Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Brian Leiter: Expert on Drug Testing in Sports

Who knew?  Not me.

What the Republican Party Can Learn from Pakistan

Robert Hockett (Cornell) comments.

An Interesting New On-Line Law Review Feature: Scholarly Discussion of Pending Supreme Court Cases

Courtesy of the new "Roundtable" feature from the Vanderbilt Law Review.  

You know you shouldn't look...

...but you won't be able to resist.

Melbourne Law Faculty in Turmoil

Its Dean, James Hathaway (who is on leave from Michigan), has resigned after only 18 months, and the faculty is in an uproar over a proposed reorganization of the faculty (part of broader financial and administrative adjustments at Melbourne, that have also proved  controversial in philosophy).

Too many law reviews, too many articles to possibly read...

...so Michael Froomkin (Miami) and colleagues will help.

Law school drop-out makes good...

...in economics.

Massive Tuition Hike at UC Hastings College of Law

Given earlier budgetary troubles, this development (Download UC Hastings Law School Tuition Increase)--a 20% hike in the cost of a legal education--is not really surprising, though it is no doubt very painful for the students, especially in this job market.

UPDATE:  Judging from this, it looks like UC Davis has raised its fees even more than Hastings, and of course all the UC law schools are way up.

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer: Dangerously Stupid Journalists of the Month

Many people will get sick and some may even die because these two are too stupid to be able to analyze and evaluate the relevance of evidence.   Share the preceding link with your friends who read The Atlantic. This useful demolition of these two irresponsible hacks is also worth reading.

Many people will get sick and some may even die because these two are too stupid to be able to analyze and evaluate the relevance of evidence.   Share the preceding link with your friends who read The Atlantic. This useful demolition of these two irresponsible hacks is also worth reading.

Workshops in Which Students Enroll for Credit: Approaches

I presented two different papers at back-to-back law & philosophy workshops/seminars this week, at Columbia (run by Joseph Raz) and at Michigan (run by Scott Hershovitz and Don Herzog).  (I don't generally like to discuss the details of academic events on the blog, so suffice it to say that both sessions were very rewarding, and I was grateful for the opportunity to discuss my work with the faculty and students in attendance.)  In both cases, students were taking the workshop for credit, and in both cases the students discussed my paper with the instructor the prior week.  That seems to be fairly typical in these kinds of workshops, in which outside speakers present work on a particular topic or theme.   But at Columbia, after discussing the paper with the students the week before, Raz prepared a set of questions (about 4-5 pages) based on that discussion, which were then sent to me prior to my visit.   At Michigan, the students prepared short (3-4 page) "reaction" papers, which were also sent to me prior to the visit.  At Chicago, the students typically send the instructor(s) questions based on the speaker's paper, and then the instructor(s) help the students reformulate some of the questions for the session with the speaker.

Are there other approaches to involving students in the discussion and examination of papers by visiting speakers?  Do readers, faculty or students, have views about which approaches work best?  Signed comments will be strongly preferred, but only comments with at least a valid e-mail address stand any chance of being approved.