New Gig: Santa Clara University School of Law
Starting next academic year, I’ll be an Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and the Director of the school’s High Technology Law Institute. In my administrative role, I will provide academic direction and leadership to the school’s…
Social Life of Law Review Articles Editors
I sent out my article to the law reviews a couple of weeks ago. Among other ding emails, I got a ding email from a journal at midnight on Saturday night and a ding email from a different journal at…
“I Need to Get Tenure”
I’ve never actually seen the social science establishing this, but I’ve been told that the single biggest determinant of a student’s evaluation of a professor is the student’s estimate of his/her grade in the class. In practice, this does not…
Tenured Canadian Professor Fired for Posting Comments to RateMyProfessor.com
Professors joke about this all the time. We know that our job performance is influenced, in part, by how others perceive our teaching. Websites like RateMyProfessor.com help shape these perceptions, but they are very unreliable because they do not confirm…
Some Professors Don’t Like Student Email?
The NYT has a reactionary story today about professor-student email interactions. The subtext of the article is that some professors don’t like some of the emails they get from students: “At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much…
Faculty Activity Reports
Faculty activity reports (FARs) are the way that faculty members report on their year’s activities to the Dean. The report is typically used to set faculty compensation for the subsequent academic year. At Marquette, the FAR determines annual salary increases…
Calendar of Law School IP Conferences/Presentations
Mike Madison has undertaken the public service of providing a one-stop central repository for upcoming conferences and presentations by IP academics. The desperate need for this calendar was demonstrated by the multiple mid-air collisions of this weekend, when there were…
US News Rankings and Mailbox Overflow
Academic reputation is a big component of US News rankings, but it’s hard to influence. The academic rankings are partially self-reinforcing–our perceptions of other schools are influenced in large part by what prior rankings said. To overcome this, many schools…
Blogging Class…During Class?
Lydia Loren reminds her Cyberlaw students during the first class to sign up for an account on her blog. What happens? Students sign up right then and there—during class! (She knows because the account sign-ups are time-stamped). She wonders about…
Are All Law Professors Democrats?
The NYT runs a story about a forthcoming Georgetown Law Journal article assessing political contributions from law professors at 21 highly-ranked law schools. The findings: * 1/3 of these professors gave to political campaigns * “81 percent who contributed $200…