Sunday, December 29, 2002
going through the times
In the news, "Automakers Block Crash Safety Recorders" and "The Republicans Try to Redefine Civil Rights." There's also a fascinating editorial in the Times entitled "When Not Knowing a Celebrity Can Prove Fatal," discussing the phenomenon where diseases with celebrity-associated publicity get lots of funding support, while those without don't---without much relationship to any consideration of scientific efficiency or "social cost." I remember talking about this in law school (Legislation class), and it always disturbed me. (This happens frequently in the environmental arena as well.)
Also pretty cool is an older article about frozen 2,800-year-old bacteria in lakes being brought back to life.
blog redesign
Not here, oh no. But on How Appealing, with my favorite color, blue.(*) Gary from The Statutory Construction Zone talked about it over coffee, and wondered if it would just be a temporary thing, if Howard Bashman was just trying to see if people would notice, but no. It looks permanent. Cool.
(*) Uh, yeah. I have a personal color scheme of blue and green, which I carry through with everything, including my house, my clothing, and really, just everything. Some people think I jest. Fools.
Friday, December 27, 2002
an amar brothers article
The ever-cute Amar brothers have an article on Writ about the precedential weight that should be given to Bakke and Bowers,.
Thursday, December 26, 2002
news
Things on findlaw: Michael Dorf writes about ranking systems (which links to Brian Leiter's rankings, hurrah), and Edward Lazarus writes about Justice Thomas's comments about cross-burning. Me, I'm finally buying holiday presents for people. Because I suck, that's why.
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
hee
A Lawyer's Letter to Santa.
Monday, December 23, 2002
ugh
My blueblanket email's been acting up, so if you emailed me anything on the morning of Monday, December 23, could you email it to me again? Thanks!
controversy over proposed power plant and smelter in iceland
AP Newswire article on it here. On that note, I really really hope to make it to Iceland someday. Which means I should start sending out that group-trip reminder to my friends who've said they're interested in going with me.
scanning the wires
The author of a book on how wealthy Americans can buy shares of defunct offshore banks to avoid paying income taxes was just indicted. Oh, and Time names the FBI, Enron, and WorldCom whistleblowers "Persons of the Year". Which is cool, except gosh, this makes me realize that the "___ of the Year" and "Top ___" Lists are going to start pouring in now. Bleah.
interesting sounding articles roundup
Ira P. Robbins, Justice by the Numbers: The Supreme Court and the Rule of Four---Or Is It Five?, 36 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 1 (2002)
Hillary Charlesworth, Speech, The Hidden Gender of International Law, 16 Temple Int'l & Comp. L.J. 93 (2002)
Oh, and law.com reprints a cute article from the New Jersey Law Journal on on the use of permissive and restrictive words in legal writing.
Sunday, December 22, 2002
hi mom! hi dad!
My parents have finally found my web page, though I've had it around in some form or another for at least seven years.
Saturday, December 21, 2002
random bits of news
Anti-Abortion Exec May Have Stolen E-Mails
EPA Jettisons Clinton Rule On Cleaning Up Waterways
Greenhouse Gases Decrease: Experts Cite U.S. Economic Decline, Warm Winter
on ap newswire
Rehnquist Injury Prompts Retirement Talk. Uh, and a spoof song that we did, to the tune of The Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?"
yo, academics and aspiring academics, here's your chance to gripe or rave
So. If you're an academic, or an aspiring academic, or just an amorphous geek (like me), you know the drill. Publication, publication, publication, in law reviews, law reviews, law reviews. You work on some scholarly piece, and refine it to your personal satisfaction. If your piece happens to please enough student editors, it gets accepted to be published. Hurray, that's it, right?
But no, the process goes on (which you probably should've known, having participated on the other end, or watched your friends participating on the other end, while in law school. Oh, but selective amnesia can be powerful.) Your piece must be edited.
Some of you may have had great experiences being edited. Your editors might have been kind and sweet and incredibly flattering to your text. They might have kept you so informed of every step of the process such that nothing (no deadlines, no edits) were ever a surprise. They might even have corrected blunders (typos, incorrect citations, even, dear me, erroneous discussions) though surely those are some research assistant's or junior associate's fault.
But then, some of you may have had terrible experiences.
Anyway, I'm teaching a seminar called Applied Scholarly Editing at Georgetown this spring. The seminar is for law student editors, and the point of it is to teach both the substance of scholarly editing, as well as to provide perspective on the procedural parts of law journal life (i.e., interacting with authors, managing other students, etc.), the latter being sometimes more salient in students' minds than the substance of editing itself.
More info about the class is here:
http://data.law.georgetown.edu/curriculum/tab_courses.cfm?Status=Course&Detail=1002
It starts on January 11.(*)
Anyway, the class is still relatively new at Georgetown, and one thing I'd like to do is to provide students with more testimonials about what makes a good (or bad) editing experience from the author's perspective. Which is where I'm hoping you can help. Over the last two semesters, we've had a few Georgetown professors come in and speak about what they liked and what they didn't like in their interactions with law journals. We've also had professors come in and speak in the intro class last spring.
But I'd also like to get a larger range of authors---including less established academics, practitioners who are trying to get into academia (or at least get published)---to write about both positive and negative experiences they've had having their pieces edited. The idea is to emphasize wide range of editing experiences available, as well as to show how authors' "goals" in publishing a piece can also affect the editing process.
Anyway, here's your chance to gripe. You can redact the names of the law journals too, if that's a concern, or let me know you want to be anonymous. All the material is to go into a handout, and maybe (if it's okay with you) on a blog I'm setting up to review the law reviews, which will probably not be open for at least a month.
By the way, if you'd be willing to help further and wouldn't mind subjecting your works to various classroom discussions, please
oh please let me know! My email is steph at blueblanket dot net.
(*) By the way, if you've surfed onto this page because you're one of my future students, and particularly if you did so because I so goofily included weblogs on my bio as one of my interests, hi! Glad you googled! I'll be discussing googling during class, I'm sure. Hope you did well on your fall exams!
Thursday, December 19, 2002
instead of blogging
I am singing goofy legal spoof songs at our section holiday party. Geeks away!
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
products liability fun!
I'm of mixed feelings about the use of torts and products liability insurance as an alternate means of regulation. But despite this mixedness, I think that thinking about it is fun. So of course I enjoyed reading this article on Slate, which addresses gun insurance.
sigh
Sorry to go back to the topic of my current state of social angst, but it's vaguely related to being a government lawyer in DC. So. I'll point you all to Pitchfork Review's review of the latest Thievery Corporation album, which has this lovely excerpt: For most readers of the 'Fork, DC means Fugazi, the Dismemberment Plan, and maybe a little go-go. But many who live and work in the city live and die by a single virtue: blandness. If you're a politico or a lawyer, nothing ensures success more than not sticking out. Look at the present Congress-- now that Traficant is behind bars, there's no one to display even the merest hint of idiosyncrasy. Thievery Corporation understand that in a city where Moby's Play is perceived as cutting-edge, they don't have to try too hard-- all it takes is to remember never to release anything that hasn't been exhaustively tried and tested, and in service for years.
The duo realizes that a smattering of international elements-- a brief tabla sample here, an oud there-- will confer apparent substance on tracks that are never to be listened to, but rather to become part of the daily, accessorizing ritual that is the lives of the city's "elite". Professional DC agrees that it's acceptable for lobbyists, lawyers, and corporate accountants to wear certain clothing styles, but not others; to enjoy canonical works of art, but never entertain more experimental forms; to buy certain albums and not others. No surprise, then, that those obnoxious tokens of broadmindedness, the Buddha Bar and Hotel Costes compilations, fly off the shelves of area Borders and Barnes & Noble. But shame and censure await any Hill staffer found in possession of anything more exotic than Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Journeys.
Please note that I haven't listened to The Richest Man in Babylon at all. So I'm not attesting to whether I agree with Pitchfork's critique of The Richest Man. But gawsh, the review does accurately depict DC---or my experience of it at least. Over the holidays, I'm gonna try hiding out from this part of DC. Maybe disappear somewhere, I don't know. The blandness is killing me.
more online resources
In mid January, AAAS will launch an updated online version of its AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment.
some articles
Sherry Colb writes about the same-sex anti-sodomy statute case on Findlaw. And Jonathan Cohn writes about the new appointees to the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention in The New Republic.
hee
Maureen got me a cave bug toy for Christmas.
Note: So Matthew comes in and sees the cave bug. Says he, "You should probably white out its eyes or something. You know. Make them more rudimentary."
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
random
Say you're an attorney, like me. And you have case files and appendices to carry to court. But you don't want to use a boring leather bag that makes you look all stiff because dammit, like me, you're young! You still listen to Underworld and Moby and Chemical Brothers and Dntel and Boards of Canada! You can still club till 4 in your raver pants and your glowey gear!
So what do you do? You buy something like these:
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/topdjgear/2kroldjrecba.html
http://topdjgear.com/prodjcase-rdjb50.html
http://topdjgear.com/odyssey-blpcd140w.html
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=929816908
They work perfectly as document bags. Really.
evaluated
Got my evaluation today. Yay, I'm not fired. ;-)
and on a not so legal but vaguely political note
Thank you, David Brin, for your critique of blind Lord of the Rings fandom.
again with the articles
Issue 4, volume 73 of the University of Colorado Law Review is devoted to assessing the existence/prevalence of judicial activism (among, it looks like, judges of different ideologies)---Howard Bashman, take note! ;-)
hee
This New Republic article begins: One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies.
Actually, though the article seems to stray from its point quite a bit, it is full of so many of these priceless lines that it is worthwhile to read nevertheless.
for those of you who enjoy the gossip of academia
Now that I'm in a situation where my friends and acquaintances aren't hooking up left and right (alas), this becomes the sort of thing I peek at for gossip. But oh, it's good. Brian Leiter, rock on!
(And now I'm gonna tell Peter that he's being watched.)
Monday, December 16, 2002
hmm
We talked about this possibility in (of all places) this issues in disarmament class I took in law school.
interesting law review articles (picked entirely on the basis of their titles)
I used to do this pretty regularly, stopped for awhile, and will now sporadically pick this up again.
Alani Golanski, Linguistics in Law, 66 Albany L. Rev. 61 (2002)
Laura Krugman Ray, Judicial Personality: Rhetoric and Emotion in Supreme Court Opinions, 59 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 193 (2002)
Mark A. Drumbl, Environmental Supra-Nationalism, 59 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 289 (2002)
Robert A. Hillman, The Rhetoric of Legal Backfire, 43 Boston College L. Rev. 819 (2002)
Mark A. Hall, Law, Medicine, and Trust, 55 Stanford L. Rev. 463 (2002)
and
the entire issue 7, volume 90 of the Georgetown Law Journal (a volume which focuses on the numbers behind the EPA's arsenic regulations)
and issue 1, volume 8 of the UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal (which focuses on APAs and voting)
Issue 1, volume 30 of the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review would've gotten a positive reference, but it focused on Palazzolo. And that, coming from a 2002 issue, is too behind the times (given that Tahoe punditry has already come and gone as well) for a good listing. Gotta give incentives for law reviews to publish on time (or at least disincentives to publish out of time).
sometimes our clients just tickle me
Like when the Bureau of Reclamation in the Department of the Interior put up a fish eye view animation of what happens when a fish goes through the proposed fish screen at Klamath.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
the social life of lawyers
Let me sidestep talking about the law or even my particular practice and talk about being a lawyer a little bit. Or, rather, lawyers' and other dcdenizen parties.
(As an aside: Do you do that in your head when you go to parties? Try to figure out if there's a "set" that's there, if such a "set" can be characterized? I do, and it was a very government/lawyerey weekend.)
Friday night seemed to be a Kennedy-School-State-Department set. Saturday morning wasn't particularly characterizable because it was just five of us having brunch. Saturday afternoon was a pleasantly mixed set, because it was a random mix of friends of my friend the realtor---meaning high school friends of his, former/current clients of his, and other random social friends of his. It was very grown up, though, with both opposite-sex and same-sex partnered couples and their two-to-five year olds.
Saturday early evening was a half (neutral) government lawyer set/half firm lawyer party. It bordered on the conservative side of the parties I attend (conservative meaning conservative legally and politically), and it was young adulty, but not crazy young adulty. Saturday mid-evening was very professional liberal lawyerey. Saturday later-evening was liberal pseudohipster liberal lawyerey. Saturday end-evening (which was the one I wish we'd stayed at longest, but alas, no) was slacker rockey, and not very lawyer at all.
I don't know what I mean to say by this entry. I'm certainly not saying the individual parties weren't fun, because they all were in their own way. I think I'm just saying that I'm sick of these easy subcharacterizations for parties: oh, here's the hipster lawyer group, oh, here's the schmoozy group. I'm sick even of running into the same people at parties. I'm not sure if my annoyance can be cured by going to nonlawyer parties because then it would divide into other subgroups I've seen and experienced---queer asians, rockabilly addicts, bloggers. I'm sick of the display of parties, the I-belong-here-and-this-is-why that happens at these things.
Here's what I want. I want a party where my identity (as a lawyer or otherwise), and others' identities, don't matter. I want a party where we can talk about external matters---contemporary Japanese authors, the top cities for thrifting, Tomlab, Dalkey Archives, whatever---not because we're using these to code for Who We Are, but because we just want to talk about them to talk about them. Or whatever we want to talk about. I want to disappear as me, and just see . . . substance? Is that possible?
And maybe my discontent is just me, or just the way I end up at parties. I'm sure I'm missing out on a lot.
Friday, December 13, 2002
the amar brothers...
...have another article up on Findlaw. This one's entitled How Should the Supreme Court Weight Its Own Precedent?, and it discusses both the Michigan affirmative action case and the Texas anti-sodomy law case. But more importantly, it discusses Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which, according to the ever-cute Amar brothers, "privileges cases over the Constitution---the doctrine over the document." They start to argue that the special justification standard accorded in Casey is too much, and should really be a rebuttable presumption of correctness. But it's just a start, as they acknowledge, because the column is to be continued...
linksy links
* Statutory Construction Zone
* Greenwire (subscription only)
Thursday, December 12, 2002
oh boy
I hope I managed to renew my subscription to The Green Bag in time to receive the winter 2002 issue because it has an article called "Legal Lexicography" by Bryan Garner, and dude, I love Bryan Garner.
Saturday, December 07, 2002
fascinating
Wiccan Sues Board Over Prayer Refusal. I'm pretty psyched, just because I've been so waiting for the day that the Wiccans take the lead over the Jehovah's Witnesses in defining First Amendment jurisprudence. This could be the start!
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
aww....so sweet!
A letter my friend Sean (who's teaching law now) just sent three of us after we did a little guest spiel in his class:
Thank you all very much for talking to my class yesterday. The students enjoyed it very much and think that you all have the coolest possible job, which despite all the caveats remains true.
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