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Last spring I assigned a SALT intern to the task of documenting Vice President Dick Cheney’s public admissions that he supported and had authorized the use of torture, specifically in the form of water boarding, on suspects held in the “war on terror,” in the aftermath of the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Written by Kathleen Bergin This is a phrase public school administrators use all the time.  It captures the idea of integrated learning which is supposed to help students retain important information and develop the ability to visualize the forest without missing the trees.  In grade school, for example, a teacher might include a math problem in a health sciences class:  if a candy bar has 270 calories, and you burn 95 calories each hour riding a bike, how long will it take to burn off the calories consumed by eating the candy bar?  Math is a component of science, and science requires the application of math, so integrating both into a single lesson plan makes for more effective and efficient teaching. There are plenty of opportunities for integrated learning in law school, especially if you’ve been around a while and taught a variety of courses. 

written by:  andré douglas pond cummings Late last month during an extravagant signing ceremony President Barack Obama declared that the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill represented the "toughest financial reform since the ones created in the aftermath of the Great Depression."  President Obama and Congressional leadership proclaimed that the new financial industries bill would end "too big to fail" and return fiscal responsibility to Wall Street.  "Never again" and "no more" were words thrown about with abandon in the wake of passage of Dodd-Frank.  My simple question in response is this:  Are these claims actually true?  Has Congress ended the era of "too big to fail" and does new regulation force discipline onto Wall Street executives that recklessy drove the global economy to the point of near collapse in 2008? The short (and disappointing) answer is no. Over on the Corporate Justice Blog, Professor Steven Ramirez has conducted a systematic examination of the Dodd-Frank bill, breaking it down by section, providing careful and insightful analysis.  Ramirez's conclusions, by my reading, indicate that Dodd-Frank is a mixed bag, with some potential for optimism, but significant reason for pessimism.  Per Ramirez, the core of the bill abdicates legislative  responsibility to corralling Wall Street excess and fails to protect against future capital market crises.  Most disappointing is the bill's failure to properly eradicate  "too big to fail" and regulate Wall Street's beloved ability to create profits out of nothing but invention of new financial products (derivatives trading, credit default swaps, etc.).  Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz predicts that not only does Dodd-Frank not protect against future crises, but that another meltdown is inevitable.

Written by:  Deborah Post The economic crisis has eroded the middle class as government downsized along with private employers.  Middle managers are willing to work for less because they realize that they, like their blue collar counterparts, are living in a world of massive unemployment, under-employment, part time employment, and contingent employment.  There is almost no segment of the U.S. economy where employees from middle management on down has not had to adjust his or her expectations.  Despite the predictions/promises that health care and education were recession proof, the truth is that colleges and universities for some time have been staffed in large part by contingent employees.

Written by:  Deborah Post For several years and at various institutions where I have taught Business Organizations I have asked my students to read the business section of the New York Times every day.  Once a week I administer a quiz on the stories that appeared that week.  To be honest, I have had to make some adjustments because of the querulous nature of current students.  I narrowed  the assignment to the three stories featured in the online version of the New York Times.  Not every student has to read the paper every day as the quiz is administered to groups, not the entire class.  They can divide the responsibility for reading the news among the members of the groups or they can play the odds and hope that when I roll the die, their group will not be the one selected to take the quiz that week.  The quiz is administered in game show fashion and I use a power point with some visual clue for each question.

On Yom Kippur, Jews are required to seek and give forgiveness. It is not about redemption, but rather about the power of forgiveness in our lives, the lives of others and the life of the community. Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower is a moving exploration and account of forgiveness during an historical moment marked by unspeakable terror. Wiesenthal brings the reader into his inner circle by sharing a painful story about oppressor and oppressed. He takes us on a journey where we are privy to the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp where Wiesenthal was an inmate in WWII Poland. We read words that can never fully capture the pain, degradation, fear, and loathing that framed the lives of the interned at the hands of sadistic guards consumed by hate and an utter contempt for human life and suffering.

Watch some of the back episodes of Jon Stewart interviewing Elizabeth Warren on The Daily Show and you, too, will understand why there is so much resistance to Warren’s nomination. She is smart and very funny. She is clear, and she is undaunted. She knows who is doing what and she doesn’t pretend that she doesn’t. She knows how government is supposed to act and explains how it isn’t doing its job.

Bloggers are not journalists, and what bloggers write (including what I am writing in this post) should not be mischaracterized as principled, researched reporting.

When trying to figure out what the Federal government is all about, what powers it really has and, even more importantly, what types of problems the Founders invented it to deal with, it is a really good idea to take a hard look at the very first words of the Constitution. Those are found in the Preamble. Generally ignored, it just happens to be the Statement of Purpose of the Constitution and indeed for our nation itself. This column proposes the establishment of a new "-ers" organization (you know, "Birthers," "Tenthers). Focused on Constitutional government and what it is all about, according to the plain language of the Constitution, it would be called "The Preamblers."

Written by Tucker Culbertson Professor Noah Feldman recently published a valuable op/ed in the The New York Times arguing that liberals are facing a constitutional crisis, one they cannot confront with conventional civil rights talk about liberty and equality: “[N]ew and pressing constitutional issues and problems loom on the horizon — and they cannot be easily solved or resolved using the now-familiar frameworks of liberty and equality… The great economic and political challenges of our present decade — salvaging and fixing financial institutions, delivering health care, protecting the environment — have major constitutional dimensions. They require us to determine the limits of government power and the extent to which the state can impinge on collective and individual freedoms. Progressive constitutional thinkers, so skilled in arguing about social and civil rights, are out of practice in addressing such structural economic questions.” I am truly grateful for Feldman’s piece.  In this reply, I want to do two things: 1) trouble his use of the terms liberal, progressive, and conservative; and 2) suggest that the current crisis he describes is only one reflection of issues which are endemic to, and which constitute the genuine tragedy of, political liberalism.

Written by Katie Porter At a recent FDIC Conference exploring the idea of “Safe Financial Products,” I was struck by the hostility of the representatives of the banking industry to “more law.” I don’t expect businesses to volunteer to take on additional regulatory burden, but it didn’t seem…

Written by Katie Porter Legal scholars have queued up several lists of good questions for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Most have focused on her views on  “hot” topics, such as national security, racial diversity, how she might be…

Written by Tucker Culbertson What specific understandings of -- and interventions against -- forms of subordination inherent to liberal capitalism must be integrated into, or considered along with, work on structural racism? * * * These are further thoughts on the AALS's recent excellent Workshop on "Post Racial" Civil Rights Law, Politics and Legal Education, subtitled New and Old Color Lines in the Age of Obama...  Many thanks to the entire Planning Committee -- Professors Devon Carbado (Chair), Ian Haney Lopez, Audrey McFarlane, Reva Siegel, and Stephanie Wildman --  for their work. During the final event of the conference, Professor Lani Guinier spoke about the misperception of racism as only individual, intentional acts based on racial animosity.  Professor Guinier explained that race is structural. Given: (1) our long history of systemic and violent racial subordination -- from occupation, genocide, removal, and slavery to exclusion, internment, segregation, and profiling; and: (2)  contemporary race-neutral governance which actively ignores continuing disparate racial distributions of opportunity and suffering; we must understand racism not only as a private moral harm but also as a public political problem -- as Professor Kendall Thomas and Professor Ian Haney Lopez, among others, have regularly persuasively argued.

Written by Tucker Culbertson I just returned from what I found to be a remarkable and remarkably productive conference on arrangements of race, privilege, and power.  The conference was especially useful for me when we talked about how we talk about obvious disparities in present distributions of opportunity and suffering which continue to correlate with racial difference. One of the lessons I took from the conference was a much-needed reminder that I need to do more as an antisubornationist advocate in activities unrelated to my vocation.

Written by Tucker Culbertson If the Supreme Court ever does rightly decide that race may be considered by government actors trying to solve social problems, which sorts of policies will a postcolorblind Court uphold?  Postcolorblind constitutional law -- as part of a system of racial governance -- may indemnify some of the practices that we opposing colorblindness want to prohibit. These thoughts are from a forthcoming article of mine on civil rights and counterterrorism.  I'm sharing them here, now, because I think they're relevant both to an upcoming conference on civil rights law in the Obama era, and to our discussions about law and racial justice generally. When we consider the present constitutional law of colorblindness, we who argue against colorblind constitutional law ought to also imagine and prepare for the possible jurisprudence of a postcolorblind Court.  If the Supreme Court ever does rightly decide that race may be considered by government actors trying to solve social problems, which sorts of policies will a postcolorblind Court uphold?

Written by Katie Porter Law scholarship has a proud tradition of actually influencing the law. This remains true today, notwithstanding proclaimations of some in the legal academy who make proclamations about how their work is "highly theoretical" to hide shortcomings in translating their ideas in meaningful ways to policymakers and everyday people. Right now pending before Congress is an excellent example of how academic work, published in a law review, can become real law. A few years ago, Elizabeth Warren and Oren Bar-Gill authored an article in the Penn Law Review called Making Credit Safer. It was a "real" law review article in the best and worst sense of our scholarly form: 97 pages, 328 footnotes, exploring every nook and cranny of an idea. The idea, that America needs an agency devoted to protecting consumers from financial products, is about to become law, having been included in both the House and Senate versions of the financial reform bill. For progressive law scholars, this example of how to move an idea from a law review to a law offers some valuable tactical lessons: First, be persistent. Even the best ideas, even under the most opportune circumstances, take time to catch on. Elizabeth Warren first wrote about a Consumer Financial Protection Agency in the summer of 2007. Three years later, it's going to be become law. But I think a decade is a more realistic time frame for advancing ideas, especially those that sharply refute the existing paradigm. Write about your idea, and then write about it again, and then write about it some more.

Written by Jessica Silbey Although clearly the rash of anti-immigrant laws have material effects on people living in the states in which these laws are being enforced, I am obsessed with the hateful symbolism of the laws more than the anxiety and fear of incarceration and deportation the laws engender. Here in Massachusetts, the state senate just passed a bill that purports to make it even harder for illegal immigrants to be employed or receive any state benefits.  Most commentators agree that the law is nothing new -- illegal immigrants are not eligible for state benefits  -- but the symbolic add-ons to this law (e.g, a hot-line for anonymous tips to turn in illegal immigrants holding jobs and criminalizing higher education funding for illegal immigrants) are despicable. The message sent by laws like this (and those that are the subject of on-going criticism in Arizona) are of exclusion and greed.

Written by Tucker Culbertson In the past eight years, Justice John Paul Stevens has written monumental majority opinions on counterterrorism (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush) and the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment (Hope v. Pelzer and Atkins v. Virginia).  Of particular note is that in both areas of law, Justice Stevens and a majority of the Court have referred to, and even applied, international law in rendering constitutional judgments.  As we consider Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court (especially her capacity to judge the Obama Administration in matters of national security,) Kagan's regard for these opinions’ precedential force, and her stance on the use of international law in constitutional interpretation, should be closely questioned. 1. Why should we believe that a present Solicitor General can impartially judge claims against the Administration in which she now serves?

Written by Michael Waterstone Amongst other subjects, I teach and write in disability law.  In a disability law class, I will always start with a few exercises to get students to question their own assumptions and prejudices about disability.  The build up is to get…

Written By:  Jessica Silbey If you're a Harry Potter fan -- or your kids are -- wouldn't it be fun to participate in (or watch) a play or an opera about Harry Potter and his friends and adventures? Wouldn't you be thrilled to see your kids (or your students) busy at work making a video that brings Harry into the 24th century, combining sorcery with space travel? How about a dramatic reading of Turow's "One L" in your law school's dining hall, as a community event for students studying late night and needing a break? I am regularly encountering creative and community-building and educational performances, adaptations or transformations of original works (such as Harry Potter).  I am also regularly encountering anxiety from the adapters and transformers about the possible illegality of their work. Usually, these folks are right to be worried that they are trespassing. Making a "derivative work" of someone's original work violates the original work owner's copyright, specifically 17 USC 106(2).  Publicly performing someone's original work also violates that person's copyright, see 17 USC 106(4). There are limitations and exceptions to these broad rules, of course, but they are complex and fine-grained. And most people who are remixing or mashing (or simply rehearsing) for fun, are unfamiliar with the complexity or fine-grained nature of copyright laws and instead are worried about allegations of infringement or pirate that has become so common these days. There are lots of folks in the legal academy who are working on proposals for legal reform that would make many non-profit, personal or semi-private, educational or scholarly uses and reuses of original material exempt from copyright infringment. There are also lots of folks in the legal practice world who are litigating cases with an aim toward making headway in the courts toward clearer exemptions, such as EFF and the Stanford Fair Use Project. Also, there are organizations, such as Public Knowledge or Creative Commons, that are working institutionally towards less costly (e.g., fewer transaction costs or less expensive or free) access to such works. This is not only a copyright issue, but a patent issue. Access to medicine or treatment can be blocked because of proprietary claims to methods of treatment and diagnostic tools.