Dina and the Jack-in-the-Box. Oy Vey!
It’s hard for me to grasp just how much toddlers love a Jack-in-the-Box, but this is a genuine scream (of happiness), and watch Dina literally jump out of her seat: If more people gave hugs like this, we might very…
Bay Area Blawgers 3.0 Recap
Last week, we had the third gathering of Bay Area Blawgers at UC Berkeley Law School. Over 2 dozen bloggers and friends convened to discuss topics of interest to legal bloggers [see list of attendees below]. Some photos from the…
Free Classical Music Bonanza–Musopen
Last night I watched the movie The Seven Year Itch for the first time. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but now I can’t stop replaying Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 in my head (the first few notes are played repeatedly in…
Some Personal Good News
I’m pleased to share the good news of my tenure and promotion to associate professor. Some frequently asked questions: 1) You weren’t nervous about the tenure vote, were you? [This question has been posed in a variety of forms, all…
Arthur Best on Student Evaluations
Arthur Best, Student Evaluations of Law Teaching Work Well: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, Southwestern University Law Review, 2008 Another article on the deficiencies of student evaluation forms. A couple of takeaway points: * “data from student evaluation…
UpTake Launches Public Beta
One of my side projects is working with a new travel search website called UpTake, which is coming out in public beta today. There are plenty of travel content websites out there, but UpTake has an important differentiator. It enables…
Writing About Legal Topics for Non-Lawyers
Brandt Goldstein, Lost in translation? Some brief notes on writing about law for the layperson. 52 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 373-385 (2007-08). This article provides an overview of the issues that arising when writing about legal topics for a non-legal…
Thursday Grumbles–Errors in Speeches, and Forwarding Private Emails
Maybe I’m just in a cranky mood today, but two issues have been bothering me recently. 1) Every now and then, I hear a speaker make a major factual error. (For some reason, this seems to happen a lot with…
PETA Encourages Production of In Vitro Meat
PETA is funding a $1M prize for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.” I don’t know much about in vitro meat, but I…
Coyote Ridge and Wildflowers
I think of Santa Clara County as mostly urban/suburban. After all, it’s home to one of the 10 largest cities in the country (San Jose) and one of the world’s largest and most vibrant economies (the Silicon Valley). However, it’s…