Want to get elected? Get the power of Google behind you – just ask Scott Brown of Massachusetts. As elections become increasingly web dependent, Google is poised to be a power player and offers some compelling advantages given its top spot in the search engine marketplace. See more on this on Madisonian.net blog. Want more? Check out the Google Policy Blog’s top 5 strategies for political campaigns: (more…)
Entries categorized as ‘Uncategorized’
Getting elected – what Google can do for you (or to you)
February 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Categories: Data · Jeff · Policy · Pop Culture · politics
Struggling with professional fees in chapter 11
February 16, 2010 · 2 Comments
As I continue to be woefully late on an essay on how to reform the review and awarding of fees to professionals in chapter 11 bankruptcy cases (don’t worry, Maryland J. of Bus. & Tech. Law–it’s coming!), I’m trying to think of other areas in which those who are billing for professional services don’t really have to “push their bills across the table to a real client” but to a stand-in for a real client. Lawyers who represent humans have to push their bills across the table (figuratively speaking) to those humans, who can then stare the lawyers in the eye and ask why the lawyers engaged in certain tasks. Lawyers who represent even fictional people, like corporations, have to push their bills across the table to a live corporate officer/manager, who likewise can look at the bills and ask hard questions. But lawyers who represent the debtor-in-possession or the creditors’ committee are representing fiduciaries, and those fiduciaries aren’t always all “across the table” in the same way that clients might be outside of bankruptcy. Do these professionals have to do more defensive lawyering than lawyers are doing if they’re not representing fiduciaries? Are lawyers who do class action litigation in the same boat? Any thoughts?
(Posted by Nancy Rapoport)
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Check out our Social Vibe Widget
January 31, 2010 · Leave a Comment
On the right — you can do some simple (and free) online activities to help the cause — it just takes a few minutes.
Categories: Uncategorized
college sports subsidization
January 14, 2010 · Leave a Comment
We’ve touched on this topic before, but USA Today has a really interesting story on it, so we’re talking about it more – see my post on prawfsblawg here.
Categories: Uncategorized
Quentin Tarantino seems to like mentioning east Tennessee in his movies
January 11, 2010 · Leave a Comment
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Our new disclosures page
January 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Find it above or link here.
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Take on currrent enviornment for judicial nominees
November 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment
From BreakingLegalnews.com:
Controversial court nominee survives Senate test
Political and Legal – POSTED: 2009/11/18 06:23
Democrats on Tuesday crushed a Senate filibuster against a controversial appeals court nominee, demonstrating to Republicans they can’t stop President Barack Obama from turning the federal judiciary to the left.
The 70-29 vote limited debate over the qualifications of U.S. District Judge David Hamilton of Indiana, and assured his elevation to the Chicago-based appeals court. Sixty votes were needed to end the filibuster, but confirmation only requires a simple majority of the 100-member Senate.
Ten Republicans repudiated their own party leaders and voted to limit debate. The Obama administration made a crucial decision from the outset by getting the support of Hamilton’s home-state Republican senator, Richard Lugar.
The vote emphatically warned Republicans that with only 40 senators, they’re too outnumbered to prevent Obama from making major inroads into a judiciary that was populated over eight years with conservative judges chosen by President George W. Bush.
Republicans have objected to holding a vote on Hamilton’s confirmation since June, when the Judiciary Committee reported his nomination favorably to the full Senate.
Conservative Republican senators and their judicial-watching outside groups then launched a major political assault on Hamilton.
They criticized his rulings against Christian prayers in the Indiana legislature and against a menorah in the Indiana Municipal Building’s holiday display.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Eileen Braman
What role academia?
November 17, 2009 · 2 Comments
So building off my comments from yesterday I’d like to raise the issue of what political science research has to say about the legitimacy of judicial institutions, point out an apparent discrepancy in research on different aspects of our legal system, and ask (somewhat provocatively) what our role is as academics in informing the general public about the “realities” of how that system works when they seem to operate in stark contrast to traditional understandings of what our legal system is designed to do.
First, starting with Pritchett (1942), decades of behavioral research reveals that judges vote disproportionately in favor of outcomes that are consistent with their political preferences. These results stand in direct contrast to the notions that unelected judges derive authority from their expertise and ability to act as unbiased “interpreters of the law.” Now clearly we need some sort of third party arbitrators to resolve disputes that inevitably arise between people in our society – the question is why do judges get to make those determinations. The answer according to democratic theory is because they are experts in legal interpretation and will make judgments according to that expertise. Empirical findings however reveal the strong influence of other factors including political preference and ideology. Concerns about the equal administration of justice and the fairness of judicial outcomes are necessarily implicated when outcomes have more to do with the idiosyncratic preferences of who is on the bench than what the law requires under particular circumstances. Now this is not really the fault of the framers – they didn’t know better than to put their faith in traditional notions of legitimate judicial authority deriving from objective exercise of legal expertise – but after 50 years of empirical research don’t we know better now? Isn’t it time to reconcile outdated notions of judicial authority with current understandings of influences on judicial behavior? Political scientists have seemed content with demonstrating the fallacy of formalistic notions of legal decision making over the last half century – but we haven’t really adequately dealt with the normative implications of these findings.
More than this, research on public opinion on the legal system seems to celebrate the fact that citizens generally hold the courts and judges in high esteem compared to other institutions and political officials based on what Gibson and Caldeira have called “legitimizing myths” about how judges and the court system operates. Is this really cause for celebration? Should we be happy that people come to value courts based on misconceptions about how they operate? There is even research that suggests that people can hold courts in high esteem, at the same time they understand that political factors often come into play in the decisions of judges. Shouldn’t someone be pointing out the inconsistency in these two beliefs if part of what our legal system is designed to do is treat individuals equally without bias?
Now of course as someone who has been assigned the role of “guest blogger” my comments here are intentionally designed to be provocative. But I guess I’m wondering what the larger role of academics is in shaping public perceptions of the political institutions that are the subject of our research. The issue seems to come to a head whenever a new Supreme Court justice is nominated. Political scientists often want to throw tomatoes at C-SPAN when we hear judges talking about being umpires, objectively calling balls and strikes, because it is so contrary to our understanding of the judging in the legal system actually works. But the dog and pony show has a purpose. We, as a society, need our myths. OR we need a completely different justification of why judges get to make the decisions they do. To debunk the former without coming up with the latter would cause extreme discomfort if citizens started to really think about the democratic implications of what we do as empirical scholars. Maybe it’s a good thing that they don’t as a matter of routine. But to what extent to we have an obligation to point out these inconsistencies between the unrealistic requirements of democratic theory and the way the legal system actually works…
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Eileen Braman
Why Political Science Often Is Irrelevant
October 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment
The proposed Coburn amendment to eliminate the political science division of the National Science Foundation and funding for political science research has once again raised the question of whether academic research is relevant to real-world problems.
The controversy over electing judges provides interesting insight into this question, particularly when examining the reactions of the advocacy community to scientific studies of judicial elections published in the nation’s leading academic journals, law reviews, and commercial presses. While there certainly are valid criticisms of empirical studies of judicial selection, it simply is the case that empirical findings that contradict political strategies and goals will not be acknowledged and incorporated into the public dialogue no matter how relevant or compelling.
It has not mattered, for example, that empirical evidence has shown for decades that there are no measurable differences between judges chosen in partisan elections and judges chosen by other “less political” methods. Nor have many in the “reform” community demonstrated concern with the fact that nonpartisan elections effectively disenfranchise large segments of the electorate, raise the costs of seeking office, and open supreme court races to idiosyncratic forces. Similarly, recent evidence showing that confidence in courts is not lower in states using partisan elections has not been incorporated into the public dialogue, or the fact that elections are perhaps the most powerful legitimacy-conferring institutions in the world.
The bottom line is that contradictory evidence is irrelevant to actors pursuing their own agendas, an irony in the case of judicial selection since many of the most aggressive advocates against judicial elections are judges and attorneys. The same evidence also may seem, without effort to understand it, incomprehensible.
In fact, many advocates in the judicial selection controversy engage in forms of fact-finding quite removed from the standards and practices of scientific journals in political science, including the use of anecdotes to claim general tendencies or to discredit them, public opinion polls with biased question wording and flawed sampling strategies, incorrect and selective interpretation of poll results, and reliance on the opinions of “experts” as concrete evidence of problems that cannot yet be seen but nonetheless purportedly are looming. These are attempts to seek the truth but often produce evidence that does not withstand more rigorous scientific scrutiny.
There is another kind of problem, however, quite apart from sincere though flawed attempts to seek the truth. Best explained by Princeton University Professor Emeritus Harry Frankfurt in his illuminating essay On Bullshit, there is a distinct form of expression – “bullshit” – the defining characteristic of which is offering statements to suit one’s own purpose without much regard for whether the statements actually are true or false. Given the instrumental nature of political action (no matter how altruistically the goals of many advocacy organizations are stated) and the willingness to argue positions that may lack empirical support, academic work is ignored or dismissed, usually with flimsy arguments not befitting a badly educated high school debate team (more on this in my next post). As part of this, econometrics become easy to caricature among non-academics as being divorced from reality or as having some fatal flaw. Thus, “bullshit” is a powerful countervailing force to science.
In short, science and politics often are not compatible, and no amount of careful study, scientific rigor, or attempts to contribute constructively to the political process will change that. Even so, truth intrinsically is important, and the difficulties political scientists may encounter when engaging political actors does not render the enterprise any less worthwhile.
Melinda Gann Hall
Categories: Uncategorized
Apparently things aren’t *too* bad at some state universities
September 10, 2009 · 1 Comment
In the midst of furloughs and massive cut backs at many state schools, the University of Alabama’s announcement of Nick Saban’s 42.35 million dollar coaching contract is almost humorous … almost. The Faculty Lounge details the announcement here. But college sports pay for everything else at the university, right? As you may recall we already dealt with this question.
Categories: Academia · Jeff · Policy · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Taughannock Falls hiking
July 26, 2009 · Leave a Comment
I did some hiking (glorified walking) at Taughannock Falls yesterday. It’s about 10 miles outside of Ithaca, NY. It takes about an hour to an hour and a half to do the loop around the falls. Here are some pictures.
Here's a nice view of the gorge
Here's a rickety bridge you cross to get over the falls
And finally, here's the view of the falls from said rickety bridge
Categories: Jeff · Uncategorized
More on Selection Bias
July 21, 2009 · Leave a Comment
In my last blog, I noted the problem of selection bias in studying appellate court decisions and also pointed out that Harold Spaeth is coding a sample of denied certiorari petitions that will help us assess the degree to which this problem exists at the SCOTUS. In a recent email from him, he let me know that the Burger Court sample is completed (available at the South Carolina JURI site), and that:
“I am not quite finished coding Blackmun’s docket sheets on the Rehnquist Court (1986-94), but I expect to finish this database by early Fall. It will contain a sample of the Court’s denied petitions allowing individuals to ascertain the proportion of petitions dealing with various legal and constitutional provisions that the Court accepted. No longer will any basis exist for selecting on the dependent variable. The direction of the denied petitions is also provided along with other more or less pertinent data.”
Thanks to Harold for this information.
Of course, this does not solve the problem of selection bias at the U.S. Courts of Appeals or even the trial courts, since the concern could be expressed that disputes settle and therefore there is selection bias in any study of judicial decision making.
This problem ultimately cannot be resolved completely because, as I said in my last post, at some point, it becomes turtles all the way down. Of course, the extent to which selection bias matters depends on the questions the researcher is asking. If you are using court cases as your database to say something about disputes writ large, you’ve got a problem. But if you are studying court cases to say something about court cases, well, then I’m less concerned, even in appellate courts–assuming they have mandatory dockets. The problem obviously becomes more pronounced when courts exercise discretion over their own dockets.
In my next blog, I’ll have something more to say abuot alleged inaccuracies or miscodings in the Spaeth or Songer Databases.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Stefanie Lindquist
When baseball and judicial politics scholars collide
July 17, 2009 · Leave a Comment
it makes headlines — Judicial politics scholar Chris Zorn (and methodologist Jeff Gill) are featured in the Wall Street Journal discussing the DH rule and political ideology.
Categories: Jeff · Uncategorized
Public Support for the Sotomayor Nomination
July 10, 2009 · Leave a Comment
This morning, CNN released the results of a survey regarding public support for Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. About 47% of Americans support confirmation while 40% oppose it (13% had “no opinion”). To provide context, these results suggest that she is faring better than Harriet Miers did at this point. The percent supporting confirmation are comparable to Alito’s (and probably within the margin of error for Ginsburg and Thomas at a comparable point in their confirmation processes), but she also has more negative ratings than Alito, Ginsburg, and Thomas had. Naturally, though, her qualifications (“Well Qualified” ABA rating as noted by Paul Collins noted below) along with 60 Democratic votes in the Senate continue to make this look like a nomination that will end with a successful confirmation.
Categories: Courts · Damon Cann · Uncategorized
How Liberal is Sonia Sotomayor?
June 26, 2009 · Leave a Comment
One of the problems in answering questions as to how liberal or conservative a judge might be is coming up with some acceptable measure of ideology. There is no generally accepted measure of lower court ideology. A judge’s own partisan affiliation and the ideology of a judge’s appointing president have often been employed as useful surrogates of judicial attitudes. Scholars have sometimes ignored the ideology of the judge, and inferred his or her ideology from that of the appointing president. For example, Tate and Handberg (1991) proposed a measure of the ideology of the appointing president: -1 for ideologically conservative and presidents, 0 for nonideological presidents, and 1 for ideologically liberal presidents.
A recent and now widely used ideology measure was devised by Giles, Hettinger and Pepper (2001). This uses the Poole Nominate scores of the home state senators or of the nominating president if there is no home state senator of the same party as the president. The scores can range from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative). If we examine the nomination of Sotomayor to the United States District Court in 1992, she was nominated by a Republican president with a Republican home state Senator – Al D’Amato. That would peg her ideology at the time at .14, very moderate and just slightly conservative, befitting a then Republican Senator representing a very Democratic state. However, it was well known that both New York Senators employed a courtesy relationship in reference to judicial appointments. Depending upon the party of the president, the Senator of the same party would get 3 out of every 4 judicial appointments and the other Senator 1 out of every 4. Sotomayor was clearly an appointment of Daniel Moynihan. So if we peg the ideology to Moynihan, -.562, then Sotomayor is very liberal. Of course this shows one of the problems with this particular measure, and indeed with any measure of ideology.
Her appointment in 1998 to the Second Circuit presents no such problem. Clinton was president, so we can use Moynihan’s score, which at this time was even more liberal, – .614. Thus by using the Giles, et. al. measure, Sotomayor is very liberal.
Another measure was developed by a former colleague of mine, Dave Nixon, developed a more direct measure for each judge. We first used this in a paper published in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy (2003), and Scott Graves and I use it in our forthcoming book on recess appointments and I use it some other publications and it will be in another forthcoming book of mine of Courts and Tax policy. The calculation begins by using the nominate scores of congressional representatives who later served as federal judges as a formula for determining a nominate score comparable to Nominate scores. The formula then uses various circumstances surrounding the appointment such as unified government, wartime, party of the judge and party of the president, among other factors. Unlike the Giles, et. al. scores the Nixon/Howard scores allow for differences for judges even if appointed from the same state by the same president. The scores range from about -5, most liberal to + 5, most conservative.
Given all that, what is Sotomayor’s ideology based on both appointments? Although appointed first by a Republican president and then by a Democratic president, her ideology is similar in both, particularly since both took place under divided government. Her first score is – .21, while her second is -.28. Both liberal, to be sure, but both more moderate than the Giles, et. al. score.
Which is correct, what better predicts her future voting? Who knows, perhaps neither. We have not even begun to discuss the Segal Cover measure, more on that later.
Bob
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: judicial selection ideology courts
Can Ray break this?
June 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment
… something light and fun to get you through the rest of the week – video of a guy named Ray attempting to break various items while wearing a strong man suit. The circus music and chimpanzee sounds are an especially nice touch. Thank goodness for the serious and thoughtful posting activity of our guest blogger program or you’d probably just get silly stuff like this from me during the summer.
For those of you who are frequent Adam Carolla podcast listeners and know Ray’s backstories, this will be especially fun. But even if you have no idea who he is, it’s still somewhat mindlessly entertaining.
A word of caution: it’s all fairly wholesome fun, but there is some course language when Ray gets frustrated. For what it’s worth, the link (above) works better than the embedded video below, which requires more manual labor to get the videos to all run one after the other.
Categories: Jeff · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Law, Political Science and citation rates
June 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment
I want to thank Jeff and Andy for the introduction and opportunity to guest blog periodically on their website. Although I publish on all areas of law and courts, my particular area of expertise is on law and policy and I hope to blog about that in the near future.
However, one thing that is striking to me as I write for a blog that straddles the lines of political science and law are the differences in citation rates between law and political science and even between fields and subfields in political science.
I am very happy that my work appears to be cited highly and I am particularly pleased that many law professors cite my work. In fact, at least half of my citations are in law related journals and law reviews. However, one reason for that is law reviews cite many more sources than political science. The emphasis on footnotes and careful citation is the norm for law reviews. The entire citation process is very different for political science.
Indeed even within political science there are significant differences. In a 2007 article in PS: Political Science and Politics, Mike Giles and Jim Garand note the significantly lower citation rates of articles and books in American Politics (Giles and Garand, 2007 pp. 746-747) as compared to international and comparative studies. In our department we put some emphasis on citations for those seeking promotion and tenure to Associate Professor and it is very important for promotion to full, yet it appears to hurt those who write and research in American Politics as compared to those who specialize in IR and Comparative Politics.
Maybe I should not complain too much because public law encroaches on legal scholarship so we get the benefit of citations in law reviews and law journals.
Categories: Academia · Bob Howard · Courts · Law · Uncategorized
The world of unusual book titles
May 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment
It seems like Andy and I have gone through endless alternative titles for our book (no, it is not the one pictured above) which should be out this summer on Johns Hopkins Press. However, I’m really glad that none of our tentative titles really rivals (in terms of oddness) any of the titles you will find in Oddee’s collection of strange book titles. You’ll note that one of the books is written by a famous academic. Another one, “Foreskin’s Lament” I have actually read, or more accurately, listened to on Itunes. It’s very funny and you might recognize the author, Shalom Auslander, from his guest appearances on Chicago Public Radio’s program “This American Life.”
Categories: Academia · Jeff · Pop Culture · Presidency · Uncategorized
The *real* victims of the financial crises …
October 25, 2008 · Leave a Comment
… the high end financial executives, of course. Gawker provides a funny youtube video chronicling life after the high life in NYC (below). Perhaps this guy can find fulfillment on Odd Todd – a site devoted to helping those who are unemployed pass the time. Warning: pretty much all of the links in this post (and the youtube video) contain what some may consider coarse language and potentially offensive subject matter; nothing horrible, but not “G” rated, by any means.
Categories: Jeff · Other · Policy · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Why model?
October 22, 2008 · Leave a Comment
The Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Blog has a post on an interesting paper by J.M. Epstein concerning modeling. Here’s an excerpt:
In summary, while most mathematical treatment of statistical modeling tends to be focused purely on prediction, there is a good reason why the cost of interpretation should be considered. Epstein’s list of why interpretability matters should motivate us to care:
1. Explain (very distinct from predict)
2. Guide data collection
3. Illuminate core dynamics
4. Suggest dynamical analogies
5. Discover new questions
6. Promote a scientific habit of mind
7. Bound (bracket) outcomes to plausible ranges
8. Illuminate core uncertainties.
9. Offer crisis options in near-real time
10. Demonstrate tradeoffs / suggest efficiencies
11. Challenge the robustness of prevailing theory through perturbations
12. Expose prevailing wisdom as incompatible with available data
13. Train practitioners
14. Discipline the policy dialogue
15. Educate the general public
16. Reveal the apparently simple (complex) to be complex (simple)
Categories: Academia · Andy · Data · Jeff · Other · Uncategorized
The impact of the down economy on academia…
October 21, 2008 · Leave a Comment
… more specifically on hiring trends, on Leiter and Alfred Brophy on the Faculty Lounge Blog here and here. They make some interesting comments and predictions. I may post on this later when I’ve had more time to think about the topic, but I’ll posit two quick thoughts here: 1) any downturn in the economy creates institutional reactions, true, but it also creates personal reactions to those reactions. If teaching loads go up or tenure becomes more difficult (two of the predicted effects of the economic downturn), then academia becomes less attractive to certain individuals who may pursue alternative career paths. This, in turn, has its own implications. 2) A downturn in the economy also creates opportunities for those institutions who are better situated to deal with it – poaching may become more prevalent as more financially flush institutions are able to attract laterals from relatively less well off institutions.
Categories: Academia · Data · Jeff · Law · Other · Uncategorized
Letterman’s Top 10 list …
October 4, 2008 · Leave a Comment
… of messages left on Sarah Palin’s answering machine after the debate.
Categories: Uncategorized
Presidential candidate commercials through time
September 16, 2008 · Leave a Comment
While the satirical candidate public service announcement video (below), starring Tina Fey (as Sarah Palin) and Amy Poehler (as Hillary Clinton) is good fun, if you want to see the actual presidential candidate commercials they are available on “The Living Room Candidate.”
Categories: Uncategorized
The Republican convention and Comic-Con to merge?
September 1, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
Who pays for what?
August 11, 2008 · Leave a Comment
This Marginal Revolution post on faculty subsidization is, um… interesting. And here I was thinking that football paid all faculty salaries 
Actually, more interesting is a comment from the post which I provide below the fold.
Categories: Uncategorized
Battlestar Galactica – the show up to now
August 3, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Get ready for the Battlestar Galactica finale by watching show video clips below! You can skip the “Caprica” ad video and go straight to the final season recap if you prefer.If you’ve never seen the show, then you might start out with the earlier recap here. Warning: these recaps have spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen episodes and want to watch them without such knowledge, then don’ watch the recaps.
Categories: Uncategorized
Voir Dire post featured
July 31, 2008 · Leave a Comment
A VDB post was recently featured on a blog carnival. Check it out here, under the “work” section.
Categories: Uncategorized
Are you a problem solver? Need a problem solved? Now there’s a social network
July 24, 2008 · 2 Comments
The New York Times reports on Innocentive, a company that’s all about solving problems – and highly varied ones at that. Here’s an excerpt:
Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said in an interview that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.
“Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our network,” Mr. Spradlin said. “Procter & Gamble has products that were innovated on the InnoCentive network.”
InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, an in-house innovation “incubator” at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, Mr. Spradlin said, with the company posting problems that its employees had been unable to solve. From the beginning the results were good, he said. “Most of our companies tell us they have a one-third or better solve rate on their problems and that is more cost-effective than anything they could have done internally.”
Here are some of the problems that are currently available to be solved:
We are interested in finding ways for people to make long-term habit changes in lifestyle. This is an Ideation challenge so your creativity and experience qualify you to participate in this challenge. Responses are expected to be about 2 written pages. (award $20,000)
My solution: spankings for adults when they engage in bad habits; problem solved, but there may be limitations
Design a long chewing product that does not require disposal. The product can dissolve in the mouth or break-up and be swallowable with no negative health impact on the body. (award $100,000)
My solution: I have this product I’m “developing” – I call it “salt water taffy”
We are looking for a technology that allows a timed-release flavor change to occur in a food product. (award $50.000)
Wait a minute, didn’t Willy Wonka already invent this? Oh yeah, he did, but it turned Veruca Salt into a giant blueberry.
Categories: Data · Jeff · Other · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Yale prof on elite education
June 20, 2008 · Leave a Comment
William Deresiewicz’s article, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers,” appears in the current issue of The American Scholar. [hat tip to Prettier Than Napoleon blog]
Categories: Academia · Jeff · Other · Policy · Uncategorized
A city in a time of cholera
April 15, 2008 · Leave a Comment
The New York Times has an intriguing article on how the city of New York was influenced by and how it reacted to the cholera epidemics of the 18th century. It is an interesting case study for students of public policy and perhaps topical given recent threats of epidemics.
Despite the epidemics of ’32 and ’49, people still flocked to New York and other teeming cities. But the first outbreak bolstered support for the Croton Aqueduct system to bring clean upstate water to the city, a project, completed in 1842, that led to the phasing out of private and neighborhood wells that were often polluted with human and animal waste. In 1849, the municipal government banished more than 20,000 pigs to the outer reaches of the city. A similar effort in previous years had provoked riots, but this time a public chastened by epidemic complied.
Finally, after the work of Dr. Snow in London and a lesser cholera outbreak in New York in 1866, the Metropolitan Board of Health was established with doctors in commanding roles and broad powers to clean up the city. Inspectors went to houses and burned clothing of people who had just died. They cleared the filth, spread lime and instructed survivors in proper sanitation.
Cities had learned, or should have, that epidemics as a consequence of urbanization were their responsibility to prevent and control.
Categories: Jeff · Other · Policy · Uncategorized
Who are the most powerful members of Congress?
March 10, 2008 · 1 Comment
Categories: Data · Jeff · Other · Policy · Uncategorized
The topic: government subsidies for college tuition – talk amongst yourselves
February 27, 2008 · Leave a Comment
The Volokh Conspiracy Blog has a provocative post outlining the case against government subsidization of college tuition. You don’t have to agree with everything it says to find it interesting. The comments are also pretty read-worthy.
Categories: Academia · Jeff · Law · Policy · Uncategorized
The law of ‘Battlestar Galactica’
February 25, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Over on Concurring Opinions Blog, Daniel Solove and crew are featuring a three part interview with the creators, writers, and producers of the sci-fi tv show ‘Battlestar Galactica‘. The focus of the interviews is the role of law in the show; topics include trials and tribunals, necessity vs. moral principles, torture, and deference to the military, among others.
Finally, two independently great nerdy things (i.e. sci-fi and legal academia) come together to produce something really great. Surely, supernerds Ira Glass, David Sedaris, and Sarah Vowell are involved somehow.
Categories: Academia · Jeff · Law · Other · Policy · Pop Culture · Presidency · Uncategorized
Labor relations explained through sock puppets
February 18, 2008 · Leave a Comment
I think that the title pretty much says it all. Congrats to the television writers on their successful strike! What did they actually win and what did we learn? (Hat tip to Balkinization)
Categories: Jeff · Law · Other · Policy · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Update on Reich’s “Totally Spent”
February 15, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Some interesting comments on Robert Reich’s NY Times article, “Totally Spent,” can be found here. His blog is here.
Below are some remarks by Reich at the Goldman School.
Categories: Uncategorized
It’s the economy stupid – Robert Reich on being “Totally Spent”
February 13, 2008 · 1 Comment
As the presidential candidate field narrows and the parties begin to square off against each other we will be hearing many familiar “competing yet somehow similar” solutions to how to handle the economy. Will any of the usual strategies offered by the candidates work? Robert Reich doesn’t seem to think they will. In his NY Times op-ed piece,”Totally Spent,” he writes:
The problem lies deeper. It is the culmination of three decades during which American consumers have spent beyond their means. That era is now coming to an end. Consumers have run out of ways to keep the spending binge going.
The only lasting remedy, other than for Americans to accept a lower standard of living and for businesses to adjust to a smaller economy, is to give middle- and lower-income Americans more buying power — and not just temporarily.
He adds that familiar fixes such as tax breaks for businesses or fed rate adjustments will not ultimately be effective solutions. The problem, he explains, is much deeper.
Categories: Jeff · Law · Other · Policy · Presidency · Uncategorized
Marriage as a mundane and boring non-profit business – but in a good way!
February 9, 2008 · Leave a Comment
In The Atlantic, Lori Gottlieb’s article, “Marry Him!The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” advises women to heed just what the title indicates. While it’s certain to be an argument-starter, it’s also a very interesting read, regardless of how you feel about her views. Here are some excerpts:
What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way. (Emphasis added)
and…
Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men settle far less often and, when they do, they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that they’re settling.
and finally this …
But then my married friends say things like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons” or “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anyone putting the kid in front of the TV and you can raise your son the way you want.” I’ll even hear things like, “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”
The lists go on, and each time, I say, “OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!”
Not one person has taken me up on this offer.
I initially saw this article posted on VC and the comments there are almost as interesting as the article. There’s also an interview with Lori concerning the article here.
Update: The men respond here. Actually, it’s Dr. Helen Smith’s post, but a ton of male comments follow (along with some comments by women). Perhaps this puts a whole new spin on John Edwards’ “Two Americas” – apparently it’s split on gender lines, not class I had no idea that there was this much discontent out there.
Categories: Jeff · Other · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Interdisciplinary faculty, publishing, teaching loads, and the costs of legal education
February 3, 2008 · Leave a Comment
In the seemingly never ending discussion of the utility and appropriateness of hiring interdisciplinary scholars for 3-4 tier law schools Alfred Brophy offers a fresh perspective that gets to the bottom line. First, no one has offered any systematic evidence that interdisciplinary scholars are better or worse law teachers than non-interdisciplinary scholars – when I see such evidence, then we can begin discussing its accuracy and insightfulness. Until then, Brophy does a wonderful job of stating the obvious – and I mean this in a non-sarcastic way – hard to believe, but true. The real question here is about law faculty publishing vs. law faculty teaching in tier 3-4 schools. In most of these schools, the non-law faculty have anywhere from a 3-2 teaching load to a 4-4 teaching load. The expectations for these professors regarding research are certainly lower than their counterparts at 2-2 load schools. Brody sets forth an example of the potential savings to a law school and its students if such a teaching load.
So, take a hypothetical fourth tier law school with 21 faculty. Each faculty members costs $110,000 per year and teach 12 hours a year. Then increase their teaching load to 18 hours a year (a three-three load.) That increase by 50% in the teaching load would allow us to reduce the faculty to 14, for a savings of $770,000 per year. If all of that savings were passed on to student body of 630, that’s a savings of $1222 per student. That is perhaps not the earth-shaking transformation in legal education (or the cost of it) that we might hope for. Yet, this might very well be something some schools want to do and it’s a choice some students might opt for as well.
Brophy sets this forth as an all or nothing idea – abandon the writing requirement and have law faculty teach a 3-3 course load. I don’t think that most political science departments with a 3-3 load allow their faculty to do away with the writing component of their jobs – it’s less than what one finds at a 2-2 load school, but there are still requirements to publish. I know of a good number of people at 3-3 load schools who actively publish and do it well (and teach well). So, I am wondering what the new publishing standard for tenure and promotion in law schools might be with, say, a 3-3 or 4-4 teaching load. Brophy wonders about why such teaching load adjustments haven’t already occurred:
Perhaps there is more of it already going on than I’m familiar with–but for the moment let’s assume that increases in teaching loads beyond 12 hours/year are rare even at fourth tier schools. Why we’re not seeing more of this? It would seem to me that there are sufficient opportunities for fourth tier schools to innovate in this direction, if there is a need for this and if it makes sense. In short, I’m wondering, if dropping scholarship is such a great idea, why hasn’t it happened yet? I wouldn’t imagine that the ABA’s accreditation standards (particularly 402) would prevent this change.
I have a tentative answer to Alfred’s question “why hasn’t it happened yet?” Some faculty at 2-2 load schools who loudly protest that we should emphasize teaching more and research less may not actually want to teach more classes – they may simply want more credit for teaching the 4 classes per year that they already teach.
So, again, I ask – what would be the proposed publication standard for tenure at a law school with a 3-3 load? A 4-4 load? A 2-2 load for that matter? I recognize that it’s hard to state such things specifically, but we’re looking for a ballpark figure here? 8 articles? A book and 3 articles? 7 articles? Placement and impact considerations? Teaching performance considerations? Other factors?
Categories: Academia · Data · Jeff · Law · Other · Uncategorized
Presidential Candidate Crushes – “Who Loves Ya Baby?”
February 1, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Lee Sigelman has chronicled all (or at least most) of the candidate crushes on The Monkey Cage. What can we say? People love their presidential hopefuls. Yup, Obama Girl, Hillary Boy, McCain Momma, they’re all there (and below):
Hillary Boy
Just when I think I’ve gotten caught up, along comes something new.
Or, in this case, something derivative and not nearly as good as the original. But something inevitable. We should have seen it coming.
Click here to find out for yourself.
Could “McCain Mama” be next? Nope, not next — it’s already been done.
And here, as a Hit Parade Extra, is yet another “Obama Girl” wanna-be video, this one (“You’re So Lame”) focusing on George W. Bush.
[Hat tip to Paul Gronke for Hillary Boy; I found the others by myself, though I’m not sure why I bothered]
In a piece of totally unrelated pop culture that does not warrant its own post, I do urge you to check out possibly one of the 21st century’s boldest ideas Cheeseburger in a Can. (hat tip to GeekPress)
Categories: Academia · Jeff · Other · Pop Culture · Presidency · Uncategorized
Does your TSCS data sometimes feel sluggish or time-invariant?
January 27, 2008 · Leave a Comment
… If so, then maybe it’s time you tried FEVD, that’s right, FEVD – or “Panel Fixed Effects Regression with Vector Decomposition” (stata command is xtfevd). It’ll have your data up and feeling better in no time.
Well, ok, maybe not all that. Just be glad that I didn’t provide one of those “rapid fire at the end of the message statements” regarding the potential not so great side-effects of the treatment. In a recent issue of Political Analysis, there is a series of articles on the perils of TSCS data that suffer from sluggish (slow moving over time) or time-invariant variables. In what some may consider an unprecedented move in statistical methodology,Thomas Plumper (University of Essex) and his co-author, Vera Troeger, actually propose an understandable solution to the problem. Here’s the paper’s abstract:
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The death of the billable hour and speculations on the limits of legal change
January 24, 2008 · 1 Comment
Nancy Rapoport’s recent post ponders the viability of the “death of the billable hour.” There is also a recent NY Times article on changing attitudes toward the billable hour at Big Law firms. Most of the discussion focuses on the lifestyles of lawyers, but what are the long term legal policy implications of such a potentially fundamental shift in fee mechanisms? Several decades ago, fee mechanisms were an integral part of Marc Galanter’s classic article, “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change.” (9 Law & Society Review 95 (1974)). One of his points was that corporations and insurance companies used Big Law lawyers, whose profitability incentives typically involved putting as many hours into a case as the client would bear. On the flip side of the litigation, single-shot ‘have not’ litigants were typically represented by plaintiff lawyers (working on a contingency arrangement) whose profitability incentives typically involved putting as few hours as possible on a case to attain desired settlement or, in the rare situation, trial victory. This situation and other concerns, Galanter argued, led to long term policy implications favoring “have” litigants. Certainly, other factors mattered – such as the ability to play long term litigation strategies; however, the billing structure may be important.
If Big Law has agreed to a flat fee arrangement in a typical case, might the likelihood of a “Have” winning be diminished? Clearly, Big Law has less incentives to put in hours on a single case – the inability to move on to a new case with a new flat fee is the relevant opportunity cost. If, in fact, a new pay structure for corporate clients means fewer hours per case, does this mean “better” representation and a higher likelihood of winning? And, if so, what are the long term legal implications of this phenomenon?
I don’t pretend to have all of this sorted out, but I think that the specter of the “death of the billable hour” raises some interesting policy questions.
Categories: Academia · Courts · Data · Jeff · Law · Policy · Uncategorized
Apparently, someone doesn’t like STATA
January 21, 2008 · 3 Comments
On the Law and Letters Blog, Belle Lettre goes into some detail on exactly how much she hates the statistics software program STATA. Below is an excerpt from her rant (slightly edited to preserve our pseudo PG rating):
STATA is the worst program in the history of the world, and if I didn’t need to know how to read/do statistics better, I’d want to drop the class. If I wasn’t concurrently enrolled in an awesome Empirical Analysis of Gender Discrimination course, I would definitely drop it, except that I actually want to get an article out on sexual harassment by the summer, and I sort of argue for the use of empirical analysis of discrimination by courts and the EEOC.
Also, while the professors and the TA are awesome, I do not really understand the pedagogy of belaboring the basic DOS commands (granted, I suck at those, but dude, just give a handout) and rushing through, in the last half hour of class, the section on how to tell Stata to calculate the fraction of observations that are one standard deviation away from the mean for the two variables it took me three hours to figure out how to generate and code as dummy variables. I cannot, for the life of me, recall learning how to do this in class. Nor how to properly do a histogram and specify heights and widths and $#@&. I think I can calculate this stuff with a calculator and draw boxes on graph paper faster, but I have to send in log files. Which also took me a half hour to figure out how to do.
Thus, I do not get the point of making people muddle through basic DOS-like commands without instructive guides. Isn’t the point to teach the statistics, not “learn how to be frustrated at a &*$% irritating program”?! Tell people what stupid monkey commands to enter, but ask them to analyze the significance, which is the important part, right?
First, I’d like to say that I really like her phrase “stupid monkey commands” – it seems like a phrase that people could use in everyday conversation – much like another phrase I just learned, “leave Britney alone!” which can be used against someone when they are giving you a hard time (e.g. your paper discussant on a conference panel). But I digress.
Belle, stupid monkey commands and feeling frustrated and inept for no good reason are all an integral part of the development of a social science scholar. It’s kind of like the Socratic method in law school – there’s not a lot of solid evidence that it actually makes you a good lawyer and it’s usually pedagogically inefficient and even abused by some profs. But, it establishes the hierarchy and makes you “work for it”. If everyone just gave you the STATA code or taught their law classes in a concise, straightforward manner, then you wouldn’t learn to “think like a social scientist (or lawyer).”
All fun aside, there is a “hide the ball” dynamic in almost every professional field, but hate the game, not the player (i.e. STATA). It’s funny that STATA should be criticized for being nonintuitive; when people came to discover it in the mid to late 1990s it was heralded as a great advancement, because it allowed you to perform some relatively high end statistical analysis (much more so than SPSS) and was much easier to use than other dos command based programs (e.g. LIMDEP, SAS, EVIEWS etc.). Now, STATA even has a windows based interface, although it’s not that great yet.
For what it’s worth there are some great books for the beginning STATA user – they’re kind of like the Emanuel’s law outlines of statistics. These can be found in the STATA bookstore, although you might find used copies cheaper on Amazon or elsewhere. I have found Lawrence Hamilton’s series of books very helpful. STATA also runs an email listserve where you can post your questions, but that can mean a lot of emails unless you take steps to get it in batches. I also find the UCLA statistics tutorial to be very helpful. Finally, and this is most important Belle, you need to convince your law school to hire more interdisciplinary legal scholars – not only will it help you with these STATA problems, but it will give bloggers endless fodder for debate.
Meanwhile, I think that this little video of “Nick Burns the Computer Guy” is relevant and appropriate to the topic.
Categories: Academia · Conferences · Data · Jeff · Law · Other · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Questioning the midlife crises
January 15, 2008 · Leave a Comment
In the New York Times health section, Dr. Richard Friedman questions the viability of the seemingly widespread “midlife crises” among people (primarily men) of a certain age. He notes:
Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.
But surely someone has had a genuine midlife crisis. After all, don’t people routinely struggle with questions like “What can I expect from the rest of my life?” or “Is this all there is?”
Then, a study…
Of course. But it turns out that only a distinct minority think it constitutes a crisis. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation study on midlife development surveyed 8,000 Americans ages 25 to 74. While everyone recognized the term “midlife crisis,” only 23 percent of subjects reported having one. And only 8 percent viewed their crisis as something tied to the realization that they were aging; the remaining 15 percent felt the crisis resulted from specific life events. Strikingly, most people also reported an increased sense of well-being and contentment in middle age.
And some reflections…
So what keeps the myth of the midlife crisis alive?
The main culprit, I think, is our youth-obsessed culture, which makes a virtue of the relentless pursuit of self-renewal. The news media abound with stories of people who seek to recapture their youth simply by shedding their spouses, quitting their jobs or leaving their families. Who can resist?
Most middle-aged people, it turns out, if we are to believe the definitive survey.
Except, of course, for the few — mainly men, it seems — who find the midlife crisis a socially acceptable shorthand for what you do when you suddenly wake up and discover that you’re not 20 anymore.
I guess I shouldn’t like this article since it denies me the American male birthright to have a midlife crises, but I thought that it was pretty interesting. I have some questions though. Do we really even know when a midlife crises is supposed to occur? You usually see it discussed in the context of men in their late forties or early fifties – does this mean that they expect to live to be 100? Perhaps we should call it a 2/3 life crises. What if you have a family history of, let’s say, lack of longevity – should you go ahead and start your midlife crises at 28? I think that there was a Northern Exposure episode on this issue, but I forget the details. Also, what implications does this have for the quarter-life crises (which allegedly affects males and females equally) that I heard so much about a while back?
Categories: Jeff · Other · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Are the legal and medical professions ‘falling down’?
January 9, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Apparently it’s not cool to be a doctor or lawyer anymore. Of course, this assumes that it ever really was. In fairness, law and medical schools turn down thousands of applicants every year and this provides at least some supporting evidence of each profession’s coolness or at least its relative popularity. The New York Times reports that people are rapidly becoming disenchanted with these two professions and are looking for something “cooler,” namely something more on the creative side of the occupational spectrum.
Categories: Academia · Courts · Jeff · Law · Other · Policy · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Edwards, Class Politics, and “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
January 2, 2008 · 1 Comment
Enik Rising Blog (ER) has an insightful post on the politics of culture vs. the politics of class. With some help from Larry Bartels, ER makes a powerful case that for Democrats the road to the presidency is paved with class politics bricks. This stands in contrast to Frank’s book, What’s the Matter With Kansas? which makes the case that it’s all about cultural differences.
Where Frank’s book fails is that it largely buys into this culture argument. That is, he maintains that culture war politics are actually working – that working class whites are abandoning the Democrats due to cultural appeals. As Bartels shows, that’s not true. If anything, the class schism in this country has become more pronounced over the past few decades, with the wealthier far more likely to vote Republican than they used to be.
ER then goes on to argue that Edwards is the only Democratic candidate who is forcefully making the class based argument and that the culture based arguments are essentially, “not the way the [Democratic] electorate rolls.” Here’s a final exerpt:
Strip away all the hot air about Republicans liking NASCAR and beer and Democrats liking Volvos and wine and you see that the real split between the parties is economic. And it’s not just rhetorical – poorer people do better under Democratic presidents than they do under Republican presidents. Poorer voters seem to get this, and there are a lot more of them than there are wealthy voters.
Categories: Jeff · Other · Policy · Pop Culture · Uncategorized
Thanks for answering my question on the writers’ strike
January 1, 2008 · Leave a Comment
On Workplace Prof Blog, Jeffrey Hirsch (University of Tennessee) recently noted the settlement of the strike by David Letterman (who owns his show) and, more importantly, addressed a lingering question that I had on the writers’ strike. The claim of entertainment executives is essentially that they can’t give writers a piece of the internet/digital profits because it’s too early; no one knows exactly how profitable such ventures will be. Hirsh writes:
Details on the Letterman deal have not emerged, but the show has essentially said that they gave the writers what they were asking for, which wasn’t very much. This fits my understanding of the dispute, which seems not to be about any significant amount of money. The writers are asking for a percentage of revenue that may come from the Internet and other digital sources, much like they do from more traditional sources. The studios are objecting, in part because they can’t predict what will happen. But, isn’t that what a percentage takes into account? If there’s nothing, the studios don’t have to pay anything more. If significant revenues eventually occur, they would have to pay–but why shouldn’t they? This seems much more of a power play than anything related to studios bottom-line, a story that is quite familiar to those of us who have practiced in this area.
Of course, the obvious retort would be that while they (management) don’t know the expected profitability of the internet/digital ventures, they have taken risks and invested capital in the new idea – so, no one knows what the profit to investment ratio might be. Well, I’m pretty sure that it’s not a number that appropriately yields a zero percent cut for writers. If management is actually taking a loss, then, as Hirsch points out, 5% of nothing is nothing. If it turns out to be profitable, then the writers still certainly deserve to have a stake in a gain that derives from their work. But, there should be an appropriate discounting of the writers’ cut, given that the risks were undertaken by management. However, I hesitate to say that management executives took risks – the shareholders maybe – but I find it hard to argue that CEOs and other upper management are taking meaningful risks – as far as I can tell they do pretty well (what with the golden parachutes and all) regardless of whether ventures fail or succeed.
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Caron’s wrap-up on why professors are so unhappy
December 31, 2007 · 1 Comment
Is available on TaxProf blog here. As you may have seen his second post on this question generated a good amount of blog buzz. Below are the blog links that discussed the issue:
- Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA), Are Law Professors Unhappy? And, If So, Why? (Business Associations Blog)
- Peter Black (Queensland), Are Legal Academics Miserable? (Peter’s Black Freedom to Differ)
- Eric Fink (Elon), Taking Stock, and Finding a Bull Market (Debris)
- Dave Hoffman (Temple), Bainbridge on Law Professor Well-Being (Concurring Opinions)
- Brian Leiter (Texas): Are Law Professors Unhappy? (Leiter’s Law School Reports)
- Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee), Are Law Professors Unhappy? Not This One! (InstaPundit)
- Tom Smith (San Diego), Why Are Law Professors (and Everybody Else) Unhappy? (The Right Coast)
- Ilya Somin (George Mason), Are Law Professors Miserable, and If So Why? (The Volokh Conspiracy)
- Ilya Somin (George Mason), Some Evidence on Law Professors’ Relative Job Satisfaction (The Volokh Conspiracy)
From what I have read of the posts’ comments (Volokh has some good ones) most don’t believe that law professors are unhappy as a general group, but that some may be. Potential reasons for unhappiness include the real or perceived irrelevance of their work and real or perceived competitiveness in the academy, among others. Of course, a good number of commenters suggest that even if law professors (and I’m guessing that they mean professors generally) are unhappy, then they should get over it.
After having had many, many conversations concerning peoples’ employment happiness (some being voluntary on my part; some not so much) with people from a wide variety of occupations , I’ve come to the conclusion that nearly everyone believes that their job is really hard, really important and socially-redeeming, and that they are really underappreciated, and really underpaid.
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A trend in lateral hiring?
December 28, 2007 · Leave a Comment
On Prawfsblawg, Michael O’Hear wonders about what is driving the perceived trend in more lateral hiring in law schools. I say ‘perceived trend’ because I haven’t seen any hard evidence of it. I’m pretty sure that he’s right that such a trend does exist, although I wonder about the magnitude. Could it just be that more fanfare surrounds lateral hiring because of websites like Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports? O’Hear notes:
If there has been a broader upswing in lateral hiring, I wonder if it has been more supply or demand driven. On the demand side, the importance of the U.S. News survey has made law schools more sensitive to their reputation within the national legal academy, and lateral hiring seems more likely to provide an immediate reputational bump than entry-level hiring. On the supply side, as a member of our Appointments Committee in the recent past, I was surprised by the number of direct contacts we had from faculty members at other law schools looking to move on. (I once even had an expression of interest from someone I was calling for a reference check for an entry-level candidate!) Perhaps the greater connectedness of the academy in the Internet age has spawned a generation of junior faculty members who feel less attached to their home institutions than previous generations and who are more motivated to make moves that will enhance opportunities or status within the national academic community. Likewise, for junior faculty members who are not entirely satisfied with their current situations (for geographical reasons or otherwise), the Internet provides opportunities to build a reputation relatively quickly, and also facilitates the sort of networking that may pave the way for lateral moves.
On the Conglomerate Blog, Gordon Smith follows up by commenting that this activity may be driven by a broader trend – the spread of scholarly ambition beyond the top law schools. He says:
Notice the implicit assumption: that the driving force behind lateral hiring is scholarship. Of course, this is widely understood, but making that assumption explicit highlights the spread of scholarly ambition beyond elite law schools. While lower-ranked law schools may have their own unique missions — and thus may be worthy receptacles of institutional investment by faculty members — they also serve, in some instances, as “farm teams” for higher-ranked schools. Oddly, the quickest path to increased reputational capital for lower-ranked law schools probably does not come from hiring laterals, but from producing laterals for elite law schools.
All of this causes me to wonder: Is there any development in legal education of the past generation that has had a more important influence on the teaching of law than the spread of scholarly ambition beyond elite law schools?
I think that most would agree that both trends are found in political science as well, to one degree or another. I’m not sure if all of the lateral movement in pol sci is upward – there appears to be a lot of “sideways” movement as non-top tier departments vie over productive tenured (and almost tenured) faculty. Given that I know that most people don’t like going on the market and generally don’t like the transaction costs of moving, I am left to wonder if the internal compensation mechanisms and incentive structures of academic institutions don’t play some role in the lateral movement trend. Could it be that the market compensation level for academics is becoming more transparent and national in scope? It seems that (at least) three forces are clearly at work: (a) schools are willing to pay a premium for lateral candidates; (b) home institutions are sometimes willing to make counter offers; (c) faculty are actually willing to move if they do not.
What are the implications of these trends? Is it becoming a winner take all market? Will institutions have to adjust to keep up in this marketplace?
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