Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli

February 1, 2010

The Internet: Is This a Thing Any More?

One of my two courses this semester is the unfortunately-named “Law of Internet Speech.” I say it’s unfortunately named because, although I think it’s an important and timely course that should attract a lot of students, and I took the name directly from the Madeleine Schachter and Joel Kurtzberg casebook, I only have seven students. (My other course, a seminar on Law and Social Issues in Cyberspace, drew eleven students.) So I wonder: is there something about the name that makes it look unattractive to students (besides the fact that it’s not a bar course)?

From Flickr, by eflon

So perhaps my younger readers can tell me: is “the Internet” even a thing any more? Does it make sense to speak of “the Internet” as something with an identifiable shape and presence? Or is it now simply the transparent and invisible infrastructure on which so much human activity now takes place. When a student Googles a research topic or a restaurant menu, texts a friend to go to dinner, posts photos of the meal on Flickr, and then posts on his or her Facebook wall about how wasted he or she got after dinner, does that student think of all those things as “using the Internet”? Or are they (in one sense) discrete activities with their own sphere of reference, or (in another sense) just part of what you do in your daily life, like brushing your teeth?

I also wonder: what is the purpose of a course on online speech and privacy (which is really the scope of “Law of Internet Speech”) when there is a general First Amendment course on the schedule? One of the points I want to make in this course is that all speech is Internet speech now. Even the traditional subjects of free speech law–newspapers and other mass media–exist primarily online, and there is some doubt whether print newspapers will survive in anything like their traditional form. And public speech or assembly? In a world of ubiquitous digital video, they derive most of their impact–and are often stage-directed toward–online distribution and publicity.

So as I continue to shape this course, perhaps it’s best to think of it as a course on the shape of freedom of speech (and of the press) in a world of ubiquitous and instantaneous digital communication.

(ADDENDUM: Lest anyone think I’m not pulling my weight, next year I’ll be teaching a required course in legal ethics.)

January 30, 2010

Outcome Measures in Law School and Value Billing in Law Firms

I suppose this is completely obvious to everyone else, but it just struck me: the ABA Committee on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar’s proposed standards requiring outcomes measurements in legal education are completely consistent with clients’ demands for value billing.

Best Practices for Legal Education

I just saw that the Outcome Measures Report is posted on the ABA web site. The Outcome Measure Committee was chaired by Randy Hertz and is a tour de force. The Report cites Best Practices and the Carnegie Report extensively, it then goes on to look at legal education in other countries, accreditation in other disciplines and regional accreditation standards for universities and colleges. The Report concludes that the ABA accreditation standards should be less “input driven” and more “outcome driven”. It even begins to consider the costs of this shift in accreditation standards. Check out the report!

The Anchor Plate

It’s 2010 and the client revolution is in full swing — lawyers are finding that they may just have to justify their bills based on the value received by their clients, not just the amount of time the lawyers devoted to a matter. If you think about it, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but somehow it seems like virgin territory for many lawyers.

January 29, 2010

Toasted Ravioli in the News, or Welcome to The Anchor Plate

How can I not mention a new law blog that demonstrates the good taste to mention toasted ravioli in one of its first posts? Case in point: The Anchor Plate, “an alternative voice on the practice of intellectual property litigation,” from St. Louis IP lawyers Pete Salsich III and Geoff Gerber. Pete was a law student at Saint Louis University when I was Head of Computing Services at the Law Library (Hi Pete!)

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January 28, 2010

The Future of Reading, or Do Scholars Really Want “Social Scholarship”?

David Weinberger comments on the new iPad:

The iPad is the future of the past of books

….

The future of reading is social. The future of reading blurs reading and writing. The future of reading is the networking of readers, writers, content, comments, and metadata, all in one continuous-on mash.

Depends what kind of writing you’re talking about, I suppose. I’ve always been intrigued by Laura B. Cohen’s blog post from a couple of years ago, “Social Scholarship on the Rise,” but I have yet to see it catch on among the sociolegal scholars I work with. Start with Cohen’s first characteristic of a “social scholar”:

A social scholar contributes to the conversation about her research topic by discussing her findings and ruminations on her blog and by inviting comments. By doing this, she moves some of her research activities into the public arena.

Apart from a small subset of blogger/scholars, that doesn’t seem to be happening at all. Perhaps it’s due to the training that most law faculty receive now–not just the J.D., but the long, perfection-oriented dissertation process–but in my experience, law professors and other sociolegal scholars are extremely reluctant (if not phobic) about releasing to the public anything other than a fully fleshed-out article. Certainly they take advantage of the time-honored law school practice of workshopping their papers at other law schools, but this is all done face-to-face and generally with no record of the discussion other than the notes the speaker may take.

Scholars in law and sociolegal studies (and, I suspect, in many other fields) don’t seem to want the sort of fluid, boundaryless interaction of reader with the written text that futurists like Weinberger predict. I doubt that many casual readers of popular literature want that either. Certainly some Harry Potter fans like discussing their favorite books in online groups or creating fan fiction, but I suspect the vast majority of readers prefer to consume their literature in the traditional way, as artifact and object separate from the reader.

Some of us comfortable in the online environment might like to see the type of reading Weinberger predicts become the norm, but I’m not betting on it.

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September 30, 2009

How the social brain experiences empathy, Part 3

More from the Empathy and the Brain conference.

The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: Issues and Implications
Daniel Batson (University of Kansas)

“I came to empathy by the back door.” Interest in motivation for helping: whether, when we help others, it’s because we care about their welfare, or is it always in some way about ourselves? The old egoism/altrusim debate.

Depends what you mean by “altruism.” Helping? Costly helping? Self-sacrificial helping? Obviously humans do these things (on occasion).

Altruism: A motivational state with the ultimate coal of increasing another’s welfare.
Egosim: A motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing one’s own welfare.

Question is whether our motivation is ever, in any degree, altruistic? If you want to know when and where helping can be expected, and how effective it is likely to be, “helping” isn’t enough–we need to get at motives.

Keep reading →