Travel Plans
Every Milwaukeean has their favorite time to escape the crummy weather. For some, it’s January and February when the weather is the coldest and the days are the darkest. For others, it’s March, when other places are experiencing Spring and…
What Gifts Are Appropriate for Students to Give to Professors?
My buddy Dan, a graduating 3L from Georgetown (congrats, Dan!), asks a tough question: If a grateful student wants to get a professor a gift, what is appropriate? It’s hard to answer this question because I have some obvious self-interest!…
Blogs With a Marquette Law Connection
There has been a recent proliferation of blogs with a connection to Marquette University Law School (I’ve noticed a spike in blog activity around final exam time–blogging is the quintessential way to procrastinate!). Here are the ones I know about:…
Fischer on Teaching Legal Ethics
At Legal Ethics Forum, Prof. James Fischer of Southwestern speculates why students don’t respect their Legal Ethics course. He rejects the traditional rationales such as “(1) students lack real world experience; (2) the course is just a bunch of rules…
Joint Author Agreements
Copyright law has some potentially unexpected surprises for co-authors. Co-authors usually have a “duty to account” to each other for revenues generated from the jointly-authored work. Co-authors may also have a duty not to “waste” the jointly owned asset (the…
From Academia to Practice
Relatively rare event: law professor wants to return to practice after 15 years of full-time teaching. Some career advice for him/her (registration required).
Gordon Smith on Law School Teaching Loads
Gordon Smith at Conglomerate has prepared an outstanding post listing the teaching loads at various law schools. His table shows overwhelmingly that the top-ranked law schools have moved to a new standard of 10 units/year as opposed to the more…
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…
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…