jeff goes home.  (Of course, when he goes home and tries to pay for parking, the same bank blocks his credit there, too.)

This cycle of folly continues each month:

• Jeff calls the bank to explain that there's no fraud on charges from these two particular sites.
• The bank says that it understands and won't block the charges again.
• Jeff goes to the jump site, charges something, and finds out that the charge was blocked.
• Jeff calls the bank.
• The bank promises not to block the charge.
• Jeff comes home and tries to pay for parking.
• The bank blocks the charge.
• Jeff calls the bank.
• The bank promises not to block the charge.
• Repeat ad nauseum.

The cycle of folly has now ended after the bank, yet again, blocked the charges and then explained to Jeff that Jeff must call the bank ahead of time to explain that he is traveling and to ask--basically, with a "pretty, pretty please"--let his charges go through.

No more.  Now Jeff has a card with a different bank.  And we wonder why banks have such a bad rap.

An update for editors everywhere.

From my buddy Kathleen Lyon, some thoughts about editing (here) in response to my frustrated screed (here). 

Thanks, Conglomerate!

For the shout-out (here).

Serious customer service problems at Premium Media Design.

Tried to order some software.  My tale begins thus:

1. Clicked on website. 
2. Put software in cart.
3. Chose PayPal option.
4. Logged on to PayPal.
5. Paid for software.
6. Returned to site to find nothing in my cart.
7. Repeated steps 2-6.
8. Nada.
9. Wrote to Customer Service.
10. Nada.
11. Called the phone number, which referred me to Live Chat.
12. Clicked on Live Chat.
13. Nada.
14. Wrote this blog post.
15. Am sending a link of this blog post to Premium Media Design.

The best part?  I've figured out what the company means by "we will give you the best service POSSIBLE."

It's not possible.

Mixed thoughts about this post on Above the Law.

I do get what Above the Law is saying here, and I also take the point of Anonymous's comment about my screed against bad law review editing, but I've also seen the difficulty that some law students have in transitioning from college to professional school.  There has to be a good way to teach them that the little things matter.

And I'm now, after 20+ years on the job, at the point at which I require those who write papers for me to execute this affidavit.

Am I a curmudgeon?  Yep.  Do I think that some clear expectations might help students become more professional?  I sure hope so.

UPDATE (2/11/14):  Thanks, Above the Law, for including me in your non-sequiturs yesterday!

Brava, Scarlett Johansson!

I'm so glad you spoke up against the boycott!

Thanks, Above the Law!

Appreciated the shout-out!

Dear law review editors everywhere--a few words of advice.

I'm in the process of reading page proofs from two different journals, both involving symposia, and I want to explain why one journal did a superb job of editing my work and one didn't.  If you're a law review editor who follows this advice, you're likely to have very happy authors.  If you don't, you might end up being the focus of comments like this one.

1. Respect the author's voice.  You're not the author.  The person whose article you accepted is the author, and every author has his or her own style of writing.  Don't futz with that style.  It's one thing to tell an author that something that she wrote is unclear, or that a transition doesn't make sense, or that you see a hole in her argument.  Those are wonderful things to do, and telling an author those things makes the article stronger.  Deciding to "fix" the way that the author writes because you don't like her style is not a wonderful thing to do.  (We're just going to change back all of your "fixes" anyway, so both of us will end up feeling frustrated.)
2. If you do make changes, make sure that the changes are obvious when you return the revisions to the author.  It's annoying to see an article that's been revised so many times by various editors that the "track changes" feature has become worthless.  The failure to indicate what language was changed from the author's original language just delays your editorial process because it slows down the author's review of your edits.  Oh, and mere formatting changes?  Those are different--go ahead and "accept" those changes so that we don't have to spend time doing that ourselves.*  I doubt that any of us care how you format your footnotes or what font you use, as long as the substance of the article is correct.
3. If you make changes, get them right.  Please don't "fix" the author's writing by inserting language that changes the author's meaning, or by mis-citing things, or by making mistakes in spelling or grammar.  Although it's possible that you write more clearly than does your author,  it's not probable.  We write for a living; you're learning how to write as lawyers.  The odds are in our favor that we were right the first time.
4. Be timely.  If you need a revision turned around by a specific date, work backwards from that date and give the author plenty of time to look at your proposed changes--and make sure that the author has actually received your revisions.  If you don't hear from an author by, say, a week after you've sent out a draft, follow up.  Email glitches can happen.
5. Be accurate.  Don't make mistakes in cite-checking.  One of the best things that law reviews do is train students to be anal-retentive about certain things.  We want you to obsess over whether cross-references match.  We want you to be disturbed when a quotation mark is missing or a parenthetical statement has an open parenthesis but not a closed one.  We want you to check to see if every footnote is internally consistent.  We want you to be master proofreaders.  Talent at obsessing over tiny details will serve you well as a lawyer.  If, though, you miss obvious things, or if you alter things that actually were correct, we lose confidence in your abilities.
6. Help the author "plug" the final version.  Some law reviews tweet about their issues; some go so far as to send copies to other professors whose work figured prominently in the article itself.  These creative ideas go a long way toward making an author so happy with your work that he or she looks forward to placing another article with your law review.

When the collaborative process between an author and her editors results in a better article than the one that the author had originally drafted, everyone wins. 

____________________
* Better yet:  give us two versions.  One should be the "track changes" version with the formatting changes already accepted, and one should be the version that shows every single thing that you changed from the author's own draft.

Check out the cool stuff that my buddy Marketa Trimble has been doing as an IP scholar!

See here and here.  Brava, Marketa!!!!

Post Office website glitches continue.

Dear Post Office:  What a clever way to get people to buy stamps at the increased price!  Refusing to let us "select format" really does help us to appreciate how important it is to give the Post Office more money so that it can hire someone to fix a glitch that has existed for a while now.  Well played, Post Office.  Well played.

Our newest book just got cited.

Our Law Firm Job Survival Manual just got cited in an article.  Thanks, Prof. David Grenardo!

Post on Law Firm Job Survival Manual blog on cognitive biases.

We combined four different pieces (three from the Financial Times and one from TaxProf Blog) that relate to cognitive biases and the immense pressure that we put on ourselves--and that our jobs encourage) (here). 

Shameless self-promotion--ABA Webinar edition....

See here.  Ever since Enron fell, I've been fascinated with the issue of why people do, well, what they do.  This webinar is an offshoot of my study of this area, although I'm speaking for only about 10 mins or so of the whole thing.

Good practice pointers from Bankruptcy Judge Michael Williamson.

Here, courtesy of the NACTT.

In addition to taking UNLV's president as its president, UNT is bringing aboard some pretty high-powered faculty members to its law school..

See here.  I've known David Epstein a long time and have enjoyed his BAR/BRI lectures (in my apparent quest to make multijurisdictional practice history).  I've also known Ellen Pryor for a long time, and she's impressive as well.  It'll be interesting to see who else comes aboard.