« February 29, 2004 - March 06, 2004 | Main | March 14, 2004 - March 20, 2004 »
Top Rides 2004
There must be something about spring that makes people think about getting new cars. Maybe it's increased advertising? But as a quick followup to the car-focused post of a couple of weeks ago, Consumer Reports has announced its best automobile picks for 2004. DG will be thrilled to hear that the Ford Focus is the best "small sedan." (Check out DG's "enemies" list in the lower right column.) Scheherazade should also be pleased to hear the VW Passat tied with the Honda Accord for "best family sedan." FWIW, except for two versions of the Focus (the "SVT" model won for "fun to drive"), and the Passat tie, the top 10 cars are all Japanese.
L's car continues to have an annoying little coolant problem; there's a tiny leak somewhere, it seems, even though it was supposedly pressure-tested about a month ago and no leaks were found. Cars drive me nuts, which is why it's so great to be in a situation where I almost never need to drive (not to mention the joy of not having a car payment!).
Posted 08:09 AM | Comments (4) | life generally
Run for President Yourself
Nearly two years ago I heard about an idea for a "reality" tv show called "American Candidate," where contestants would somehow compete to become "the people's candidate" for POTUS. For a while, it looked like the show was really going to happen, but then I didn't hear anything more and figured the producers or networks or whomever had changed their minds. I was wrong.
So what are you waiting for? Get yourself an application and apply to be the people's candidate! According to the FAQ, the candidates will not actually run for president (obviously), unless they choose to after the show:
What the participants decide to do with the visibility and momentum they will have at the conclusion of the series is entirely up to them. If a participant in American Candidate chooses to run for president, he or she will have to follow the same process and operate within the same laws and regulations that govern all presidential candidates. We anticipate that if a participant does run, he or she would be doing so on a write-in basis. Of course, with the publicity and attention the candidate will have received, it is feasible there could be a substantial amount of public support for him/her.
Interesting, no? Theoretically, something like this could throw a huge curveball into what otherwise promises to be a mean and dispiriting general election. Of course, (and probably more likely) the "American Candidate" could also be a big flop and have no effect on anything whatsoever. Also, the show is allowing anyone 18-yrs-old or over to apply to compete. If anyone under 35 "wins," it won't matter if he/she gets "a substantial amount of public support" because he/she won't be eligible to actually be POTUS. (See U.S. Const. Art. 2, § 1, clause 5.) But then, maybe the kiddies will be eliminated in the early rounds...
Posted 07:14 AM | election 2004 life generally
The Law Blog Book
Thinking about the law student blogs I read regularly and all the other law blogs out there gives me an idea: The history of blogging does not stretch back too far, and specifically, blogs by law students seem to be a relatively new phenomenon. Wouldn't now be a good time for a book about law school blogs and maybe law blogs more generally? I mean, as a sort of document of their development, a snapshot of this phenomenon before it goes nuclear and everyone has a law blog?
Some content ideas:
History and General Scope: Who was the first law blogger? The first law student blogger? Is there any sort of evolution that can be traced from the first law school blogs to those of today? What are the most popular law school blogs and why? Are there any common denominators among law school bloggers (other than the fact they have blogs)?
Blogs in School: What role do law school blogs play at different schools? This could be a main focus: Some law school bloggers report that their profs read their blogs -- is this a good thing? Does blog content come up in class or office hours? Do any schools take an "official" position on blogging (as in, do they try to control who has blogs and what they say)? There was a mini-brouhaha at Michigan about the "White Lancer" who apparently crossed a line by "bashing" a professor and a fellow student. Are there more examples of this? More important, are there good examples of law student blogs actually having a positive effect on the classroom environment or the quality of legal education in general?
Faculty and Blogs: This may be a subset of the above, or its own "chapter," but there are lots of fascinating law professor blogs. What role are they playing? Do students commonly read their professors' blogs? Are professors finding this channel of communication to be helfpul? (Presumably yes, otherwise they wouldn't blog, but we could try to learn more about this.)
The Future of Blogs in School: Blogs could be a dynamic teaching tool. Are any profs using blogs specifically as requirements for class (i.e., requiring each student to post once or more in a semester)? In what ways could blogs be used to improve the impersonal (and deeply flawed) assembly-line/mass production nature of legal education? In what ways might blogs only make that "teaching" model worse (i.e., will blogs encourage moves toward online education rather than classroom-based education)?
And why stop there? Why not a chapter on Practitioners' Blogs? Judicial blogs? Paralegal blogs? The future and different legal questions raised by blogs in different legal contexts (ethics, conflicts of interest, privacy, etc.) It need never end! The general point would be a populist/academic look at blogging the law. The target audience would include (in something like this order): future and current law students, current law faculty, all legal practitioners, the blogging community in general, anyone else w/an interest in blogging and/or developments in the law.
This could either be a solo project or an edited collection of essays, or it could take some other collaborative form. Could a book like this be written online? On blogs? (I'd say yes.)
So who wants to do what? Come on, you've got nothing better to do this summer, do you?
______
Posted while listening to: The Amendment Song from the album "A Song For All Seasons" by The Viper and His Famous Orchestra
Posted 06:44 AM | Comments (6) | law general law school meta-blogging
Conference Madness
If you're in New York today, get yourself on down to the Cooper Union for the Socialist Scholars Conference. The program sounds terrific.
Next month, April 15-17, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association will hold its Equal Justice Conference at the Hilton Atlanta Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Lots of good workshops and networking, and it only costs $100 for law students.
More "mainstream" and much closer to me: The American Constitution Society's 2004 Convention at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, right here in D.C., featuring a keynote from SCOTUS Justice Breyer. That's June 18-20th. I'm there.
Posted 06:02 AM | Comments (1) | law general
UnReality TV Minute
Thursday = Survivor Day. After last week's episode of Survivor: All-Stars, Just Playin asked: "Will Sue sue?" For those of you who didn't see it, Professor Yin has a detailed summary of the episode, but surprisingly he doesn't address the potential legal questions it raised.
But while Professor Yin was sympathetic to Sue, Salon's Heather Havrilesky weighed in with a scathing denunciation:
And if that doesn't make it clear enough where Havrilesky stands on this burning question, she goes on to say:
Context is pretty important here, I'd say. Yet, the question remains: Will Sue sue? If she were going to, wouldn't she have done so by now? These and more burning questions next time on: UnReality TV Minute!
______
Posted while listening to: The Dog-End of a Day Gone By from the album "Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven" by Love And Rockets
Posted 07:22 AM | Comments (2) | life generally
Daily Photos
I don't know how I stumbled on this, but for some reason it's fascinating. And of course there are many variations on the theme, including the Arrow of Time (a family portrait taken on the same day every year since 1976), and the Daily Photo Project (one guy taking his own pic every day for, well, a lot of days), which includes links to several others.
Oh, am I supposed to be working on spring break instead of trying to get to the end of the internet? Oops.
Posted 07:20 AM | life generally
RefSearch and Refer
Ask and you shall recieve. Thanks to Rick Klau for showing me how he does that cool Google trick. The secret is MT-RefSearch, which automagically detects when someone is coming to your site through a search engine, then runs a search on your site based on the terms that person had originally searched for. Confused? If it works, you should be able to search for "imbroglio," click the "ambivalent imbroglio" link on the Google results page, and see what I'm talking about. It doesn't seem to work yet if the search result directs you to an individual archive page (e.g., this search), but maybe that's the way it's supposed to be?
(If you'd like to install MT-RefSearch yourself and find the links to the files broken on the page above, try downloading them from here.)
Kill Refer Spam
Dean Allen's Refer is a cool little script to track who has visited your site, but it's been recording all kinds of crazy and unwanted spam traffic. Luckily, other people who know a lot more than I do are as annoyed by this as I am, so they've written a fix. I installed it a few days ago and it's cut all that junk to nearly zero. Thank you.
BTW, Dean Allen has just released the "gamma" version of Text Pattern, a new content management system. Looks pretty cool. Thanks to The Menagerie, I also learned recently of another content management option called Geeklog, which offers a very cool threaded comments feature. Is there a way to make MT do that? Also see this cool stats page that generates all kinds of useful info about a blog, like how many links it contains (and which are most popular) and the most popular posts (both by views and comments). Very very cool. The Calendar and "Poll Booth" functionality also looks very cool. And it doesn't look like any of this requires a plugin or tweaking -- it's built in to Geeklog. Definitely worth a serious look...
And speaking of alternatives to MT (not that I'm really looking), does anyone use WordPress?
Future Tweaks
Rick Klau has also implemented or discussed several other cool blog features I may implement someday when I don't have so much to do, including: A sidebar reviews blog (perhaps to replace the largely useless "ai booklist" sidebar), a MT-managed blogroll (this is also a good tutorial for how to include a blog w/in a blog on MT), and SmartyPants (which gives you "smart" punctuation; I thought I had this installed, but it looks like not). Of course, the MT Plugin Directory lists a huge number of other fun things you can do with MT, but MT 3.0 should be here soon and it might come with some of these tweaks built in.
I also keep forgetting to reformat the archives/individual entry pages so that trackbacks and comments will show up on the same page as the post. So much to play with, so little time. Which reminds me, even though there really aren't that many bloggers in the bigger scheme of things blogs might still ruin your social life. Perhaps we should all be careful, apparently they're infectious.
Posted 08:27 AM | meta-blogging
Ego for President
Over the weekend, CNN ran an edition of "CNN Presents" called True Believers: Life Inside the Dean Campaign. The title says a lot about what the program was trying to convey, suggesting perhaps that the Dean campaign was some kind of cult or something. In other words, the goal was not to spin the campaign in a positive way. It wasn't overtly negative, either, though.
So what was it? This reaction from Mike Walsh boils it down pretty well, although instead of calling it "The Rise and Fall of Howard Dean as Seen Through the Eyes of Joe Trippi," I think I would have called it "If Not for Trippi's Ego." That's what I was thinking as I watched it—if not for Trippi's ego, maybe the campaign would have been better prepared to react quickly and positively to adversity in Iowa. But it wasn't just ego, it was also management style (of which ego can be a big part)—Trippi comes off as such a force and a personality and so temperamental and moody that people seemed reluctant to tell him when they had bad news or to have serious and frank conversations with him about doubts they may have had. If people waited to discuss or deal with bad news or doubts until they became too large to ignore, by then it was far too late.
That's at least one potential version of what happened in Iowa and New Hampshire—the campaign refused to see/admit/discuss its loss of support, and once the problem became too big to ignore, it was so bad that there wasn't anything anyone could do. But then, looking back at how the campaign handled "the scream," I'm not sure what more anyone could have done.
At any rate, I certainly don't blame Trippi for the fact that Dean didn't get the nomination. In fact, there's no doubt Trippi was a (if not the) decisive factor in taking Dean "from asterisk to frontrunner." In the end, the Dean campaign was not about Dean, but it wasn't about Trippi either. As Trippi said: It's the people, stupid. But while Trippi has the vision, it does seem likely that that vision needs to be coupled with some disciplined management in order to be most effective. Was it Dean's responsibility to provide that discipline (either personally or in the form of a strong assistant for Trippi)? Perhaps. As I've said before, I look forward to the book(s) about the campaign in the hope that some insider(s) can offer some better perspective on what happened.
Best line from "True Believers": In the meltdown between Iowa and New Hampshire, Trippi retreated from the campaign trail and "hunkered down" in Burlington. As things got worse, he just wanted to "not think about anything Dean for a while" (that's a paraphrase) so he went to see "LOTR: The Return of the King." When he got back, he seemed in slightly better spirits and joked that the Dean campaign was like the final battle in the movie: "Certain death? Small chance of success? What are we waiting for!?"
Of course, in "The Return of the King" (which I just saw last night for the first time—yay spring break!), the good guys won. Now why can't real life be more like the movies?
FWIW: Change for America, Trippi's new blog, talks about the show here and here, while Blog for America talks about it here and here.
Posted 07:18 AM | election 2004
Journal Competition Notes
It is done! Spring Break has begun! In fact, it began yesterday afternoon around 6 p.m. In all, I spent a fairly concentrated three days reading eight cases, one snippet of congressional debate, two articles from law journals, a collection of four essays, a newspaper article, and an article from Reason magazine. It was about 200 pages in all, from which I produced a table of authorities and a 6-page "note." You might think I'm crazy, but all I want is you. Er, I mean... You might think I'm crazy, but I actually kind of had fun writing that note. I enjoyed it. In fact, it may have been the most enjoyable part of law school so far. Maybe. But it was definitely the best writing assignment so far. I'm still trying to figure out exactly why that is, but I know it has a lot to do with the fact that this assignment called for a type of creative critical thinking I haven't found a way to employ in my briefs and memos.
Anyway, the subject was generally violence in the media and the First Amendment. The subject case was Sanders v. Acclaim Entertainment, Inc. (PDF), a suit brought by the widow and stepchildren of Dave Sanders, the teacher killed by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in 1999. The plaintiffs argued that the makers and distributors of the movie "The Basketball Diaries" and several violent video games were negligent in making and distributing these materials, and were therefore liable for Sanders' death. A Colorado judge dismissed the claims on the defendants' 12(b)(6) motion, and argued that, like so many similar claims, these were barred by the First Amendment.
Doesn't that just sound fascinating? It was and it wasn't, but it was fun to argue that all these cases are silly because the media don't kill people, people kill people. Ok, that's not exactly what I argued, but sort of. It's hard to be very nuanced or original when you're limited to six pages and a set group of authorities. The point is, it's done, it was fun, and spring break has begun. I'm off to Tahiti. Have a nice week, everyone!
Note: ai is not going to Tahiti unless Tahiti is somewhere in Washington D.C. around 20th and J street. However, where ai goes in ai's mind is entirely up to him. So there.
Posted 07:06 AM | Comments (1) | law school
Disturbing photo essays
Just two:
- What happens when you become unable to stop collecting "stuff."
- Racing through Chernobyl, 18 years later. (You may need to start here, but it looks like suddenly the pages are "under construction" or something.
Posted 10:17 PM | Comments (1) | life generally
Word-Fu
And then it was brief-writing time, which is over for me, but not apparently not for others. So, for anyone who would like to format a Table of Contents (TOC) in Word where the page numbers are all aligned nicely on the right-hand side with dot leaders between the TOC sections and their corresponding page numbers, the easiest thing is to make Word generate the TOC for you. Go to: Insert -->Index and Tables.... --> TOC.
But then, if tabs elude you, then I'm guessing Styles are not your friend, and you must apply styles for Word to do its TOC automagically. So instead of a primer on Styles (which maybe I'll do another day if anyone's interested, though I'm sure primers on these things abound elsewhere), here's a "brief" bit o' tab magic (pun intended):
- Before beginning, "Save As" a copy so that if you mess things up, you can revert to what you've got. ;-)
- Select (highlight/drag mouse over) the text you'd like to align. Go to Format --> Tabs.
- In the "Tab Stop Position" box, set a tab at 6.5 or 7", click the box/button for a a RIGHT tab, and click the box/button for a "dot" leader.
- Click "Set." Then click "ok."
- Go back to your TOC, and delete all the periods you put in between your section headings and the page numbers.
- Once all periods are gone, click at the end of your section headings and hit the tab key. Your page numbers should now jump to the right side of the page with a dot leader in between. They will now all line up perfectly.
I hope that helps. For a time in my past I was a professional Word jockey, so I have a little Word-fu if you have more questions or if my instructions are unclear.
Now it's back to that journal competition thingy for me...
Posted 10:05 AM | Comments (7) | law school
