"Maybe I’ve been spoiled, but I feel like if this happened at Harvard Law School, a guy like Charles Nesson would be all over the opportunity..."

"... to just hop in, teach from the hip, and turn this upheaval into a Con Law experience like no other. Doesn’t Columbia Law have one professor like that? Doesn’t Columbia have any professors who want to teach just because interacting with young people and shaping minds about constitutional theory is kind of fun?"

Doesn’t Columbia even have any professors who at least want to send the message that lawprofs teach because interacting with young people and shaping minds about constitutional theory is kind of fun?

It's also interesting that at Columbia, a law professor is missing classes because she's going through a divorce. Back in the 1980s, when my first marriage broke up, it happened to coincide with a research grant that gave me a full semester off to write. I've always believed it would have been much better to have had classes to give some structure to those days.

Meanwhile, Instapundit links to Steven Bainbridge who talks about Columbia's solution of lumping 200 students together in one big class. What's the big deal if the teacher is lecturing, which, per Bainbridge, is a good idea anyway.

I suspect the students would have a few questions like: Why am I paying so much tuition if all I'm getting is something I could be watching on the Internet? And why are you paid so much money to lecture in person in front of people who could just as well be watching video of whoever is the very best lawprof lecturer on this subject?

Prof. Bainbridge rails against the "a left-liberal political agenda" of law school clinics.

He's on the appointments committee at his school and says "most of the clinical professors whose work we have reviewed this semester have pursued a model of inculcating left-liberal political values in students and deploying those students to advance left-liberal political causes."

Only most? Not all? Who were the ones who didn't? What are the forces that cause the applicants for this type of legal academic work to lean left? The "regular" professors tend to lean left as well, so it's only a question of degree, but clinical lawprof work tends to pay a lot less and to involve less pleasurable tasks than classic lawprof work.

Bainbridge's law school is UCLA. Here's a list of their clinics, including some that don't seem too lefty, like the Business Deals Clinic and Mergers & Acquisitions. But, realistically, you can see why someone with expertise practicing law in business deals mergers & acquisitions — the kind that would impress a law school appointments committee — has an incentive to stay in practice and not to shift into clinical teaching. The standard lawprof job has its obvious rewards, but why clinical teaching?

The system is founded on the reward the accrues to those with the left-liberal political agenda that Bainbridge rails against. It's baked into the cake.

The Germans are annoying Professor Bainbridge.

"To be lectured on military proprieties by a people who are free to do so because they've been able to hide behind our security skirts for decades takes the proverbial cake."

"[H]ow do we make sure law schools can teach people to think like lawyers when our hiring criteria increasingly privilege people who do interdisciplinary and empirical rather than traditional legal scholarship?"

Asks lawprof Stephen Bainbridge (via Instapundit):

When we hire people with mediocre law credentials just because they're good at running regressions or have a PhD? Or when the PhDs we hire went the law route either because law schools pay more or because they didn't have the chops to get a top job in their home discipline. Or when the PhDs we hire went the law route either because law schools pay more or because they didn't have the chops to get a top job in their home discipline.

If we were still trying to hire folks because they were EIC of a top law review, head of their law school class, had a good clerkship, and some experience in a top law firm doing real law, I'd be more confident of our ability to teach people to think like lawyers instead of teaching them to think like mediocre statisticians, sociologists, philosophers, economists, or what have you.

A question that hits hard here in Wisconsin.... where, incidentally, we're involved in a big dean search and — check it out — that salary is excellent. And you may have heard about the pension and health insurance benefits we've got here....

But wouldn't it be funny to test the dean candidate with Bainbridge's question?

About that Christmas tree.

I said it's okay — and green enough — to get an artificial Christmas tree. Then Professor Yin came in with some scary stuff about lead, and Professor Bainbridge says don't get a tree at all, and don't even get presents — give it all to charity.

What's the best solution to the Christmas tree problem?
	A real tree, a cut tree. Follow tradition!
	A nice new artificial tree. The lead problem is solved, right?
	Some sort of potted tree, that you reuse or replant or something.
	No tree at all!
pollcode.com free polls

"Alan Simpson Didn't Need to Apologize."

Says Professor Bainbridge, via Instapundit ... and, as you know, I agree.

Well, you know, now, there is a solution for your apology mistakes. Levi Johnston is leading the way. Take back your apology.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade writes:

Un-apology for Non-apology Tips for Teens of All Ages:

1. Take responsibility for having non-apologized.
2. Acknowledge that, no, you really did mean to insult, hurt, damage the other person.
3. Determine the frivolousness of the offense for which you mistakenly non-apologized.
4. Decide the best time to un-apologize for your non-apology.
5. Choose a method of un-apology.
6. Equivocate with sincere insincerity.
7. Remember this un-apology is about you and your charming dysfunctional non-apology, not the other person.
8. Go beyond "I'm sorry if my non-apology failed to fully offend you," to make the un-apology as personal and humiliating as possible.

That "20 Worst Americans of all time" list compiled by Right Wing News by surveying conservative bloggers.

It's a ridiculous list, as lawprof Stephen Bainbridge points out:

Personally, I find the collated list pretty much of a joke. It reflects the partisan passions of the moment, not anything resembling a serious verdict of history.

But it was predictable that the list would be ridiculous, because of the methodology:

All [43] bloggers were allowed to make anywhere from 1-20 selections. Rank was determined simply by the number of votes received. 

So, if everyone put Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama on the list, he'd come out as the worst person in American history. (The expression "of all time" highlights the silliness of the list. When in history do we start having "Americans"? 1776... 1787... or thereabouts. There were no terrible Americans in the Middle Ages or ancient times. Saying "of all time" makes you sound like a bombastic know-nothing. (It's an expression we've been using jocosely, chez Meadhouse, ever since this happened.)

In fact, only 25 of the 43 put Jimmy Carter on their list, and that was enough to put him at #1. Obama was second with only 23 selections. They're easy to think of, so they got on a lot of lists. (Surprisingly few, actually.) More obscure but more evil Americans were less likely to come to mind, but would probably have raked in votes if the surveyed bloggers had been given a list to chose from.

So, tweak the methodology. Have 2 stages where you first take suggestions for who should be on a list, then have the voters pick however many they want from the list. If I have to pick 20, I may need to pad it out with individuals who aren't really that bad. Or give everyone 20 votes and let them pile the votes on their choices in whatever proportion they want. You could dump 15 votes on Obama and 5 on Carter, for example.

By the way, oddly enough, my name appears in the first comment over there at Right Wing News:

What an [sic] spectacularly ignorant list. I'm a progressive, and I could do a better job of being a right-wing butthole than the people who voted.....

Michael Moore over Upton Sinclair or Lincoln Steffens? Jane Fonda over Paul Robeson? Not one member of the Warren Court? Not Theodore Roosevelt? Where's Daniel Ellsberg or Seymour Hirsch-- or Julian Assange?

This is why we make fun of your lack of intellect, folks-- you can't even identify the people who've done the most damage to your belief system. It would be as if progressives compiled a list of the most vile and bigoted conservatives in history and picked Wally George, John Schmitz, Ann Althouse and Orly Taitz.

... whoever they are.

If you click over to Bainbridge, you'll see his comments on each of the individuals on the RWN list. Bainbridge also makes his own "Worst Americans" list, with a decided emphasis on traitors. He puts Aldrich Ames and Benedict Arnold at #1 and #2.

Now, for some reason he puts Paris Hilton at #11. Huh? I guess he thought there had to be a female on the list and that was the best he could do. He called her the "personification of the celebrity obsessed culture." Isn't the obsession with celebrities the fault of the people doing the obsessing? (Let's take responsibility for our own faults. It's the conservative way, I've heard.)

In an update, he defends his #11 selection of Hilton "as one of the earliest examples of how it is now possible in our culture to be famous merely for being famous without having any significant merit or worth."

Earliest examples? Earliest examples??!!! If Paris Hilton seems like an early example, you might not know so much about history.  The definition of "celebrity" as someone who is "known for his well-knownness" appears in a book that came out in 1962 — "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America" by Daniel J. Boorstin.

Can we think of some earlier examples of famous-for-being-famous Americans? Who was Boorstin writing about in 1962? We had empty celebrities then, for sure. Somebody motivated Andy Warhol to say "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Or is that why we can't remember the empty celebrities of the past? Their fame-time ran out, and we forgot.

And how about giving Paris Hilton credit as an entrepreneur? You try creating a compelling character out of yourself and making money out of that product? The fact is, she's a model and an actress, and the way she annoys people like Bainbridge and seems dumb and pointless is part of the fabulous image-product that has sold so well.

"Why I gave up on Socrates and why I think teaching students to think like lawyers, as Kingsfield claimed to do, is a bad idea."

Professor Bainbridge lectures about lecturing.