Cat-Hunting in Wisconsin
I’ve already blogged about Wisconsin’s efforts to ban Internet hunting because it’s not “real” hunting. Now Wisconsin is considering allowing hunters to hunt kitties. Is bagging Fluffy more consistent with hunting norms than Internet hunting?
Emerging Social Norms About SSRN
Over the weekend, I socialized with a number of law professors. Naturally, the topic of SSRN came up. I noticed an interesting response to the recent attention to SSRN’s download count statistics. Many of us are so shy about blatant…
Punitive Billing
Taco Bell employee double-swipes the credit cards of irritating customers. It is a poorly-kept and dirty secret that some lawyers engage in “punitive billing,” where a lawyer grosses up his or her hours to penalize annoying/disrespectful clients. The Taco Bell…
More Fallout From Live-Shot.com
California is moving to pass a law against Internet hunting. According to Cal. Sen. Debra Bowen, “This isn’t hunting; it’s an inhumane, over the top, pay-per-view video game using live animals for target practice….Shooting live animals over the Internet takes…
North Dakota Targets Professors With Foreign Accents
North Dakota is considering a law giving students certain rights if professors do not “speak English clearly and with good pronunciation”—and if enough students complain, stripping the professor of classroom duties. Two observations: · This is the most jingoistic proposal…
Steele on the State of Legal Education
John Steele organizes his thoughts into a thought-provoking post about the state of legal education. He concludes “Two trends that bother me: the use of citation counts and download counts as a proxy for the quality of education, and the…
Cunningham on SSRN as a Metrics Source
Larry Cunningham posted “Scholarly Profit Margins and the Legal Scholarship Network: Reflections on the Web” to SSRN. This essay deconstructs various metrics of academic/scholarly performance, including SSRN download counts. He notes several limitations of SSRN as a metric, including first…