Thursday, November 29, 2007

Ann Bartow: tag, you're it!

Jim Chen, the stalwart dean of the U of Louisville School of Law, has started a bad movie meme over at Jurisdynamics, and he's tagged me first.
Nice try, Jim, nominating Caligula. I think, however, we can reach lower: I nominate a bad movie from an actress whose work I normally like. I loved Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, but something went woefully wrong in A Stranger Among Us.

In this movie, Ms. Griffith plays a detective who has to go undercover in a Hasidic community. I don't know why the mix went wrong: the director's great (Sidney Lumet); the writer's great (Robert J. Avrech); the cast is great. But the movie's glimpse into life inside and outside the Hasidic cluster just fell flat, and Ms. Griffith's delivery of a line something like "stop, or I'll shoot" in her soft voice just didn't work for me. I was originally considering nominating Sheena, which was a very, very, VERY bad movie, although the flamingo-wrangler did a good job.
The difference, though, is that Sheena must have known it was going to be bad from the get-go. My guess is that people hoped for more from A Stranger Among Us.

Ann Bartow, of the wonderful blog Feminist Law Profs: I'd love to hear from you next. Tag, you're it!

Monday, November 19, 2007

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Latest lawyer joke--except that it's not one.

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal: "Except in One Career, Our Brains Seem Built for Optimism."

The only career where optimism wasn't, well, optimal? Law.

Anthony Ciolli gets dismissed from lawsuit

To see how disgusting some of the comments posted on AutoAdmit were, see here. The people who posted such things demonstrated their immaturity (at best) and their own venal natures (at worst). Nothing I've ever said condones the material that these people posted. I've been a victim of it, too (back when I was at the UH Law Center), albeit with less-nasty comments.

But Anthony Ciolli has been dismissed as a defendant in the case. For more info, click here.

Happy birthday, Marines!

I know some honorable people, although there are few enough truly honorable people that I can count the ones I know on two hands. But I know of one honorable group for sure:

Follow this link (here) for more. Happy birthday, Marines!

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

And now, for something completely different [in the law school publications wars]


I enjoyed Brian Leiter's comments about SUNY-Buffalo's latest publication (here). Having recycled my share of "law porn" this year, I'm actually looking forward to reading Buffalo's publication.

BTW, for those of you who said that I seemed a tad bitter about UH's 2004-2007 faculty publications PR piece, fair 'nuff. I am a tad bitter. The last few years at UH were brutal for me--so bad that it's taken me over a year to recover even this much from the experience. But I'll get over it. Life in Sin City is gooooooooood, and life at the Boyd School of Law is simply marvelous.