OK, at some level I understand that this is a serious lawsuit. As reported by the AP, Hooters has accused a former executive of taking confidential information to his new employer, rival Twin Peaks restaurants.
Now, I’d never heard of Twin Peaks restaurants before (do I smell some kind of trademark or dilution claim out [...]

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Today, the legal academy lost a good friend and colleague. Keith Aoki passed away after struggling with illness. Those of us who had the privilege of working with Keith will remember him for his intelligence, wit, energy, and caring. I was lucky enough to know him as a fellow intellectual property professor, [...]

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A sports law story making the rounds involves the ability of Seminole County high school cheerleaders to wear their cheerleader outfits on game day. Not long ago, the county implemented a stronger dress code that required skirts to be longer than mid-thigh. This code also banned “sexually suggestive” clothing and appeared designed to [...]

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According to Yahoo Sports, Florida State University has decided it wants to be the only Seminoles. FSU has apparently sent a demand letter to a high school 50years after learning that the school calls its teams the Seminoles.

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In this post, I’m going to argue that prospective students should care whether a law school’s faculty publishes. Not everyone agrees, and we’ve all had professors who were great scholars but indifferent classroom teachers. I also freely concede that teaching ability does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with scholarly ability, so that a school’s [...]

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Every prospective student notices the physical facilities of a school when he or she visits. Wood paneling, marble floors, and grand foyers create impressions about whether a law school is well-funded and a “nice” place to study. I’d like to suggest a few other ways in which prospective students should evaluate a school’s [...]

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I thought I would say a bit about faculty – the people who teach all those classes in the curriculum. Every law school will tell you that its faculty is excellent, and with justification. Law teaching jobs are sufficiently desirable that law schools generally have many, many qualified applicants for openings. Law [...]

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Law schools compete for students by touting the strength of their curriculum, and with every school claiming that it is strong in a particular area, it’s sometimes hard to get a handle on whether a particular school really would be better than another for a student interested in, for example, corporate law or environmental law. [...]

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Legal writing programs get staffed in 3 meaningfully different ways. One model relies primarily on part-time instructors (generally adjunct teachers or graduate student fellows) supervised by a director of the program who is sometimes, but not always, a full-time specialist in legal writing. A second model uses a director (sometimes, but not always, [...]

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Let me use this post to suggest one way in which prospective students can begin comparing academic programs. All law schools require their first year students to take a heavily prescribed curriculum. Few, if any electives exist, and indeed the required courses are practically the same at most schools. By contrast, second [...]

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The coming of spring means that thousands of aspiring lawyers will soon have to choose the law school they will attend. Over the last decade or so, rankings like U.S. News and World Report’s have become increasingly important in making those decisions. How heavily should a would-be lawyer rely on these rankings in [...]

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I was introduced today to Google’s Election and Issue Advocacy Team, a service designed to maximize the effectiveness of political advertising campaigns. Scott Brown’s successful Senate campaign made use of this service and paid Google’s AdWords program to ensure that Brown’s web page was the first sponsored link for any search on “Martha Coakley.”
According [...]

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Today’s Charlotte Observer reports the story of Clair Watkins, a senior basketball player who got one of those coveted “early commitments” from basketball powerhouse Duke. According to the story, Duke offered Ms. Watkins a promise of admission to Duke and a full basketball scholarship, a scholarship that Duke planned to honor for 4 years. [...]

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This morning’s Politico.com features a story entitled “Who Gets Whacked?” – a guide to Sarah Palin’s recent “Going Rogue” memoir summarizing how Palin treats various Washington players. The story features fairly extensive quotation from the book, which the authors of the story got in advance of today’s release.
Reading the story made me think Harper [...]

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In a story entitled “Recorded Sex Comments Cost Calif. Lawmaker His Job,” the Associated Press reports that California Assemblyman Mike Duvall resigned after his boasts about extramarital affairs were recorded by an open mike. The story mentioned that the tape had been posted to YouTube, and – like all dedicated academics with inquiring minds [...]

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I never thought this would happen, but today I heard my first radio ad directed specifically towards copyright. The ad, airing here in Boston, criticized attempts in Congress to add a performance right for recording artists, and it encouraged listeners to fight the “tax” on radio stations.
Now, if only all of copyright becomes perceived [...]

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The University of Connecticut men’s basketball team will not be playing in the championship game tonight, but recent turmoil surrounding the program raises important questions about the direction and credibility of college sports. One need not be a cynic to wonder, indeed suspect, that serious cheating has become the norm in big-money college sports. Accordingly, [...]

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Today’s Wall Street Journal online reports that the RIAA will no longer sue individuals it suspects of sharing copyrighted music files online. Instead, the RIAA will notify ISPs on the assumption that ISPs will try to stop their users’ behavior. Apparently, the RIAA has agreements with some ISPs. The Journal reports that ISPs [...]

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Today, it has been reported that guitarist Joe Satriani has sued Coldplay, alleging that portions of Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” incorporate material from Satriani’s “If I Could Fly.” For those (like me) who didn’t instantly know what the suit is about, Youtube has some interesting videos comparing the relevant portions of the songs – [...]

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In a recently issued opinion, Judge Davis has granted Jammie Thomas a new trial, overturning an earlier verdict holding her liable in the amount of $222,000 for file sharing music over a peer-to-peer network. The specific legal ground for the ruling was an erroneous jury instruction that merely offering a work on a peer-to-peer [...]

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