clinicians with not enough to do

Law school on the "Block Plan" ?

A query from Howard Wasserman at PrawfsBlawg: Legal education bubble?

For no particular reason, I was thinking today about the "Block Plan" (or "One-Course-at-a-Time") approach used at liberal arts colleges such as Colorado College and Cornell (IA) College. As the name suggests, students take (and professors teach) one class in an intensive 3 1/2- or 4-week block, take one week off, then move on to another single class. And at least Cornell plays up internship and other outside-the-classroom opportunities.

So: Any thoughts on whether law school could work on this model?

For no particular reason, I was thinking today about the "Block Plan" (or "One-Course-at-a-Time") approach used at liberal arts colleges such as Colorado College and Cornell (IA) College. As the name suggests, students take (and professors teach) one class in an intensive 3 1/2- or 4-week block, take one week off, then move on to another single class. And at least Cornell plays up internship and other outside-the-classroom opportunities.

So: Any thoughts on whether law school could work on this model?

New Book on Feminist and Queer Legal Theory

NOW AVAILABLE!

Feminist and Queer Legal Theory

Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations

Edited by Martha Fineman, Jack Jackson and Adam Romero

Hardback edition $124.95

Paperback edition $49.95

Use discount code FLTP20 to receive a 20% discount at Ashgate Publishing.  The publisher’s website is:

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Outcome Measures and Regulatory Failure in Legal Education

Legal Profession Blog

[Posted by Bill Henderson]

Over the last few years, the topic of outcome (or output) measures has been a recurring theme at various association meetings and conferences surrounding legal education.  Some of this discussion is motivated by Department of Education initiatives that want to establish a clear linkage between educational cost and economic returns.  Some schools, however, believe that their fortunes will rise when they can be judged on three years of education (e.g., bar passage rates, employment, student satisfaction) rather than the input measures that drive the U.S. News Rankings.

It is hard to imagine a more impossible task than faculty from 190+ law schools reaching a "consensus" on outcomes measures.  Yet, consensus is not required.  The ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, through its authority to accredit law schools, can require law schools to measure, collect, and report information that the Section determines is in the public interest.   In 2007, the Section created a "Special Committee on Output Measures" and asked it to "define appropriate output measures and make specific recommendations as to whether the Section should adopt those measures a part of the [Accreditation] Standards."

So what happened?  The Special Committee's 76-page single-spaced Final Report, issued in July 2008, made little headway in defining output measures or making specific recommendation regarding accreditation. In a nutshell, the Committee recommended that the Standards be amended so that each law school would be free to define and measure its own outcomes.  In theory, these new Standards could be given teeth by the rigor of the outcome measures (or lack thereof) embodied in a school's self-study report and strategic plan (two processes already required under the accreditation process).  This excerpt from the Final Report puts the best possible spin on the Committee's recommendation:

[A]n approach that accords significant independence to law schools would make it possible for the schools to serve as laboratories for innovation and systemic improvement. ... As law schools experiment with various models of their own choosing, the data these schools generate will inform other schools' experiments and will provide a basis for fine-tuning models for instruction and evaluation. At some point in the future, it may be the case that our understanding of outcome measures has progressed so far, and that certain views have become so widely held, that the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar will be in a position to demand greater specificity in the criteria in the [Accreditation] Standards and/or Interpretations. But, at least at the present time, the Committee believes that in drafting Standards and Interpretations, it is best to give law schools the latitude to experiment with a wide range of models.

When we step back, it is hard to believe that this thousand-flowers-bloom approach is the tack taken by the regulator charged with overseeing legal education.  To paraphrase the above passage, it says "do what you want to do, but try a little harder.  When something works well, and most schools adopt it, the Section can implement it as the new rule.  That way we can avoid difficult decisions that will upset our friends."

In truth, the Committee's approach turns the purpose of outcome measures on its head.  In the broader discussion in higher education, outcome measures are sought because they enable an apples-to-apples assessment of the effectiveness of an educational institution.  Indeed, the entire process is meant to facilitate comparisons.  Why? Because meaningful comparative information levels the playing field between those providing education (the schools) and those financing it (the students/citiizens). When outcome information is readily available, it changes behavior and alters powerful norms, including over-reliance on US News.  In the absence of apples-to-apples outcome information, the market adapts as it does now--by focusing on the basis of inputs (revenues, books, number of faculty, LSAT scores, UGPA, etc.).  It is the opaqueness of legal education that creates a vacuum needed for the US News rankings, which are nearly perfectly correlated with student entering credentials.

The Committee shrinks from the task of defining specific, comparable outcomes because it knows (at least implicitly or subconsciously) that the very process of creating meaningful outputs creates a large number of winners and losers among law schools.   Yet, by refusing to act as regulator that serves the public interest, the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar makes law schools the winner and law students the losers. 

If we evaluate outcome measures from the perspective of law students rather than law schools, there are at least three pieces of information that the Section should collect and publish annually in a format that facilitates school-to-school comparisons:

read the rest here

Conference: Teaching Law for Engaged Learning

 

Institute for Law School Teaching

and

Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

 

"Teaching Law for Engaged Learning," is a one-day conference for new and experienced legal educators interested in developing as teachers. The conference will take place on April 10, 2010, at the Elon University School of Law in Greensboro, North Carolina. The conference co-sponsors are the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning (Gonzaga and Washburn) and the Center for Engaged Learning in the Law (Elon).

 

Structure of the Conference

 

The conference will consist of four sessions: (1) course and class planning; (2) teaching methods; (3) assessment and exams; and (4) developing as a teacher.

 

Course and class planning. What are the most important things you want your students to learn and how will you get your students there?  In this session, participants will construct learning objectives, plan how they will know whether their students have attained those objectives, discuss what to include in a syllabus and what makes for an effective syllabus, reconsider how they start and end their courses and class sessions, and plan a single class session from start to finish.

 

Teaching methods. Participants will consider a wide variety of techniques and perspectives, from the more traditional techniques, such as lecture and questioning, to other commonly-used techniques, such as free writing, collaborative learning, PowerPoint slides, simulations, clickers, and course Web pages, to a few cutting-edge techniques, such as discovery sequence instruction, cognitive think-alouds, and in-class instant messaging. Participants will both experience and discuss how best practices can be applied to these techniques.  Participants will also consider keys to effective teaching beyond techniques, including attitudes, habits of mind, conceptualizations of students, and personal qualities and characteristics.

 

Assessment and exams.  As a result of taking a course, what should students be able to do? Design effective ways to solve clients' problems using a range of authorities and complicated facts? Would they show their learning by writing opinion letters, drafting agreements, or interviewing witness? During this workshop, participants will work from their own assessments, samples, and guidelines to design and evaluate a variety of assessments. Participants also will practice using and developing effective and sustainable ways to provide feedback, including rubrics, classroom assessment techniques, and peer review, and they will consider how to use assessment results as feedback for improving their course and class design and teaching.

 

Developing as a teacher.  Following an introduction to the research on faculty development, participants in this session will engage in a variety of teaching development instruments. For example, participants will complete a teaching inventory, engage in reflective writing, view a teaching video, practice giving feedback, and brainstorm ways to develop a sustainable teaching development practice.

SSRN: Clinical Research Institute

LSN LAW RESEARCH CENTERS PAPERS CLINICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE (sponsored by New York Law School) Vol. 6, No. 4: Nov 12, 2009 RICHARD D. MARSICO, EDITOR Professor of Law, New York Law School [email protected] STEPHEN ELLMANN, EDITOR Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Law, New York Law School [email protected] Browse ALL abstracts for this journal

Links: Subscribe ~ Unsubscribe | Distribution | Network Directors | Submit ~ Revise Your Papers

Table of Contents Stories Absent from the Courtroom: Responding to Domestic Violence in the Context of HIV and AIDS Jane K. Stoever, Seattle University School of Law See One, Do One, Teach One: Dissecting the Use of Medical Education’s Signature Pedagogy in the Law School Curriculum Christine Nero Coughlin, Wake Forest University - School of Law Lisa McElroy, Drexel University - Earle Mack School of Law Sandy Patrick, Lewis & Clark Law School Storytelling Across the Curriculum: From Margin to Center, from Clinic to the Classroom Carolyn Grose, William Mitchell College of Law Decriminalizing Students with Disabilities Dean Hill Rivkin, University of Tennessee College of Law Strip-Mining and Grassroots Resistance in Appalachia: Community Lawyering for Environmental Justice Dean Hill Rivkin, University of Tennessee College of Law Chris Irwin, United Mountain Defense Anne Passino, affiliation not provided to SSRN The Cartography of Legal Inquiry Tonya Kowalski, Washburn University School of Law

itunes oral arguments?

Appellate Oral Arguments Available for Free on 'iTunes U'

from Legal Blog Watch by Bruce Carton

You've already ordered your U.S. Supreme Court baseball cards. Now it's time for all of you appellate law geeks aficionados to take the next step and get yourself some good oral arguments on iTunes to listen to while you work out. The Tex Parte Blog reports here that St. Mary's University School of Law will now be making recordings of Texas Supreme Court oral arguments available, for free, on iTunes U, Apple's online repository of free educational content and lectures, presentations, videos and podcasts from all over the world. For three years now, St. Mary's and the Texas Supreme Court have partnered to provide the court's oral arguments through live webcasts, but these arguments will now also be featured on iTunes U. A quick look at iTunes U shows that the Texas oral arguments are not the only ones available on the site. In fact, dozens -- if not hundreds -- of U.S. Supreme Court argument are also available, for free, through the Oyez Project. Here, for instance, is the iTunes U link to oral argument in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore. Listen to that one a few times on the treadmill and see if the justices' controversial...

You've already ordered your U.S. Supreme Court baseball cards. Now it's time for all of you appellate law geeks aficionados to take the next step and get yourself some good oral arguments on iTunes to listen to while you work out. The Tex Parte Blog reports here that St. Mary's University School of Law will now be making recordings of Texas Supreme Court oral arguments available, for free, on iTunes U, Apple's online repository of free educational content and lectures, presentations, videos and podcasts from all over the world. For three years now, St. Mary's and the Texas Supreme Court have partnered to provide the court's oral arguments through live webcasts, but these arguments will now also be featured on iTunes U. A quick look at iTunes U shows that the Texas oral arguments are not the only ones available on the site. In fact, dozens -- if not hundreds -- of U.S. Supreme Court argument are also available, for free, through the Oyez Project. Here, for instance, is the iTunes U link to oral argument in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore. Listen to that one a few times on the treadmill and see if the justices' controversial...

ABA and loan relief

National Law Journal: ABA proposes law student loan relief

Karen Sloan

November 10, 2009

The American Bar Association is lobbying the Obama administration and Congress to extend relief to recent law school graduates who went into debt to finance their legal educations but haven't been able to find a job because of the recession.

The ABA wants the government to let unemployed graduates convert private loans into federal ones. The change could allow them to defer repaying those loans for as long as three years.

The effort is in its early stages — executives of the largest provider of private law school loans, Access Group Inc., weren't even aware of it, according to spokeswoman Linda Smith.

"This is really intended to give them some breathing room," said ABA President Carolyn Lamm.

read the rest here

Steve Ellmann reviews Arc of Justice

Now Without Hesitation: Ossian Sweet and the power of client narrative

Ossian Sweet and the power of client narrative
We often worry that clients' voice is lost in the process of representation. The story that gets told, though not false, is a story keyed to the elements of the case, or to some other persuasive need, rather than to the client's understanding of the narrative of his or her life. But my co-author Ann Shalleck, in her chapter on "Narrative Theory and Narrative Practices" in our new book (Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling (2009) -- see my previous post for the book announcement) emphasizes that clients' own narratives change over time, and in part as a result of the influence of the lawyer. Sometimes those changes are benign. Sometimes they may not be.

In his fascinating book Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), Kevin Boyle tells the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet and his trial. Dr. Sweet was an African American physician, living in Detroit, who in 1925 made the decision to move with his family into a house in an all-white neighborhood. The results were disastrous. A white crowd swelled around his house on each of his first two nights in it; the second night, members of the crowd began hurling stones at the house, and as the stones fell someone (or someones) in the house fired into the crowd, wounding one person and killing another. Dr. Sweet and the 10 other people in the house were all arrested and charged with murder.

As Boyle tells the story, Dr. Sweet emerges as a conflicted man, who was almost overcome by anxiety as the mob surrounded his house. He seems not so much to have decided to risk everything for the sake of his right to purchase this house as to have been unable to back down from the purchase as the extent of the peril he and his family faced became clear. None of this is to his discredit; the fact is that he did exercise his right to purchase a house anywhere he could afford, and he determined to defend the house against attack, and he did so. (He did not, however, fire any shots himself.)

Boyle tells us that after their arrests, Dr. Sweet and most of the others initially told the authorities, falsely, that they weren't in the house that night to defend it but rather were just waiting for dinner when the trouble began. (Boyle, at 173-74.) Apparently it was Clarence Darrow, perhaps accompanied by Walter White of the NAACP (which had made this case a cause), who persuaded the defendants to tell the story more fully. In Boyle's words:

"For the longest time, Darrow sat with Ossian and the others, listening to them recount the evening on Garland Avenue, gently pressing them to admit to the shooting rather than cling to the unlikely stories they had concocted the night of the police interrogation, quietly reassuring them that the case could be won even if they had fired into the crowd, bridging the chasm between the famous white lawyer and ten desperately afraid colored men with his remarkable gift for empathy." (244)

Along the way, however, Dr. Sweet's understanding of his own story changed. "[H]e began to see the road he had followed to Garland Avenue as much straighter, his steps more purposeful, than they had actually been." (247) Perhaps Dr. Sweet was influenced by his sense of what a jury might respond to, and perhaps he was moved by the praise that his supporters offered for him. I don't mean that he falsified any concrete fact of his story, just that he came to see it as a story of his own manifest heroism.

That may have been fine for the two trials, at the first of which Dr. Sweet responded to cross-examination "with a dignity so fierce it was inspiring" (290), and at the second of which "he seemed to straighten in his seat as the questions were asked.... Now the fear was gone, replaced by unbending pride, the terrified little boy of Bartow given way to a New Negro willing to risk everything in defense of his family, his home, and his principles." (327-28) And the trials ultimately ended in complete legal victory for the defendants.

Unfortunately, it was not fine for Dr. Sweet as a person. Between the two trials, Dr. Sweet and his wife, Gladys (also a defendant), went on a tour planned by the NAACP. A pastor accompanying them said that "Each day he [Dr. Sweet] got more egotistic." (306). The same man said that "I averted no fewer than four scenes ... [and] abated five quarrels between the Sweets." (306-07)

Perhaps all would have been well in time. But as it turned out, Gladys Sweet and the Sweets' one-year-old daughter Iva contracted tuberculosis, very possibly from the jail in which they were confined after the arrests, and both died of it. (344) Dr. Sweet lived in the house he had bought for many years, but his life went awry in multiple ways, and at the age of 64 he shot and killed himself. (344-46) Would he have handled better the challenges he faced if he had not come to see himself, at one point in his life, as a more unambiguously heroic man than he (or almost anyone else) could be? We don't know. But the book leaves the strong impression that the case, the cause, became so great that it changed even the individuals whose cause it was, and not entirely for the better.

*******************

For me, reading Arc of Justice raised another, more personal question. In 1925, my grandfather, James Ellmann, was a young attorney practicing in Detroit and raising a family along with his wife Jean. He would go on to be active in civil rights issues, but the first trace of that activity that I've found so far on the web is in the mid-late 1930s. There's no sign that he was involved in any way in the Sweet case. I can't help but think, though, that he must have been inspired by this celebrated, dramatic case, involving local people and the most prominent lawyer of the age. So I hope that one of the effects of this case -- which brought Dr. Sweet freedom but not happiness, and helped launch the NAACP's legal challenges to racism even while Northern cities' residential segregation intensified (342-43) -- was to play some part in my grandfather's political development, and so my father's, and so mine.

Bob Dinerstein to get PIncus Award!

The AALS, the Section on Clinical Legal Education's Executive Committee, and the Section's Awards Committee would like to announce that Professor Robert Dinerstein, Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, will be awarded the William Pincus Award at the AALS Annual Conference in New Orleans, in January, 2010, at the Clinical Section luncheon on Saturday, January 9, 2010.  The Pincus Award honors one or more individuals or institutions of clinical legal education who have demonstrated excellence in service, scholarship, program design and implementation, and other activity beneficial to clinical education or to the advancement of justice.

 

 

Professor Dinerstein exhibits these qualities in abundance, and he continues to be a leader of the clinical movement in legal education.

Professor Dinerstein has been a tireless advocate for clinical legal education and a mentor to countless members of the clinical teaching community.  In his scholarship, in his own clinical work as a mentor to his students, as an advocate for clinic clients, in furthering clinical legal education in the United States and in other countries, and in his years of service in furthering the development of clinical legal education both through the AALS and the ABA, he has contributed and continues to contribute to the development of clinical legal education.

He is an author of important articles about clinical legal education pedagogy and the theory of practice, and he has made significant contributions to the field.  His service to the clinical community includes serving as a Chair of the Clinical Section, the AALS Standing Committee on Clinical Education, CLEA's Best Practices Project and the Best Practices Implementation Committee, and important committees of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, including the Standards Review Committee and the Council of the Section.  He has amply demonstrated his continued commitment to improving legal education and the role of clinical legal education.

 

Professor Dinerstein's work toward advancing the cause of clinical education, his scholarship, and his commitment to his students and clients make him a worthy recipient of the 2010 William Pincus Award.

 

Technology in the Classroom -- comments? thoughts?

Hello all,

 

I am preparing the upcoming newsletter for the AALS Teaching Methods section. I'd like to include section members' thoughts on the use of technology in the classroom (and I don't mean students' use of laptops to surf the internet rather than listen to the lecture!). If you have found the use of some technology (clickers, podcasts, webinars, course websites, etc.) has enhanced the teaching of your subject in some way, I'd love to hear about it.

 

I'll publish entries up to around 500 words or so. Let me know the subject you teach, where you teach, and how you've used technology to do any of the following: (1) make your job easier; (2) enhance the students' learning of the subject; (3) test the students' comprehension of the subject matter; (4) encourage collaborative or interactive learning; or (5) anything else I'm not thinking of.

 

I'd like to receive submissions no later than November 23rd.

 

Thanks in advance for your input!

 

Rachel Croskery-Roberts

Associate Director, Legal Practice Program

Michigan Law School

SSRN: alternatives to bar exams

"An Alternative Model to United States Bar Examinations: The South African Community Service Experience in Licensing Attorneys" 

Georgia State University Law Review, Vol. 20, No.4, Summer 2004
Florida International University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-16

PEGGY MAISEL, Florida International University College of Law
Email: [email protected]

This Article examines the system of educating and licensing attorneys in South Africa to determine whether that country’s experience can provide guidance to jurisdictions in the United States that are considering proposals to reduce or eliminate the importance of bar examinations. The analysis set out here is supplemented by a companion article, providing a first-hand account of the South African system by Ms. Thuli Mhlungu, who was educated and sought admission to the bar during the last years of apartheid and the early years of the new democratic regime.

Examining the situation in South Africa makes particular sense because South Africa is a country whose tortured history parallels the United States’ history in many ways. Further, the South African system (1) has always required some form of practical training prior to admission as an attorney; (2) expanded the way to fulfill the practical training requirement ten years ago to include two alternatives being considered in the United States - community service apprenticeships and practical training courses; and (3) suffers from societal problems similar to those of the United States, including under-representation of people of color within the legal profession and inadequate resources to provide access to justice for indigent persons.

Any analysis of how helpful a consideration of the South African history of bar licensure can be for jurisdictions in the United States initially requires an understanding of the structure of that country’s bar, its system of legal education, the historical method it used for licensing law graduates, and the racial composition of its bar. Part I of this Article sets out this historical framework. After providing that historical information, Part II discusses the post-apartheid changes to bar admissions, the rationale for those changes, and how successful they have been. Part III examines key issues jurisdictions in the United States will face if they try to institute a parallel system. Finally, Part IV offers a suggestion for how U.S. jurisdictions might try to duplicate the successes achieved in South Africa.

SSRN: a student's perspective on clinic

"The Five Lessons I Learned through Clinical Education" 

CLPE Research Paper No. 40/2009

NADIA CHIESA, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: [email protected]

Legal education has long been criticized for failing to prepare students for the realities of the practice of law. This article explores how clinical legal education programmes, offered at many Canadian law schools, may respond to this criticism and provide an alternative to traditional legal education. Through a reflection on the experience of working as a student at a community legal aid clinic, the author offers a student's perspective on the challenges and rewards of pursuing this type of legal education and discusses how clinical legal education may better equip law students for their future career.

Memo to the appointments committee: how to interview minority candidates

from hunter of justice by Nan Hunter

The hiring conference for entry-level law professors, known universally and grimly as the meat market, starts today. Having survived my one year as a candidate and many years on the hiring side of the table, I herewith pass on the following advice from a non-lawyer, but similarly experienced, historian, my friend Claire Potter, aka the Tenured Radical:

...[I]n lieu of giving bad advice to candidates, I thought I would give advice to those people who were doing the interviewing instead. And it's a particular kind of advice: how not to look like a fool when interviewing what we now call a "diversity candidate." Now for the sake of brevity, let's say the candidate is either a man or a woman (technically all women are diversity candidates), but may also be either of color or queer (technically queer people are never diversity candidates. Unless they are -- for some other reason.) Because these categories are too internally various, and because in fact there is surprising overlap in some of the ways you could possibly offend the people who occupy them, let's call them: Martians. And we'll assume for the sake of clarity in what follows that "you" are not a Martian, and that "I" am. Are you ready? Let's begin.

1. Do not tell irrelevant stories about your friends who are Martians, or that your daughter decided to come out as a Martian last year and how great you feel about it. I understand that you are doing this to make us Martians feel as though we are among friends, and to demonstrate your absolute lack of Martianophobia or your committed anti-Martianism. I appreciate that. Really, I do. But you know what? It suggests just the opposite. It suggests that the Martian in your presence, who is me, is making you uncomfortable, and that you are bravely overcoming it. We Martians are used to being in the minority, but it makes us impatient to have other people remind us of it all the time -- in the name of pro-Martianism, no less. So we will all do better during the interview if you stick to scholarship, teaching and what the actual requirements of the job are.

2. Do not take me to a Martian restaurant for dinner. First of all, a Martian restaurant that is not on Mars, or in a place with a significant Martian population, is likely not to be any good. It will serve Martian food cooked to the taste of the non-Martians who populate your planet. So I will find this depressing. But furthermore, it suggests that I, as a Martian, am in danger of feeling alienated on your planet because I may not be able to access my "culture." Though a Martian, as a scholar and an intellectual, I probably feel I am a little more cosmopolitan than that.

3. While we are at dinner, stay away from topics that betray how invisible the other Martians on campus or on your planet are to you. Telling me that I may wish to live on the planet one light year away because it has a larger Martian population is one way of conveying this, as is: explaining that retaining single Martians is so difficult because it is so difficult to meet and other, marriageable, Martians on your planet; or announcing that, incredibly, there is a Martian Episcopalian church that serves the entire planet right in your canyon! So even though there aren't many Martians on campus, there will be a terrific community for me. On Sundays. (Did I say I was religious? Are you sure?)

4. Admit it if your college does a crappy job of recruiting and serving the needs of Martians. Most colleges and universities that are not on Mars do -- it's not up to you to apologize for it. As in (1), don't tell me about the one Martian who graduated Summa and won the department prize twelve years ago. And although there may be serious Martian politics on campus, don't assume that I share your view of what it means to be progressive on these issues, even -- or especially -- if you are a fellow Martian.

5. Refrain from hinting to me coyly that there is someone I "really need to meet" but not telling me why. This is the most frequent way that people have of dropping a few hairpins that I am a Martian (duh), and this other person is a Martian, but being a person who doesn't really "see" or believe in interplanetary differences, you aren't going to say the word "Martian" (wink, wink.) Most Martians find this tiresome. We aren't at a job interview to meet other Martians: we're there to get a job. And if meeting another Martian on campus is important to me, I'll tell you so.

6. Try to police your references to Martian stereotypes, whether social or intellectual. Don't ask me, for example, why I ended up a historian and not a flight engineer; don't tell me that the special barber I need to cut the hair around my antennae is in the next town over (we don't all have antennae, ok?); and don't, for heaven's sake, if I am interviewing for a Renaissance Literature position, reassure me that the Martian Studies program is very welcoming. Don't put the chair of Martian Studies on my schedule without asking me, if I am not interviewing in Martian Studies, or set up lunch with the one other out Martian to talk about how I might like to work up a Martian survey course once I get a firm grip on the courses I am actually being hired to teach.

And last of all -- if you make any of the above errors, please forget about it and move on -- don't embarrass all of us by dwelling on your faux pas and trying to repair the damage. Martians are used to being in the minority, and we can take care of ourselves, thank you very much.

JOBS: A list of 69 Fellowships

More Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors

from TaxProf Blog by Paul Caron

Following up on my August post, Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors (2009-10 Edition):  Jonathan Gingerich (J.D. 2010, Harvard) of the Harvard Legal Theory Forum has compiled this very helpful spreadsheet with detailed information (including application deadlines, qualifications, salaries, and duration) on 69 teaching and research fellowships.

Symposium from “Critical Race Theory at 20″ published

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

Iowa Law Review has published an issue of papers coming out of the “Critical Race Theory at 20″ conference that was held at Iowa.  The papers are below:

Celebrating Critical Race Theory at 20
Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Liberal McCarthyism and the Origins of Critical Race Theory
Richard Delgado

The Re-Emergence of Race as a Biological Category: The Societal Implications—Reaffirmation of Race
Alex M. Johnson, Jr.

Post-Racialism
Sumi Cho

Jim Crow Ethics and the Defense of the Jena Six
Anthony V. Alfieri

Oh Puleez: Do We Really Need to Teach Them Not to Do That?

By Mary Alice Robbins, Texas Lawyer

Adam Reposa, the Austin, Texas, criminal defense solo who made a gesture simulating masturbation toward a prosecutor while standing before Travis County Court-at-Law No. 6 Judge Jan Breland, faces 90 days in jail. In an 8-1 decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Reposa's application for a writ of habeas corpus in his contempt case.

Judge Lawrence Meyers, the lone dissenter in Ex Parte Adam Reposa, did not write an opinion. The CCA's unpublished opinion, written by Judge Paul Womack, presents the following summary of Breland's testimony at Reposa's contempt hearing: On March 11, 2008, Reposa appeared as counsel for a defendant in a criminal case in Breland's court. Breland asked Reposa to stop whispering to his client while she was trying to explain a plea offer to the client. After the prosecutor, Assistant County Attorney Bill Swaim, protested about Reposa's continued whispering, Reposa made the simulated masturbation gesture toward the prosecutor while looking at Breland.

Acting on Swaim's motion, Breland held Reposa in contempt. Senior Judge Paul Davis of Austin, sitting by assignment, subsequently found Reposa guilty of contempt and sentenced him to 90 days in jail. Reposa appealed to the CCA on June 2, 2008. The CCA had set bail for Reposa pending the disposition of his case.

In its decision Wednesday, the CCA overruled Reposa's five issues challenging the judgment of contempt and sentence. With regard to Reposa's challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence, Womack wrote for the majority, "Regardless of the fact that the gesture was not directed at Judge Breland, it nevertheless was a purposeful act of disrespect and an affront to the dignity of the court. As such, it rises to the level of criminal contempt."

Swaim declines comment on the CCA's decision.

When told of the CCA's decision, Reposa said, "Oh well." When asked what happens next, Reposa says he doesn't know. "I need to talk to my lawyer," he says.

To read more, go to:  http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202435009683&rss=newswire