Which recalls:

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From what I can tell, there aren’t many of these, but I would be delighted to know about more. Here is a list of what I have found so far, online:

Jonathan Band’s recent chart titled GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement, distributed by the Library Copyright Alliance.

Pam Samuelson’s Map of the Public Domain, published as part of Mapping the Digital Public Domain: Threats and Opportunities, 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 147 (Winter/Spring 2003). In later work, she has acknowledged, a la James Boyle, that the information law world may comprise multiple public domains.

Tom Bell produced this map of intellectual property.

Via Ann Bartow, I heard about this Section 108 “spinner,” which is a nifty graphical guide to what Section 108 of the Copyright Act offers, and does not offer, to libraries and librarians.

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Model 1 is inexpensive for a school to operate. Adjunct faculty don’t get paid very much, so this saves faculty positions for people who will teach other subjects. Devoting slots this way arguably benefits students in a couple of different ways. It might mean lower student-faculty ratios in upper level classes or a wider variety of courses from which to choose. And, it could mean more faculty publishing and advancing the school’s scholarly reputation. (Note: This second point may be hotly contested depending on one’s perspective. Conventional wisdom holds that tenure-track faculty who teach outside of legal writing publish more than legal writing faculty. This is partly because many legal writing faculty hold non-tenure track positions for which publication is not a requirement. This may be changing as legal writing faculty have begun to hold tenure-track positions and publishing more.) All of this comes at a cost, however. Full-time faculty who specialize in legal writing develop considerable teaching expertise. Perhaps more than any other type of law school faculty, full-time legal writing teachers think and write about how to train lawyers. With all due respect to those who teach legal writing as adjuncts or fellows, I think that full-time legal writing faculty will, on the whole, teach better classes than part-time faculty. An adjunct has another job that is his primary income. He understandably pays more attention to that than his students. And, adjuncts frequently teach for only a few years. Just when they’re starting to figure things out, they move on.

Model 2 has intriguing possibilities for excellence that may not always be realized. When full-time faculty teach writing as part of a doctrinally focused course, the integration could lead to a deeper understanding of legal problems and how to write about them. Class discussion can explicitly tie big substantive questions to challenges in writing memos or briefs. If this works, it probably creates an excellent legal writing class. Unfortunately, the faculty I know who have taught in these programs report that the promise is not always realized because faculty who teach doctrinal classes do not, as a whole, make legal writing a priority. They prefer to concentrate on their substantive law specialties and their scholarship. Only an unusually dedicated non-legal writing specialist professor will spend the time necessary to become a top-flight legal writing teacher. Some undoubtedly do it, but others I’ve spoken to find the obligation to teach writing a burdensome distraction from teaching and writing about subjects they prefer.

Model 3 uses only full-time faculty who dedicate themselves to teaching legal writing. The obvious benefit is the development of expertise I mentioned earlier. Not every law professor will agree with this, but I think that top-flight legal writing teachers bring great value to their students. Those who don’t agree may say that any of us (meaning non-legal writing law professors) could step right in and do just as good of a job, but I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. A good legal writing course combines the reading and analysis of cases with instruction on how to write about the law. It isn’t obvious that “just any” professor would immediately do a good job of it. If experience matters in teaching torts, it probably matters in teaching legal writing too. So why don’t all law schools employ a full-time staff of legal writing teachers? Well, it’s expensive. Full-time legal writing teachers occupy faculty slots that could be used for teachers in other areas. A school may not think that legal writing is sufficiently important to warrant the expenditure.

From the standpoint of a prospective law student, it’s worth deciding how important legal writing will be to you. You will have to candidly assess your writing ability, how easily you will adapt to legal conventions, and your willingness to experience stress if you’re behind fellow summer associates/new lawyers who have had more training. To be clear, I’m not saying that legal writing should be your primary method for choosing a law school. But, if schools are fairly close in other ways, the legal writing program is one important and frequently overlooked way to identify the right school for you.

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As this blog notes: “It’s a draggable umbrella designed by Qian Jiang & Yiying Wu. Apparently, it’s for people who are so accustomed to traveling with a rolling suitcase, that they can’t make the switch to an umbrella.”

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The similarity between law school curriculums may give students the impression that there is little to distinguish the program of a particular school. However, there is one area – legal writing – where schools differ a great deal.

When I went to law school, I mistakenly thought that legal writing was the least important course I would take. And indeed, that is exactly how my alma mater, Harvard, treated it. The course was taught by second and third year students, giving it the feel of an afterthought to the “real” courses taught by full-time faculty. We didn’t pay much attention to it, and my education suffered for it. After my first year of law school, I arrived as a summer associate thinking I’d be well-prepared, only to find that I knew very little about how to conduct effective legal research or write memos. If not for the advice of a kind fellow summer associate educated at a supposedly “lesser” school, I might have failed in my first legal job.

Legal writing is important well beyond the summer associate experience. People may think of lawyers as oralists, but cases are really won and lost on briefs. When I practiced in California, judges issued tentative rulings based on briefs, and wouldn’t even hear argument from the “winning” side unless the “losing” side could convince the judge otherwise in a very few minutes. And of course, transactional lawyers must document deals clearly.

Despite the importance of legal writing, most law schools do not promote the details of their legal writing programs as heavily as other things. I can think of a few reasons. First, legal writing was not traditionally important to elite law schools, and one could argue that it still isn’t. Second, legal writing is not generally considered an academic discipline like torts or civil procedure. Third, legal writing comes across as un-sexy. Accomplished students of the sort who get into law school don’t feel good being told that their writing skills need improvement. It’s far more exciting to tell them that a school will make them experts in international human rights.

All of these things conspire to hide the importance of legal writing to students. Nevertheless, I’d suggest that it’s very much worthwhile for prospective students to compare legal writing programs at various schools and think about what kind of program best suits them. In my next post, I will describe 3 general types of legal writing programs, their pros and cons, and some of the reasons that schools adopt them.

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The yellow traffic light is taking on a new meaning for motorists during these tough economic times: one expensive trap.

According to the National Motorists Association (NMA), some municipalities have been caught shortening the time in which yellow lights are on in order to generate additional revenue from tickets issued to motorists caught on traffic cameras running red lights. At least six cities including Dallas and Chattanooga, Tenn. have engaged in the practice in recent years, the organization’s Web site says.

Traffic cameras are seen as cash cows by their backers. Big cities reap millions in revenue from the cameras, which cost about $100,000 to install. Los Angeles issues about 3,600 red-light violations a month through its camera systems and netted more than $6 million last year from the program after expenses, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Shorten the time in which drivers have to stop and that revenue-stream can be even more lucrative. For the NMA, a libertarian group opposed to many traffic safety rules, shorter yellow lights is one way state and local governments can justify the expensive traffic camera systems, says the group’s President Jim Baxter.

Other groups, including the larger American Automobile Association, say the NMA is exaggerating the extent of the problem in order to whip up public hysteria. “AAA does not believe the problem is widespread,” says Justin McNaull, the organization’s director of state relations. He says the problems disclosed by the NMA were in isolated programs run by vendors motivated by profit.

Baxter, though, is undaunted. “They play games with the yellow light timing,” he says, adding that manipulating yellow lights does little to promote traffic safety

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I had switched sides because I think competitor paid placement, while a “trademark use” (the scare quotes express skepticism of the concept) for infringement purposes, is generally a pro-consumer and non-confusing practice, so I was hoping to see Google win the case on the lack of confusion.  Indeed, I was also hoping the Second Circuit might, with the help of Google’s lawyers, do some good work in reining in IIC doctrine, clarifying that competitive and non-confusing use of keywords is never a problem (contra the old meta tag cases).

As it turns out, Rescuecom wants the same thing!  And it wants to be in the front line in that battle.  Rescuecom is apparently seeking a declaratory judgment supporting its right to engage in competitive keyword advertising, targeting the customers of Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

Way to go, Rescuecom, looks like I’m on your side once again.  Best of luck in litigating your way to a more sensible version of online trademark law.

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“(1) We have posted a call for applications for the summer 2010 IPilogue
team and we would be very pleased to hear from students at your own
institution.  The call for editors has a deadline of 31 March 2010 and may
be found here:
http://www.iposgoode.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/IPilogue-Editors-Summer-2010.pdf
. Students from all schools are encouraged to get involved and we look
forward to their contributions! Please let me know if you have any
questions or suggestions as to how we might work together and further build
on this cross-institutional conversation.

(2) We are recruiting a new Assistant Director and would welcome you
passing on details to any who you think might be interested (see job ad
attached). Applications are due March 12, 2010

Last, on a somewhat unrelated note, I would like to seize this occasion to
inquire as to whether you have any articles/reviews/notes etc ready or soon
to be ready for publication. David Vaver … and I will be relaunching
the Intellectual Property Journal (IPJ) and are seeking submissions. As you
may know, the IPJ was first launched by David Vaver in 1984 and made a
unique contribution to the scholarly and practicing IP community in Canada
and around the world. The IPJ is a quarterly publication and there are 3
more issues that will be published this year. Please feel free to get in
touch with either of us on this front as we would be pleased to be able to
work with you.”

Prof D’Agostino’s email address:  gdagostino@osgoode.yorku.ca

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Over the next few weeks, I intend to post my thoughts about these questions. Like most law professors, I’m curious to see how my schools (I teach at Boston College and went to Harvard) get ranked. But beyond that idle curiosity, I’ve thought a bit (and just a bit) about evaluating the quality of a school because I’ve had the privilege of serving on American Bar Association teams that visit schools and prepare reports for purposes of accreditation. These visits typically last 3 days and offer team members a real “look under the hood” of what is happening at a particular school. I’ve also had the opportunity to get to know a couple of other schools through visiting or other methods that offered more than a casual glance at their programs. In some cases, I’ve come away convinced that schools deserve their rankings (whether high or low). But in others, I’ve come away with the impression that a school is actually a lot better or worse than its U.S. News ranking suggests. I am not going to discuss the specifics of those impressions, but I will try to share the general things I’ve learned in hopes that it will help those choosing law schools.

So let me start with just a few thoughts about U.S. News and how much weight it should be given. In my opinion, U.S. News gives a rough indication about how prestigious a school is. Every prospective law student wants to know what a school will do for his resume, and U.S. News helps answer that question. The top of the list – perhaps 5 to 8 schools – are sufficiently prestigious that simply going there will do a lot for the student in question in terms of career opportunities. Beyond that, however, things get more dicey. The schools that follow surely carry prestige, but employers will no longer pay attention “just because” a particular applicant went to the school. The individual’s ability matters more. That’s not to say that a school’s reputation becomes irrelevant. It remains relevant, but in my opinion a prospective lawyer needs to think about what school will make him a capable lawyer.

To make this clear, look at the numerical scores assigned by U.S. News to various schools. In last year’s ranking, Yale was #1 with a score of 100. Harvard was #2 with 95. Duke, Northwestern, and Virginia shared #10 with 80. Now let’s take a look further down the line. Three more schools shared #20 with scores of 66. Five schools shared #30 with a 62. In short, the difference between numbers 20 and 30 was one point LESS than the difference between numbers 1 and 2, and 16 points less than the difference between numbers 1 and 10. That means, according to U.S. News, there’s not much difference between a school ranked 20 and one ranked 30.

Despite this, I suspect that many aspiring lawyers place unwarranted weight on the relative rankings of schools outside the top few. U.S. News (and maybe others) need to have a “top 20” or “top 50” to make rankings interesting. A law student, however, needs to find the school that will best educate her, and I am hoping that the posts I intend to write will help students identify schools that will help them flourish.

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