As Scott Greenfield notices, the lawprof chatfest (organized by Danielle Citron, Frank Pasquale, David Hoffman, and Deven Desai) is tilted toward participants who want to restrict online speech in the name of feminism and civil rights.
P.S. One of the symposium participants most inclined toward the free-speech position, Michael Froomkin, draws some particularly lively comments. And Paul Horwitz at Prawfsblawg offers some pointed criticisms.
Might your skepticism about government programs amount to a form of mental illness? Some conferees at Harvard Law School are willing to help with making a diagnosis.
The founding dean of the ideologically charged new law school at the University of California, Irvine, is already taking a hand in Orange County public affairs by suing the town of Laguna Beach on behalf of homeless persons: he and his public-interest-law colleagues “want a federal judge to enjoin enforcement of Laguna’s anticamping ordinance until the city builds more no-strings-attached homeless housing.” [Heather Mac Donald, WSJ] More: Chemerinsky offers to debate Mac Donald.
Teresa Wagner claims the University of Iowa Law School denied her the appointment because of her conservative views. (TaxProf, WSJ Law Blog, Somin @ Volokh).
Wounded feelings, hostage rescues by lawyers, and Philadelphia politics:
In the next edition of Microblog, we’ll answer the question, “How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?”
A new law school [University of California, Irvine] opening next fall in Southern California is offering a big incentive to top students who might be thinking twice about the cost of a legal education during the recession: free tuition for three years. …
Scholarship winners will be chosen for their potential to emerge three years later as legal stars on the ascendance. Only the best and brightest need apply, but the school hopes to offer full scholarships to all 60 members of its inaugural class in 2009. Subsequent classes will be on a normal tuition basis.
Chemerinsky, who knows something about the difficulty of landing a job at the top of the legal world, is certainly taking a bold stab at leapfrogging the competition with this offer. And while in Southern California one has to be careful not to trip over unemployed lawyers while strolling on the sidewalk, we’d certainly encourage Overlawyered readers who’ve always wanted to live the dream to apply.
Via Talkleft, which is also encouraging its readers to fill these spots. Two can play that game!
Edit: Thanks to reader Jwill for a valuable correction.
Updating our Apr. 29 item: “A law professor who sued two former students for defamation has dropped his suit after the school’s interim dean said there is no evidence he is a racist. Law professor Richard Peltz of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock told Inside Higher Ed that he sued to get his reputation back. ‘This suit was never about money,’ he said. ‘I feel that now with the university’s support, I am on the road to repairing my reputation.'” (Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal, Nov. 17).
I’ve got an op-ed in today’s L.A. Times (Walter Olson, “Slavery reparations: what happened?”, Oct. 31) based on a longer article forthcoming in City Journal. (The short answer to what happened: 9/11, public opinion, and the courts.)
The City Journal article is in turn a much condensed version of a draft chapter in my book-in-progress about the influence of the law schools. As I show in that chapter, there were few places where reparations enthusiasm burned hotter than in legal academia, with conferences and law review articles galore devoted to advancing the cause. The most prominent law school advocate of the reparations cause back then, Harvard’s Charles Ogletree, is back in the news these days because of his role as mentor (and, reportedly, chief advisor on racial issues) to Democratic candidate Barack Obama; he’s being mentioned as a possible civil rights chief in the next administration. Not surprisingly, Ogletree has had much less to say about the reparations cause this year than he did eight or nine years ago; I have a feeling that in an Obama administration he’d be under strict orders not to get near the issue, but of course I could be wrong.
We’ve covered reparations litigation extensively at Overlawyered.