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Many of us are in the process of (perhaps frantically) wrapping up our summer scholarly activity and re-focusing our primary professional attention on teaching.  As always, I am using the annual conference sponsored by the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) to help me make this transition.  Yesterday, I attended a discussion session led by law school associate deans and faculty who focus on faculty development–scholarship and teaching.  It was an incredibly interesting and wide-ranging discussion.

Part of the conversation centered around summer research stipends, a topic that has been in the national news a bit over the past few years.  Various participants in the discussion session addressed, each from his or her individual institution’s vantage point, the reasons for/purposes of summer research stipends (which not every school represented at the session currently has) and how summer stipends actually work or should/could optimally work.  I was surprised by the variations in approaches and ideas from school to school.  While the individual models are too numerous to capture here, I summarize below the fold some of the top-level points made and thoughts shared during the discussion.

This year, I will be teaching undergraduate, MBA, and law students at Belmont University.  As an undergraduate professor, I often advise students considering law school.

I focus on helping prospective law students make an informed decision.  Formally or informally, I usually walk the students through a simple cost/benefit analysis.  Even with all the information about law schools out there now, most students still need some help navigating.    

Usually, I ask prospective law students a lot of questions, including at least some of the ones below.

If readers have constructive additions to my list, please e-mail me or leave a comment.  I am always trying to improve my advising. 

  • Why do you want to go to law school? (The student’s answer can be illuminating. Answers that are essentially – to please my parents or because I don’t know what else to do or because I want to get rich – should cause the student to think a bit harder. I think there is now enough data out there that students can see that there are much better avenues to getting rich than going to law school.)
  • Do you understand the total financial cost of going to law school? (See

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While I will miss my friends at the wonderful SEALS conference, I am excited to be attending and presenting at the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) conference in Seattle next week.

For the ALSB conference, the organizers have set up a Guidebook App.  I am just now exploring all the features, but it looks like an impressive and useful tool.

The App includes:

  • The conference program.
  • The conference schedule.
  • Your schedule. You create your own schedule and can have reminders send to your phone.
  • Full text of all the conference papers, organized by subject, author, and title.
  • An attendee list, where attendees can share their contact information.
  • In-app social networking.
  • Information about exhibitors.
  • A survey.
  • Information about Seattle (restaurants, attractions, etc.) 

There is a free version of Guidebook, but it looks like this ALSB Conference App has features of the rather expensive paid plans.  The free version is limited to 200 downloads and doesn’t appear to allow inclusion of presentation materials.  Given the textbook publisher listed at the bottom of the App, I am guessing that the textbook publisher paid at least part of the cost, though that is pure speculation on my part.

While pricey…

This week, two of my co-bloggers shared some great insights on the revamped American Apparel board of directors.  See Marcia Narine quoted in The Guardian article American Apparel adds its first woman to revamped board of directors; Joan Heminway, American Apparel 1, NFL 0. For those not following the American Apparel saga, the New York Times recently reported:

The founder and chief executive of American Apparel, Dov Charney, was fired this week because an internal investigation found that he had misused company money and had allowed an employee to post naked photographs of a former female employee who had sued him, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation. 

Beyond the public relations problems surrounding Charney’s departure, American Apparel is struggling financially as sales have dropped dramatically. As an initial step in trying start a turnaround, the company announced four new board members, including the company’s first female director, Colleen Birdnow Brown, former chief executive of Fisher Communications. 

When I opened the Guardian article quoting Marcia, I had another article open in the tab next to it from the Washington Post’s On Leadership section: For women and minorities, advocating for diversity has a downside.  That article explained:

In corporate America, diversity is about as controversial as motherhood and apple pie. CEOs love to tout the number of women in their upper ranks. Human resource departments like to trumpet their diversity programs in glossy reports.

But a new study finds that for female and minority executives, being seen as an advocate for diversity could actually have a downside. The researchers behind the study, which will be presented at the Academy of Management’s annual conference in early August, found that women and minorities who were rated by their peers as being good at managing diverse groups or respecting gender or racial differences also tended to get lower performance ratings. That’s because they may be viewed as “selfishly advancing the social standing of their own low-status demographic groups,” the researchers write, a no-no when it comes to rating good managers.

Please click below to read more.

Alabama

Last year, when many law schools made no new hires, Alabama was one of the most active law schools on the market. Alabama hired a new dean and five new faculty members.  It appears that Alabama is looking to hire again this year.  

The University of Alabama School of Law is seeking applications from entry level or lateral candidates.   They will accept applications from applicants in all subject areas, but have a particular interest in applicants that research and teach in one or more of the following areas:

business law (including enterprise, finance, and/or securities); administrative regulation (including the regulatory state and/or regulated industries or activities); intellectual property (specifically trademark and copyright); and criminal law (including substantive criminal law and/or criminal procedure).

(Emphasis added, for the benefit of our business law readers.)

More information is available here.  

This post started off as a comment to co-blogger Haskell Murray‘s post Modifying the Law Review Submission and Review Process, and is perhaps overkill, but at least a few of us, thanks in part to Steve Bradford’s post, are finding the conversation fruitful, so here we go:

In response to my suspicion that widespread law review changes could impact promotion and tenure (P&T) processes, Haskell writes: “I am not sure why the expectations for P&T would have to change if law reviews instituted blind review.  It seems that all blind review would do is make the selection process more fair.”  

Maybe he is right, but here’s my thinking: I  believe expectations for P&T would change because I believe that widespread blind review would increase the (already long) turnaround time for getting pieces accepted for publication.  If I am right (an open question) that it would increase the review time, it would make it harder for some faculty to get their pieces accepted, which is often required for it to “count” in the review process. Perhaps this would be a good thing, but I would see it as a potentially significant change. 

This could also impact higher ranked schools…

 Given the attention our posts on law reviews received, I thought I would add to my comments on Josh Fershee’s post commenting on Steve Bradford’s post. 

In short, I think the law review submission and review process could be improved by at least two modifications. 

1. Blind Review. 

Currently, law review editors see, and in fact require, not only the author’s name and employer, but also the author’s entire CV.  This is quite unlike the article selection process in other disciplines where all identifying information is supposed to be stripped. 

If blind-review were adopted by law reviews, Josh Fershee claimed that it might still be possible to find the identity of the author through self-citations.  Authors, however, do not always cite themselves and even if they do, law review editors would have to read pretty carefully to figure out the idenity of the author.  Currently, it is simply not possible for law review editors to read closely all article submitted, so stripping the author’s name would, at the very least, require the editors to dig into each article.  Also, Authors could be instructed to remove, during the review process, identifying phrases like “in previous work I argued…” 

This call for…

As someone who teaches and researches both business law and energy law, I often focus on the overlap of the two areas, which I find to be significant.  One of my most recent projects has been to write a new casebook, Energy Law: A Context and Practice Casebook, which will be available for courses taught this fall. I wrote a detailed description of the book in a guest post at the Energy Law Professor blog, but here I wanted to highlight the business aspects of the book. 

The second chapter of my book is titled The Business of Energy Law.  That chapter begins with some key vocabulary, and I then provide students with a client issue to frame the reading for the chapter. The issue: 

Your firm has just taken on a new client who is a large shareholder in many companies. She is particularly concerned about her holdings in Energex, Inc., a publicly traded energy company. Energex was founded in 1977 by a oil and gas man from Louisiana who is still the CEO and a member of the board of directors. The client is concerned that the CEO is taking opportunities for himself that she thinks

…

Steve Bradford yesterday posted a thoughtful (as is usual for his posts) critique of law reviews. I had drafted a comment, but Steve suggested that I should post links to my prior posts separately, so here goes, along with (what has turned out to be a lot of) additional commentary.

I think Steve has some valid (and compelling) points. As I have written before, though, I can’t go as far as he does.  I won’t rehash all that I have written before on this subject, but one of my earlier posts, Some Thoughts for Law Review Editors and Law Review Authors covers a lot of that ground.  Please click below to read more: 

Steve Bainbridge has an interesting response to yesterday’s post on law reviews, linking to a number of other interesting posts he has written. Definitely worth reading. (He agrees with me, so he must be correct.)

A number of you commented on my post yesterday. I will get those posted sometime today.  Sorry for the delay. My wife and I got back home this morning at 2:30 a.m. from a wonderful vacation trip to San Diego. (Yesterday’s post was scheduled in advance; we have a firm no-work rule during vacations.)