This Denver Post news story nicely illustrates a maxim in law practice – don’t ask a question at trial when you don’t know the answer. In civil litigation, extensive discovery is used to look under every stone so as to avoid that very situation.
Criminal prosecution, however, is a bit more messy. Contrary to what you [...]

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I’m not a First Amendment scholar, nor am I an employment discrimination scholar. I did, however, go through a hiring process twice, and this decision by the Eighth Circuit surprised the heck out of me. The gist of the opinion is that a jury must decide if a professor who was not hired at a [...]

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Quick, everyone dropout because school will fail you, and you can go create JOBS! Jobs, not Steve but those things we all want and need, are the topic of the year. How do we generate them? What skills do new graduates (and really even us old ones) need? Is the future all digital or are [...]

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The future of the legal profession is a topic usually reserved for social scientists and legal scholars who focus on the profession itself.  Last Spring, I wrote here that the future of the legal profession is an innovation problem, on a par with the problems that beset the steel industry in the 1960s and 1970s [...]

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Read through Atul Gawande’s recent commencement address to the most recent graduates of Harvard Medical School and ponder, as I have been trying to do, whether it maps onto lawyers and legal education.  There is lots here, too, for students of innovation and creativity generally.
A taste:
I do not believe society should be forced to choose [...]

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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 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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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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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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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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D is for Digital is over now. I urge anyone interested in the Google Book Deal (aka the Google Book Search) to check out the schedule page and the webcast links (the stream links are at the top of the Friday and Saturday schedules respectively). James Grimmelmann put together a conference that aired out pro [...]

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From Wired.com:

When 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz decided last fall to help an open government activist amass a public and free copy of millions of federal court records, he didn’t not expect he’d end up with an FBI agent trying to stake out his house.
But that’s what happened, as Swartz found out this week when got [...]

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s expected, last weekend’s NYT op-eds with advice to college students attracted commentary that points out how legal education is like, and unlike, college education.  Paul Horwitz at Prawfsblawg offers characteristically thoughtful analysis; Danielle Citron at Concurring Opinions is pithier but no less on point.
When I read that series of op-eds, I was struck not [...]

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(Lots of interesting details are omitted from the anecdote below; in time, as circumstances permit, I may flesh them out!)
Ah, the perils of teaching timely topics.  Among the scenarios that I ran by my Trademark Law students at the beginning of this semester is a pending Intent to Use application to register a trademark.  The [...]

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Wired editor Chris Anderson, in a book entitled Free, in passages defining “free lunch” and the “TANSTAAFL” acronym, decides to get his authorial words for free from Wikipedia and to include them in Free without attribution. Guess what? Turns out that when it comes to lifting other people’s writing, there’s no such thing [...]

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From Business Week:
This summer, the government agency is expected to issue new advertising guidelines that will require bloggers to disclose when they’re writing about a sponsor’s product and voicing opinions that aren’t their own. The new FTC guidelines say that blog authors should disclose when they’re being compensated by an advertiser to discuss a product.
And [...]

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