Salt Blog

by Lisa R. Pruitt Wealth and income inequality have been getting a lot of attention in recent months--at least in the New York Times. Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert has been especially persistent about keeping the topic on readers' radar screens; read some of his columns here, here, here, and here. Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Robert Frank have had a say, too. Wealth inequality was also the subject of a "Room for Debate" feature a few weeks ago. But geographic analysis of inequality has been little examined in the mainstream media until The Economist Magazine ran a couple of stories about uneven development and spatial inequality in the March 10, 2011 issue. The first "Internal affairs: The gap between rich and poor regions widened because of the recession," analyzes various nations' spatial inequality as measured by income and GDP. This analysis shows that Britain is the nation with the widest geography-based income gap: the per capita GDP is nine times greater in central London than it is in some Welsh regions. The smallest regional spreads, on the other hand, were in Italy and Germany, where "incomes in their most affluent areas are [nevertheless] almost three times those of the poorest." The United States falls at the British end of the spectrum, coming in second for inequality across regions among the nations studied. The District of Columbia, for example, is five times as rich as Mississippi. Further, the situation has worsened in the past few years.

Written by SpearIt “Post-racial” is rhetoric for a state of social consciousness that has moved beyond the antiquated trappings of white superiority.  In post-racial discourse, the American cosmic race progresses past the oppressions of old, credence to which is lent the presidential election of Barack Obama; for believers, election of a “black” to the White House symbolized the American Dream achieved.  Closer scrutiny, however, reveals another type of dreaming going on, the fantasy evinced by the term “post-racial.” In this American Dream, adherents to “post-racial” are a slumber to existing racial woes, with vision stuck on a future that’s yet to be achieved.  The discursive import of “post-racial,” then, is in persuading others that the dream indeed is real; it takes the present and supplants it with something more sublime than the status quo.  Despite the “post-racial” concept’s beauty, in the waking world such a state may well be impossible due to the systemic nature of discrimination.  Today, more is at stake than the force of individual bigotry—discrimination has been institutionalized in law and society—and language is no exception.  Today’s names and labels continue to harbor inequities of old, and show why debates on race and color are fundamentally flawed.

The 13th Annual! That phrase in some ways is numbing. It is a solemn reminder that it has been fifteen years since Trina Grillo, our colleague, friend and inspiration, too soon left the planet, three years shy of her fiftieth birthday. That phrase – the 13th Annual – is also inspiring as it demonstrates the lasting power of Trina’s legacy and the persistence of the struggle in which we all engage and to which the annual retreat is dedicated.

Following the SEC’s securities fraud wrist slap of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo to the tune of $67.5 million civil fine (only $22.5 million was paid by Mozilo, who received $521.5 million in compensation from 2000 to 2008) for his prominent role in the mortgage meltdown, federal prosecutors decided…

Peter King is my representative in the United States Congress! There I said it. I apologize to everyone and assure you I have never done anything to get him elected or reelected. One would think that living in Nassau County, Long Island, under an hour by car or train to New York City, would mean I was living in a fairly progressive community. When I moved here in 1987, I thought I was. But Long Island has a nasty history: in the 1730s, there were more enslaved men and women living here than anyplace else in the north. The Levitt family which singlehandedly created the concept of the cookie-cutter suburbs that soon led to white flight and sprawl, had restrictive covenants in the leases and deeds to their homes in Levittown. (Levittown still is less than 1% African American!) Long Island has 127 individual school districts, each devised to assure homogeneity and racial purity. So Peter King as an elected official somehow fits the demographics of a region trying to stave off modernity despite its proximity to Manhattan.

The business of rhetoric is persuasion. At its zenith, rhetoric functions like a jedi-mind-trick, making us amnesiacs to the history of the present. The law is no exception, where persuasion is everything. Everything about the profession whittles down to persuasion in some form or other—lawyers use verbal tactics to persuade judge and jury, judges use it to write persuasive legal opinions - not to mention legal scholars who ruminate over sexy titles and themes for their articles. Under close inspection, then, the language of law proves to be one big rhetorical script. It is crucial, then, to consider rhetoric within a framework of oppression, both legal and linguistic.

by andré douglas pond cummings In May of 2009, the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA) was signed into law. The bill created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel of 5 Democrats, 1 Independent, and 4 Republicans whose task was to “examine the causes, domestic…

By Hazel Weiser. My twentysomething year old daughter accuses me of “Facebook” stalking, because she set up the SALT Facebook page, giving me access to hers.  Browsing, not stalking, I see how young Americans use Facebook: to connect with people they don’t have time to communicate with daily about stuff that really doesn’t matter; to amass lots of “friends” so that they don’t feel lonely; and to document their lives like the Kardashians by posting humiliating photographs after every party and shared meal. Seeing Facebook used like this seems like a waste of time, and perhaps the reason why the United States is not recovering fast enough from the 2008 crash, because so many of us are on Facebook for too much time every day. That’s not how Egyptians see Facebook.  It’s not how any totalitarian regime will ever see Facebook again. Wael Ghonim is the head of marketing for Google Middle East, and his resume, which you can find here, reflects his generation’s understanding of social media.  Obviously Hosni Mubarak didn’t, not at first.  Ghonim launched the Facebook page that first “galvanized the protesters,” as Brooke Gladstone put it last weekend during her On the Media interview. Ghonim was arrested and detained by Egyptian authorities for 12 days during the demonstrations, held blindfolded, the entire time.  Between Facebook, Twitter, and cell phones, the young protesters in Egypt were able to organize their supporters.  Al Jazeera showed the world, but more importantly, the residents of Egypt and the Middle East that there were indeed protests, what the protesters looked like, and that no matter how much Al Ahram, the leading government newspaper in Cairo, denied it, young people, lawyers, workers, and students were revolting against thirty years of oppression.  You know what happened. By Monday morning, there were demonstrations in Iran, Yemen, and Bahrain.

By Kathleen Bergin Representative Pete King (R-NY), the new chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, wants to keep you safe.  He’s asking patriotic Americans to watch out for the terrorists among us, and thinks people should be immune from civil liability if they report a hunch based on “reasonable…

By Olympia Duhart In my legal research and writing class, I spend a great deal of time trying to teach my 1Ls to steer clear of ambiguity in their communication.  At the core, I offer them simple and familiar advice: Say what you mean, and mean what you say. Seems like a lesson Ohio Gov. John Kasich needs to learn. Last week, Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner said the Republican governor made an ambiguous – potentially explosive – comment to her when she offered to help assemble a racially diverse cabinet. The governor’s response to her offer: “I don’t need your people.” For Turner, it was unclear whether Kasich’s comments were dismissive of her constituents (she is a Democrat) or her ethnic group (she is black).  Turner said she was “kind of perplexed” by the governor’s comments. She’s not the only one. The Ohio Legislative Black Caucus has criticized Republicans in the Kasich administration and the Ohio legislature for failing to place people of color in key positions. According to POLITICO, Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols confirmed that the governor did tell Turner he didn’t need her “people.” However, the spokesman said Kasich’s comments were intended to be a rejection of partisan Democrat support.  “What he meant was, ‘Your people are Democrats, we don’t need them on our cabinet,’” Nichols insisted. “He said it referring to partisan Democrats who don’t agree with reducing taxes and reducing spending.” Even if Kasich intended to reject Democratic involvement, such isolationism is disheartening from a governor who represents both Republican and Democrat constituents. With the push to relax the ranting as of late and a call from both sides to build consensus, one would hope a state leader would not be so firmly committed to excluding different views and voices. Then there is that other reading of Kasich’s ambiguous comments.

By Kathleen Bergin Rhetoric and Ranting. That’s February’s “theme of the month” here at SALTLAW.  What’s the “theme of the month,” you ask.  It’s a new feature that gives bloggers and readers alike an opportunity to exchange ideas on a specific issue that progressive law profs care about.  Consider it…

Despite the blustery winter winds, a group of law professors and librarians joined the picket lines that surrounded the San Francisco Hilton Hotel during the AALS Annual Meeting last week.

We recently returned from the SALT Human Rights Delegation to Guatemala. The trip was a profoundly haunting and disturbing experience. Jennifer Harbury requested the delegation at a critical time for human rights accountability in Guatemala and for those brave enough to pursue it. The civil war in Guatemala, which lasted from 1960 until 1996, left a river of blood, with 200,000 dead, the vast majority Mayan Indians, but also many labor, church, civic, and student leaders, as well as their families.

Imagine my panic when my son’s school invited me to present for 250 sixth graders on immigration – in the time slot just before lunch. On the one hand, I welcomed a chance to counter the distressing anti-immigrant xenophobia I witness every day on the web, in social settings, and even in court.

Written by J.D. King I always get excited when obscure issues of criminal procedure find their way into popular culture.  Last week, the issue of expired sodium thiopental was featured on both the CBS drama, “The Good Wife” and Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”  Most states now…

At a time when the complexity of the world might seem impossible to navigate, the rise of Facebook, the marvel of Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest billionaire and Time’s “Man of the Year,” makes absolute sense. It is a global condenser, creating neighborhoods of “friends” across geographic boundaries.

Written by Michael Perlin Note: I originally published this in the CrimProfs blog last year, and, in a slightly modified version, in the Clinicians With Not Enough To Do blog shortly thereafter. I’ve updated it a bit, and hope it is of interest to SALT members, especially those grappling with P&T committees, etc. Many years ago, when I began teaching (I had litigated for 13 years prior to changing careers, and had written a good number of law review articles during those years), I received all sorts of well-meaning advice from colleagues (both at my own school and elsewhere) about what to do and what not to do as part of my pre-tenure years (being me, I proceeded to ignore almost all that advice, and I have never regretted it for a moment, but that’s another story). Much of the advice was predictable, and made sort of sense, given how tenure decisions are mostly made. But one piece of it flabbergasted me, and has remained stuck in my mind for years as an example of one of the many things wrong with the legal scholarship enterprise. “Never write anything with a colleague,” I was warned, “because the tenure committee won’t be able to figure out what was yours and what was your colleague’s and, therefore, it won’t count.” The whole notion of what “counts” also struck me as bizarre (I was at the time engaged in writing a three-volume treatise in mental disability law, an area of the law in which there had never been a treatise, and was told blithely that it wouldn’t “count” because it was a book (well, three books), and “books don’t count.” I was also told that it was time for me to abandon writing in behavioral journals and cross-over “law and ...” journals, since they weren’t really law reviews and this they told me, you guessed it, “wouldn’t count.”

Inside Job is the new documentary by Charles Ferguson that examines the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, but which had been brewing since Ronald Reagan began his campaign to convince the American public to accept two “undemocratic” principles.

Martha T. McCluskey Nov. 30, 2010 SALT has been a leader in opposing recent proposals to weaken ABA standards supporting faculty governance and tenure.   It’s a good time to read more about what it means to structure work so that “choice,” “flexibility,” and “productivity” come from minimizing workers’ voice and encouraging hierarchical controls that channel power mainly into calculations of the relative merits of obedience versus exit (the threat of firing, quitting, or covert shirking). The U.S. is the international leader in what some economists call “guard labor,” devoting the highest share of its labor force to supervisory workers than any other advanced capitalist economy – 15.7% in 2002, compared to a mere 4.4% in Sweden, and up from .8% of the U.S. workforce in 1890 and 11.7% in 1979.  Adding workers primarily involved in internal and external security and punishment (military and prisons), the U.S. stands out even more, arguably allocating more than a quarter of the workforce to what “new governance” scholars like Charles Sabel might call “monitoring” seemingly separate from (and generally opposed to) “learning” – or what law-and-economics might term “transaction costs”  rather than productive transactions.   Some decades back, Sabel and others held out hope that new global economic pressures could inspire the replacement of command-and-control bureaucratic hierarchies with decentralized, creative and dynamic cooperation between  managers and empowered workers, thereby mobilizing workers’ expertise to enhance productivity.    Surveying the data on “guard labor,” economist Michael Perelman concludes, to the contrary, that numerous studies have shown that worker control tends to have more allure than profit for U.S. firms.[1] As this context of stepped-up surveillance, control, and punishment has come to shape not just blue collar and service work but professional labor such as law firm practice, law faculty positions may offer rare opportunities for creative productivity not squelched or distracted by hierarchy.  Yet Perelman’s analysis of guard labor warns that the obsession with supervision at the expense of productivity takes more subtle forms in white collar work, forms that may be familiar even to law faculty.   

It’s no mere coincidence that the release of the film Fair Game occurred on November 5, just four days before George Bush’s memoir Decision Points was published.