Salt Blog

Written by Jeannine Bell I recently had an occasion to address a group of 1Ls to give them advice for law school. I've done this for the past several years and found myself with somewhat mixed emotions for the first time about the type of advice I would give them. When I first began dispensing advice of the sort I was very close to my own law school days. Unsurprisingly perhaps, my advice was a combination of what I imagined law students needed to know and what I wished I had been told as a law student. My comments were heavily peppered with advice about work/life balance, study skills, course selection, and preparing for exams. As I gave this advice over the next several

Written by Ezra Rosser Should self-identified "public interest" law students should do law review or, depending on the school and the nature of the program, moot court?  Months ago I promised I would work on a blog entry related to this question for the Equal Justice Works Blog, but I admit still being conflicted about the issue.  What follows are my thoughts, but they are subject to change and on this issue often do change.  As a law student, my first bonding with upper level, 2L & 3L, students happened at a NLG Disorientation retreat.  There I was told two memorable things: (1) your professors sold-out and though they sound progressive, they decided NOT to DO public interest work, and (2) you don't have to and probably shouldn't do law review.  Now, in my current position I am perhaps particularly nervous about and pained by (1) (something I have written about here), but (2) stuck with me while a student.

Written by Jeannine Bell If your law teaching experiences are anything like mine (or that of my students) you have had few discussions of class or socioeconomic (SES) either with colleagues or with your students. While race is frequently discussed in first year and upper-class courses, there…

“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night….” Organized labor is struggling.

Written by Ezra Rosser I am writing this post in the hopes it will inspire discussion, not because I have any good answers.  This semester I am lucky enough to be living in San Salvador, El Salvador, where my wife is from.  I am there because, given a new baby and family around to help, I can get more work done in El Salvador than I can in the U.S.  On most flights to and from the U.S. there are many Salvadorans and usually a group or two of non-Salvadorans going down to do service projects -- often but not always connected to a church -- in El Salvador.  You can pick them out by their nervous excitement on the way down and more muted expressions on the way back to the U.S. When I talk to them or when I talk with others from the U.S. about El Salvador, I end up getting a lot of questions about safety or concerns for my safety.  Usually people have in mind the vague memory of the country's civil war and know very little about the true reason for concern: the gang violence in the country. Safety and gang violence/gang extortion is the central topic in El Salvador; an NPR story from 2009 gives a small taste of the issue.  President Mauricio Funes, the first leftist-FMLN candidate elected, campaigned against the candidate chosen by ARENA, the former police chief.  But on the wake of an attack by gangs on a bus in which passengers were burned to death, Funes pushed a 'no one is going to intimidate El Salvador' campaign with billboards throughout San Salvador and television spots highlighting the decision to deploy the military to support the police.  (Here is a speech by Funes on the topic of violence in the country.)  Finally this week a new law was passed that criminalizes gang membership, period.  The recent killing of 72 immigrants in Mexico, among them many Salvadorans, only highlights the international problem of gangs, but does not detract from the attention the issue is getting in El Salvador.

Written by Jeannine Bell On Sunday, August 28th 2010 we marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina which flooded 80% of New Orleans metro area. My parents live in New Orleans and I remember Katrina making landfall and the subsequent…

Written by Adrien Wing In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote her husband John Quincy that he and the other men considering a declaration of  independence  should “remember the ladies.” Of course, we know that the men of that era did not do so in the declaration or subsequent constitution, and we remain without gender equality in our governing document up until today. The east African nation Kenya now joins the list of modern era countries that have not forgotten gender equality on paper, even though there are numerous deeply rooted patriarchal practices such as polygamy and female genital surgery, among others.

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 Lisa R. Pruitt In a recent post, I commented on what the film “Winter’s Bone” might reveal about white privilege.  There I discussed Ree Dolly, the film’s heroine, in the overwhelmingly white context of Taney County, Missouri, where the median household income is about 75% of the national median.  (In neighboring persistent poverty Ozark County, which seems more reflective of Ree’s milieu as depicted in the film, the median household income is about 65% of the national figure).  Now I want to discuss Ree’s whiteness and socioeconomic disadvantage in a broader context. What if Ree goes off to Southwest Missouri State in nearby Springfield, Missouri?  or even the University of Missouri?  First, should she be the beneficiary of affirmative action in getting there?  In my opinion, absolutely.  (Read a recent discussion regarding the lack of white, lower class and rural privilege in college admissions here and here).  She would bring diversity of life experience to the student body, and she represents extreme socioeconomic disadvantage.

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 Lisa R. Pruitt This story, "Placing the Blame as Students are Buried in Debt," caught my attention when it appeared in the New York Times in May.   The report features Cortney Munna, a 26-year-old NYU grad who is buried under $100,000 of student debt.  Journalist Ron Lieber tells us that Ms. Munna would "struggle" to make her student loan payments if she had to, but she's been deferring them since her 2005 graduation, in part by taking night classes.  Lieber writes: "This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up." This story, which also appears under the headline, "Another Debt Crisis is Looming, This One in Student Loans," discusses the range of stakeholders who could be blamed for the situation in which Ms. Munna and many others find themselves:  the universities, the parents, and--of course--the lenders.  At one point Lieber suggests a "shared failure of parenting and underwriting."  He continues: "How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn’t she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? 'All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her,' [her mother] said. 'All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.'”

Written by:  Deborah Post Let’s talk dystopia.  Would we want to see factory law schools where students are passed along an assembly line to graduation; where the exclusive measure of the quality of education is test performance on regularly administered multiple choice or short answer tests? We have all had those conversations with law students who admit they never did any research or wrote a paper while they were undergraduates.  Last year I had a student from a reputable state university whose major was political science.  The student confessed that the only paper she wrote in four years of college was in an art history class. If accreditation standards are revised to eliminate the requirement of tenure and the peer review of those who are full time faculty with job security, I have no doubt that most universities will quickly adopt a strategy of replacing tenured faculty with part time or contingent faculty.  An AAUP report in 2009 on contingent faculty indicated that 70% of academic labor is now contingent. For resources on the use of contingent faculty in U.S. colleges and Universities see generally http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issues/contingent/ .  We know the widespread use of contingent faculty in undergraduate schools is an unsound educational practice because we have seen the results.   The overuse of contingent faculty has been identified as one variable affecting the acquisition of knowledge by undergraduate students. Quality suffers when educators are treated as fungible – when one teacher is as good as another -- and when the need to contain costs prompts managers to think about “downsizing” by using part time employees.  This failed strategy has crippled the U.S. economy and compromised higher education.  It is not a model we want to adopt in our professional schools.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt Progressive law professors talk a lot about privilege, including white privilege.  If we're white (like I am), we try to be aware of it and not re-create it.  Law professors of color remind us that we benefit from it. Writing about rural people in relation to the law, which I have been doing for a few years now, has put me in an awkward position in relation to white privilege.  A lot of my work is about rural disadvantage and class, and I've been told my work is "very white."  The presumption about whiteness in my work is probably because rural places are popularly associated with stasis and homogeneity—and with white people in particular.  But I’ve written a lot about the sort of entrenched, inter-generational poverty that defines what the U.S. government labels persistent poverty, and the reality is that most persistent poverty counties are dominated by a cluster of a single racial/ethnic group:  Latina/o (Rio Grande Valley), African American (the Mississippi Delta and Black belt), American Indian (the Great Plains and Southwest) and, yes, white (Appalachia, the Ozarks plateau, the Texas panhandle).  A few of my articles have discussed racial and ethnic minorities in rural and/or persistent poverty contexts; examples are here, here and here. I have also written about impoverished rural white communities, and I do admit to being concerned about them, too.  Which brings me to Ree Dolly, 17-year-old heroine of “Winter's Bone,” the critically acclaimed indie film that won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance this year.  The film is set in the Missouri Ozarks, about 50 miles from where I grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks, so when it began to garner media attention in the run up to its national release, I found myself holding my breath.  Who and what would it show—and how authentic would the depiction be?  Was “Winter’s Bone” going to be the 21st century “Deliverance”?  In fact, “Winter’s Bone” is pretty ugly, a very difficult film to watch.  It is also, I must admit, quite authentic in its depiction of a certain milieu.

Written by Michael Avery Thanks to SALT for an opportunity to serve as a guest blogger.  I'm just finishing up my portion of the annual supplement to Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation, a civil rights treatise that I write together with David Rudovsky and Karen Blum.  This is a good chance to share what's happening in that field with those of you who don't handle those cases or follow that law. For the past forty years (ouch!) I have been suing cops who violate the Constitution when they arrest, search, beat up and shoot people.  When I first got started in this business, cops who thought they might get in trouble for shooting unarmed suspects used to carry throwdown guns, also known as drop guns.  After they shot the guy, they would simply plant the throwdown gun near his hand or in his belt. Now they could say they shot him because he had a weapon and was threatening the officer, or someone else. The cops who didn't carry drop guns had a tendency to see shiny objects that looked liked guns in the hands of the suspects they shot, just before they shot them. This was also a good defense to an excessive force claim by the relatives of the deceased suspect.  The suspect didn't really have to have a gun; the shooting would be legal if the officer reasonably believed that he saw a gun in the deceased's hand.

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 Adrien Wing The 2012 Project was just in the news today. Quoting the purpose of the organization from its website, it “is a national, non-partisan campaign to increase the number of women in legislative office by identifying and engaging accomplished women 45 and older from underrepresented fields and industries. These include finance, science, technology, energy, health, environment, small business and international affairs.”  It is shocking that the US is 74th in the world in terms of female representation, with only 17% females in Congress and 25% in the state legislatures.  I agree with the 2012 Project that we need to increase the number of women. I think that there are a number of things that need amending in our nation’s approach to this problem and even in the 2012 Project approach. The law remains a logical profession to draw future politicians from. While some of the people in the 2012 Project’s targeted fields such as finance, small business, environment, and international affairs in particular may be likely to  have had legal background,   practicing female lawyers should not be left out. The skill set remains invaluable in so many ways suitable for a legislator.   I would also think that the number of women lawyers potentially interested has got to be significantly greater than the numbers of female doctors or businesswomen.

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 Lisa R. Pruitt I've been contemplating a series on "Elitism in Education," but the posting of a new paper by Richard Sander and Jane Yakowitz  prompted me to change the title to "Elitism and Education."  That's because their new study, "The Secret of My Success:  How Status, Prestige and School Performance Shape Legal Careers," suggests that an elite law school education is not as important to a successful legal career as conventional wisdom suggests.  The draft paper is not yet peer reviewed, but here's a summarizing excerpt: "The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school--as measured by law school grades--is the most important predictor of career success.  It is decisively more important than law school 'eliteness.'  Socioeconomic factors play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but little or no discernible role in shaping post-graduate careers.  Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all important, and since students who 'trade up' in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message."

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.

Written by Kathleen A. Bergin It’s the end of summer, which means that most of us are turning our attention to class prep.  For me there’s plenty left to do, but I’m glad for the opportunity to connect with the good folks at SALT as a guest blogger this month.  Thanks for the invitation! It’s exciting to be part of a community that shares a mission of "enhancing social justice within the curriculum."  This obviously brings to mind the typical "law and . . ." courses that tackle issues of social justice head-on, courses like Race and the Law, Women and the Law, Sexuality and the Law, etc., or the genre’s more "radical offspring," as I once heard someone describe it, Critical Race Theory.  But those of us who teach these classes also know there’s plenty of opportunity to address social justice issues in the core curriculum, where questions about fairness, equality, and subordination, are too often brushed aside. Take the first year Property course, for example.  Most Property Profs cover the circumstances under which courts are able to force the sale of real property.  In July, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws approved the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), which places conditions on a court’s ability to force a sale when multiple owners share an interest in the land.  These sales typically occur when the owners disagree on how to use the land, and there’s no practicable way to partition the land into functional plots.  The only way to resolve the dispute, conventional jurisprudence says, is to sell the land and distribute the proceeds proportionally to each owner according to their respective share.