Why the title of an ad counts--a lot

Taken from a Craigslist ad -- verbatim.

Looking for Bad Faith Attorney (Las Vegas, NV)

Why Liz Warren rocks, part n

Story on front page of New York Times, just barely below the fold (here).

I've posted some videos of our 2010 Vegas Showdown competition.

You can see them on the right-hand side of the blog--Sergei & I had a ton of fun!

One of my friends, Meredith Duncan, has written a great op-ed.

Read it here.  You can check out some of her scholarly work here and here.  If Jeff & I had had kids, we'd have wanted them to be like Meredith and Curtis's kids.

Brava, Meredith!

Thanks, Super Shag, for the videos!

SuperShag did some on-the-dance-floor videos of our Vegas Showdown 2010 Silver Smooth Scholarship (here), Bronze Standard Scholarship (here), and Open B Rhythm Scholarship rounds.  (The two in the ballgowns are tango, which is why I look more serious in those clips.)  For the Rhythm videos, see here (although I managed to kick the floor in a rondé), here, and here.  (Thank goodness that SuperShag didn't catch the Coppertone moment after that part of our routine!)  For more tiny videos, check this blog after this weekend.

Thanks to my teacher, Sergei Shapoval, and to my coaches, Felipe and Carolina Telona.  Y'all ROCK!

Brian Leiter's latest letter to USNWR is a must-read.

See here.

A salute to master teacher Jaime Escalante

Apparently Mr. Escalante is battling cancer (here).  My thoughts go out to him, his friends and family, and the countless students whose lives he made better by pushing them to excellence.

Wrong. Wrong on so many levels....

Hat tip to UNLV's own Matthew Stafford for pointing me to this Above the Law post (here). 

I count 7 independent ethically (and grammatically) challenged errors in this one business card.  Anyone care to list them?

Fearless prediction and a shout-out to Loren Steffy of the Houston Chronicle

My buddy Jessica Gabel of Georgia State pointed out Loren Steffy's latest column about Jeff Skilling's appeal (here).  The column is quintessential Loren, and it's absolutely correct.

But I still think that the Supreme Court's going to reverse Skilling's conviction based on what the Court will call a misinterpretation of the "honest services" doctrine.  Let's see if I'm correct.

Rest in peace, Will Kohn

Will, who was delightful, warm, funny, and extremely smart (see here), passed away suddenly last week.  I'll really miss him.  I met him when I was still at Ohio State, and we worked together on the American Board of Certification.  He was a natural leader and modest as all get-out.  His obituary is here.

The former University of Maryland law dean's current troubles

I've been following the stories about Karen Rothenberg's current troubles over some payments made to her while she was Maryland's dean, and two particularly good posts are here and here.  I don't know Karen that well, but I certainly saw her in action, and I found her to be extremely energetic and committed behavior. 

Were the payments authorized?  I'll bet that they were.  Were they vetted thoroughly beforehand?  Who knows?  Should academics get those big salaries?  Maybe not, but as the Feminist Law Professors post points out, Karen probably found herself in the crosshairs of all of those folks who are angry at Wall Street bonuses as well.

All I know is that being in the public eye is sometimes really, really miserable, and that Karen has my sympathy right now.

Newsflash: small, newly established law schools not in National Law Journal's top 25

Thanks to my home Google page, I read TaxProf Blog regularly, so I clicked on the links (see here and here) to the National Law Journal's Law School Report (here).  The basic methodology:  "[NLJ has] ranked the top 50 law schools by the percentage of 2009 juris doctor graduates who snagged jobs at NLJ 250 firms by Sept. 30, 2009."

What I like:  the ranking at least gives users some useful information about the link between going to a particular school and how many of that school's grads go to BigLaw; my alma mater (Stanford) did well, even though many older grads (25th reunion this year!) are BigLaw refugees; and there are thoughtful articles that accompany the report (see Emily Spieler's thoughts here). 

The only drawback is that some newer schools (think Boyd) won't make the cut for a while, if ever:  we're still new-ish, as law schools go (in two more years, the school could have a Bar Mitzvah), and we don't have the benefit of having a plethora of branch offices of BigLaw firms in Nevada, although we do place graduates in many other states.

All in all, though, the Law School Report makes for juicy reading.

Will the crash in BigLaw hiring be a boon for lesser-"ranked" law schools?

We won't know for a while, but if some law schools didn't place a lot of their grads in BigLaw firms before the crash, and the graduates at those "lesser" schools find more jobs than those do who hail from "elite" schools, will we see a big change in the USNWR rankings in a couple of years, when the data from the placement crash play out?

You know you've been in legal education a long time when . . .

You remember being dean at Nebraska and helping to hire someone who is now the incoming dean at Nebraska.  Congrats to Susan Poser (see here)!

I get a kick out of this one (hat tip to PrawfsBlawg again)

See the commentary and the comments to How to Write an Incendiary Blog Post (here).  The post refers to the original full article in the Boston Globe (here), but I got a huge kick out of the comments to the post on PrawfsBlog.  Hat tip to that blog and to my buddy Bernie Burk, who sent me the original BG version a while back. 

My two favorite comments so far:

This sentence says that I know you won't publish this comment, but you neglected to consider a point that is not even germane to the post. This sentence makes it clear that I'm very angry because there is some trivial difference in our world-views.

Posted by: Bruce Boyden | Feb 17, 2010 1:39:22 PM

This sentence is not self-referential except to the extent that it is.

Posted by: Matthew Reid Krell | Feb 17, 2010 1:55:25 PM

Bravo to Paul Horwitz for the post!

I hate bullies--especially anonymous ones.

Just got a nastygram today from RoastMail (meaning that the sender wasn't brave enough to sign his or her own name to the email).  The person, in the guise of being concerned about professionalism, suggested that I was cluttering up everyone's inboxes with my congratulations when people at Boyd did something praiseworthy.

Here's the text:

Nancy,

Please read and heed the subject line.  Everyone at Boyd (especially because we are lawyers/law students) would probably like to throw in their two cents and congratulate whoever deserves congratulations, BUT can you imagine what a mess our inboxes would be if we all gave in to our desires.  Besides it being rude and unprofessional, it's just downright annoying to see a reply to every announcement regarding our school/faculty/students.

PLEASE, out of professional courtesy, keep your personal comments off the email server. 

Good day.

And here was my response:

Tell you what, anonymous roaster---let me put this up to the whole faculty. I'm happy to bow out of congratulatory emails, if my colleagues would prefer that. But I would have had more respect for you, whoever you are, if you'd had the courage to sign your name.
NBR

I'll let readers know which way the faculty goes on this issue.  If I'm really annoying people, then I'm happy to lay off the congrats, even though my guess is that most people feel underappreciated and could use some well-deserved congratulations.*  But I truly hate bullies and cowards, having had enough experience with those to last a lifetime.

Had this person had the courage to come into my office, shut the door, and express his or her view to me directly (or even in a private but signed email), I would have felt bad that I'd annoyed the person, I would have apologized to him or her, and I'd have gone to other colleagues to ask them if I really was irritating the crud out of my colleagues.  But that's not what the person did.

If it's important enough to send a nastygram, it's important enough to sign it.  And I'm going to assume that this person who sent it to me isn't a student, due to the salutation using my first name.

Readers:  are we at a point when praising others is a bad thing?

* See Kent Syverud, Three Principles of Effective Deaning, 31 U. Tol. L. Rev. 751 (2000).

Musings about an essay that I'm writing.

Posted at Voir Dire (here), where I'm guest-blogging this month.  Comments gratefully accepted.  Thanks!

One of the many reasons that my friend Bernie Burk ROCKS!

See Bernie's comment to Howard Wasserman's post (http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2010/02/being-sued-v-being-held-liable.html) about the difference between being sued and being held liable on PrawfsBlawg: 

It seems to me that the interesting question here is how this set of preconceptions differs, if at all, from the dynamics of blame in our culture more generally.

A lawsuit is, for most people not twisted by overexposure to our legal system, about blame. The plaintiff blames the defendant for something, and virtually every cause of action involves a duty (what you should do) and its breach (you didn't do it). Our system posits sanctions for starting an action--asserting blame--without some colorable basis, e.g., Rule 11; the tort of malicious prosecution. These present low thresholds to be sure, but all with the moral underpinnings of "don't blame somebody for something unless you've got the stuff to back it up." (And, interestingly, note how different the ground rules are for defending yourself. There is no tort of malicious defense.)

Blaming someone for something publicly is a serious thing. Just think of how surprised, upset and defensive you feel if someone accosts you at Starbucks and announces that you just cut in line.

With various caveats and perhaps a general reservation about rushing to judgment, we also generally assume that people don't make accusations of any kind without some colorable basis for doing so, even though daily experience provides counterexamples without number. These somehow prove the rule by exciting our outrage at levelling a false accusation, however trivial: exCUSE me, I was standing here in line when I saw you walk in the door over there.

Law students walk into torts class lay people. Small wonder they share the general culture's views about the dynamics of blame and vindication as they play out in the very public forum of litigation. The dissection of claim from liability (with all the slips between the cup of one and the lip of the other) is one of the innumerable counterintuitive wisdoms we internalize in learning to think like a lawyer.
And by the way, a principal challenge of the trial lawyer is learning to think like a person again.

(The writer is a longtime practitioner who is transitioning into law teaching. He welcomes your thoughts, and any news of available positions. References available on request.)

Posted by: Bernie Burk | Feb 15, 2010 2:10:01 PM

Bernie's got that great combo of intellectual gravitas and real-world, law-at-a-high-level experience.  He also has a killer sense of humor.  (See?  Three other reasons why Bernie ROCKS!)

More kudos for David Dow.

Check out this book review (here).

I'm sad about the NASA budget cuts.

And I'm not the only one (see here).  There is not enough space on any blog to list all of the gifts that NASA's research and mission has given us throughout the years.  I'll be eternally grateful for all that NASA has done so far, and I just hope that NASA will get the opportunity to thrive in the future.