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Three Business Law Prof Blog editors (myself included) are presenting at the upcoming Berle Symposium on June 27-28 in Seattle.

Colin Mayer (Oxford) is the keynote speaker, and I look forward to hearing him present again. I blogged on his book Firm Commitment after I heard him speak at Vanderbilt a few of years ago. The presenters also include former Chancellor Bill Chandler of the Delaware Court of Chancery. Given that Chancellor Chandler’s eBay v. Newmark decision is heavily cited in the benefit corporation debates, it will be quite valuable to have him among the contributors. The author of the Model Benefit Corporation Legislation, Bill Clark, will also be presenting; I have been at a number of conferences with Bill Clark and always appreciate his thoughts from the front lines. Finally, the list is packed with professors I know and admire, or have read their work and am looking forward to meeting. 

More information about the conference is available here.

I read an article this morning that resonated with me.  It was odd, because it was about a University of Michigan sports coach. As a dedicated Spartan, that’s not always easy to reconcile. 

Michigan’s softball team lost in the College World Series, and there was understandable disappointment.  I thought coach Carol Hutchins message, though, was spot on: 

“One thing I learned after the national championship, it definitely doesn’t define you,” she said. “If winning defines you, you’re not focused on the right things. I’m defined by all the women that I’ve been able to help grow up and who have impacted my life equally. I define myself by that.

“We’ve won a lot of games here, we’ve lost a lot of games here. It’s a sport. We do the best we can every day.”

Yes. You can’t control who you play.  You control how you prepare, and how you try, and how you care.  Sometimes, you can control how you play, but not always who you play against or the tools you have at your disposal.

This is true as a lawyer, too.  You may have bad facts. Or a bad client. Or a whole host of other hurdles.

One of our readers (thanks, Tom N.) brought this to my attention earlier today.  I have passed it on to some folks internally here at UT Law.  Scammers who prey on students to extract money from them to pay a “Federal Student Tax” deserve their own special place on the Wall of Shame. ‘nough said.

A few months ago, Inside Higher Ed ran a story that noted “that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges.” (emphasis added).  This finding surprised me. I knew grade inflation was becoming more and more common, but I did not expect A to be the most common grade earned, especially in the undergraduate setting.

The article reported that A’s accounted for “more than 42 percent of grades” and “A’s are now three times more common than they were in 1960.” (emphasis added).

This grade inflation trend is a mistake, in my opinion. And it is a trend that is impacting graduate schools as well. At the law school I attended, they moved from a 100-point scale and a 78-point mean when I attended, to letter grades and a much higher mean GPA. I understand why my alma mater made the move; they were very different than other law schools, even at the time, and a student with an 85% average had a tendency to be discounted by employers, even if that person was in the top 10% of her class. Business graduate schools may well have led the grade…

It is that time of year again when law profs are up to their ears in grading exams. (Unless one teaches on the continent, where exams are oral.) Given my location in the UK, I thought I would provide a few insights on what we do here.  These are my own personal reflections and I may not be able to generalise about what gets done across the board, though in the UK we probably have more uniformity of policies among law schools and universities generally than in the US. What I am about to say is nowhere near complete in coverage. I want to focus here only on some differences which caught my particular attention as an American teaching in the UK.

Preliminarily, we don’t use the word “grading.”  The term is “marking.” This is terminological. They mean the same thing. I’ll stick to the American terminology here.

We allocate grading and just about every other task to be done in a British law school through something called a “workload allocation.” A workload allocation is a bit of distributive justice. It is meant to allocate work in the school fairly among all faculty (we say staff but I’ll stick to the US word). So, if you are called upon to chair a busy committee, you get credit for that in the workload. The workload will include time for you to do scholarship if scholarship is part of your job.

Here comes the interesting part for those of you saddled with large classes and large amounts of exam grading: exam grading is also subject to the workload allocation. You may be asked to grade in a course (a ‘module’) you did not teach.

Some time ago, I wrote the post Better Teaching Idea: Try to Notice When the Wind Is at Your Back. That post emerged from some observations while running, and today’s post has the same origin.

This month I have been trying to up my miles again for no particular reason. I don’t run for races. I run to run. And to feel like I am at least doing something to stay in some semblance of good shape (it’s not really working).  I now run 4 miles most days. Maybe a little more or less, but that’s the norm this month.  The past two days, I ran from my house, which is at the top of a hill. It is more of a mountain when I am running up it. (I promise, I am getting somewhere with this.)  

I often go down to the rail trail along the river, which is a mostly flat, pretty place to run.  The last two days, I have been running from my house. This means that if I want to get any distance in, I need to go down the mountain.  And, of course, it means I need to get back to the top.  Now, I…

It is commencement season – our commencement at Belmont University is tomorrow. Commencement season means commencement speeches. Commencement speeches often comes with an extra helping of cliché advice. If I had to guess, no piece of cliché advice is more common in commencement speeches than “follow your passion in your career.”

For example, in Steve Job’s famous Stanford commencement speech he said:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

Jim Carey, in an otherwise pretty original and somewhat odd commencement speech, included some of the cliché “follow your passion” advice when he said:

My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant, and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job and our

…

Today I hit “submit” on an article I was asked to review for an international law journal. Because the process required blind peer review, I won’t be any more specific other than to say that the article related to a topic that I have written and spoken about extensively over the past few years. Unfortunately, the author did not cite any of the main (or even ancillary) articles on the topic and instead focused on a number of disparate theories that barely related to the title or topic of the piece. In short, the article had a few good pages and might make a few decent articles, but only after major revisions. I knew what the article was missing because I have read almost every other piece written on the topic.

As a junior academic, I admit that the most frustrating part of the law review process is the lack of peer review, at least in the United States. My colleagues in the EU review articles of 10-12,000 words on average and generally have 1-2 other reviewers deciding on publication of a scholar’s piece. The review period tends to be 6-8 weeks (or so I have been told) and generally…

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Although other outlets in the blogosphere (including the blog he founded, The Conglomerate) beat us to the punch by a few weeks (see, e.g., here and here), I want to take time out today to congratulate D. Gordon Smith, currently Glen L Farr Professor of Law at BYU Law, on his appointment as Dean of BYU Law commencing May 1.  (That’s this coming Sunday!)

I have had the privilege of working with Gordon a number of times over the years (perhaps most notably in the formation and leadership of the AALS Section on Transactional Law and Skills and with The Conglomerate), and he is a consummate professional.  He represents his institution impeccably as a scholar and servant of the academy and the profession.  He has great judgment and is a kind, considerate soul.  I know that he will be a great leader for BYU Law.

My only regret is that Gordon will likely have to step back from the many leading roles he has had in pushing business transactional law scholarship forward.  His service as a symposium sponsor, conference panel organizer, moderator, discussant, and presenter are so appreciated by me.  [sigh]

Nevertheless…