[cross-posted at Prawfsblawg]
Dave Fagundes just posted a nice discussion about the difference between internal and external critiques of a paper and how those critiques should be addressed at workshops. The internal critique challenges the internal logic of a thesis – whether it is supported by the evidence and argument. The external critique challenges priors – [...]

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[Cross-posted at Prawfsblawg, where I am guest blogging this month]

I’m giving my very first multiple choice exam in cyberlaw this semester. I decided to move to a multiple choice exam for a few reasons:
1. Time: I have 85 students (about half 3L) and I just don’t think I can get the exams graded in time [...]

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I was charmed by this op-ed in today’s NYTimes about how a teacher changed a person’s life.  There is almost always an edge to the tale of inspiration, however.  Be sure to read all the way to the end.
In the same vein, at my other blog yesterday I wrote a bit about a Pittsburgh feel-good [...]

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Press release here.
Congratulations, Mary!  It’s very well deserved.

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Larry Ribstein has a provocative post and paper up about the future of law practice and legal education and intersections with innovation.  Post here; paper here.
From the post:
“The article’s central and most surprising claim is that theory is quite relevant to what legally trained people will be doing and therefore how they should be trained.  That is [...]

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The University of South Carolina School of Law is looking for visitors in the following subject areas for next academic year. Depending upon matches to needs, the visits will be either a semester or a year.
Constitutional Law (fall)
Wills, Trusts & Estates (fall)
Criminal Law (fall)
Evidence (fall)
Intellectual Property (either semester or possibly a year)
Corporate (either semester, possibly [...]

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Michael Risch’s post below about the norms of the cyberlaw colloquium (”The Virtues of Getting Shredded“) prompted me to revisit some thoughts that I collected during my recently-concluded term as Research Dean at Pitt.
The problem, or the issue, is the form and tone of “feedback” to give colleagues who are presenting or sharing preliminary versions [...]

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I just finished participating in and presenting at the two-day “Cyberlaw Colloquium,” an annual mid-Atlanticish conference devoted to cyberlaw scholarship (with some bleeding into IP). This year it was hosted by Madisonian’s own Greg Lastowka at Rutgers – Camden, with other Madisonians Mike Madison and Mike Carroll participating.
An hour was devoted to each paper, and [...]

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Our law school, like many, has begun the process of distributing offers of admission to prospective students.  Several of us faculty members are part of a typical marketing effort to persuade our admittees to pick our law school; the effort consists of the admissions staff’s sending email under our names to prospective students who have [...]

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In last weekend’s New York Times, I came across this quotation in a short piece regarding on-line education:
Wendy Brown, the Heller professor of political science at the Berkeley campus, spoke witheringly of the idea at a campus forum in October: “What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver [...]

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I spent the last couple of days at the Stanford Law Review symposium called The Future of Patents: Bilski and Beyond. I moderated one panel while Mark Lemley presented our article Life After Bilski, which Mark, Ted Sichelman, Polk Wagner, and I wrote. It will be published in the Stanford Law Review’s symposium issue. (If [...]

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I’ve always considered those in the IP field to be lucky in that, at least in recent years, we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of conferences and works-in-progress opportunities.  However, people have also complained that there are too many conferences, particularly of the works-in-progress variety, and that the works-in-progress conferences have become somewhat [...]

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The pivot point in Jill Lepore’s review of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson, 2010) nicely captures something that makes me uncomfortable in some contemporary legal scholarship.  Lepore:
[Wilkerson's] project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about [...]

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Here is an outlier post that uses the law review manuscript submission “system” as the starting point for a new model of manuscript submission and review at social science journals.  Note the post’s description of how the law review world works:
The idea stems from the law review system in which people submit their papers to [...]

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I will be attending the 2010 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference next week at UC Berkeley, as an observer rather than a presenter. I’m looking forward to the conference: seeing lots of friends, listening to presentations, fishing for great new papers. But I have a curmudgeon’s view of much of the working-paper-conference phenomenon. [...]

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Once again the mass media are shocked – shocked! – to discover that today’s college and high school students have no respect for their sources, for their teachers, for their forebears, for the difficulty of writing, and ultimately for themselves. They plagiarize, willy-nilly, just like they download and Facebook (that’s a verb) and “try [...]

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I have just finished reading Bobbi Kwall’s new book, The Soul of Creativity, which sets out a plan for ways in which the United States might revisit the idea of adopting a moral rights agenda, but perhaps in a more palatable way than has been suggested in the past – with significant deference to [...]

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In a futile attempt to break up the soccer blogging (no offense, Mike!), I wanted to raise something Mike and I were recently talking about.  Is there still room for a scholarly field called “cyberlaw”?  Or have we reached the point where cyberlaw scholarship has more or less collapsed into other fields like IP, privacy, [...]

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For those rankings mavens amongst us, it appears that the U.S. News Rankings for 2011 leaked yesterday.  What do people think of this year’s IP specialty rankings (assuming the list is accurate)?
1. Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. George Washington
4. Boston University
5. N.Y.U.
6. Columbia
7. U Michigan
8. Houston
9. Duke
10. Franklin Pierce

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The New York Times reports that law clinics that take on large corporations are under pressure from private companies. The pressure has resulted in some saying that state dollars should not be used to allow clinics to take on “controversial issues.” Frankly, if educational institutions aren’t supposed to take on controversial issues, they will [...]

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