April 14, 2014

In the last five years, legal education has witnessed a dramatic reduction in demand. Applications are down, forcing many schools to shrink class size and discount tuition to attract students through “merit” scholarships...

What will the “new normal” mean for legal scholarship? Here are two thoughts about how the current situation for law schools is likely to impact the scholarly side of what law professors do.

(1) First, I expect that scholarship will receive less attention inside the legal academy. In the last two decades, scholarship became an ever-increasing priority for law schools because they had the resources to make it so. Schools could offer generous stipends to faculty to encourage scholarly works. They could hire additional faculty members who didn’t fit a particular curricular need but had great scholarly promise. They could offer lots of money to try to lure top scholars to their faculties. And they could lower teaching loads to free up time for scholarship...

It seems likely that many schools will respond to these pressures my making scholarship a lower priority. The change will occur gradually, I expect...

(2) I would guess that the new environment also will have at least some impact on the substance of legal scholarship. My thoughts are tentative, but here’s a prediction: The lean years will create pressures for scholarship to have more relevance to the bench and bar. The impact will be modest on the whole, as most professors are unlikely to change the basic tenor of their research in light of outside influences. The impact will be felt at some schools more than others. Still, I think the lean years will push legal scholarship as a whole to engage more with the kinds of issues that judges and lawyers see.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/04/14/legal-scholarship-in-the-lean-years/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2543178&forum_id=2#25380583)

Everytime Obama does some constitutionally questionable shit, you can bet Orin Kerr will chime in with a post about how it comports with precedent. He was a huge shill for the individual mandate, he's a huge shill for very expansive search and seizure powers, etc. The executive can do no wrong for Dr. Kerr.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2543178&forum_id=2#25380599)

Volokh is an aspie egghead who writes lengthy screeds on things like "why are people offended when someone tells a woman to dress modestly?" and "I genuinely do not understand why incest is outlawed" and "here are 600 thoughts on gays that will offend everyone."

Kerr is basically 100% pro-whatever-the-fuck-the-federal-government-does on all issues. He thought Obamacare was constitutional, he thinks NSA taps are constitutional, he's basically a lapdog for government.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2543178&forum_id=2#25380965)

See, e.g., his critique of Obama's FISCA courts:

"If I understand Obama’s new policy on Section 215, he is going to have the Executive Branch ask the judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to begin to limit when the Executive can query the Section 215 database. That is, he will ask the judiciary to take on a new power to limit the Executive, so that the Executive can only query the database when the executive gets a court order signed by the FISC. In his words, “I have directed the Attorney General to work with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court so that during this transition period, the database can be queried only after a judicial finding, or in a true emergency.”

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but doesn’t Congress need to be involved in this little enterprise? The FISC is a creation of Congress."

There's hundreds of other examples. Volokh rarely, if ever, goes after anyone like this. He's very careful in his use of language.

Ask yourself this question: Do you really think Kerr is more likely to get a spot on the bench than Volokh? There's no way.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2543178&forum_id=2#25381499)

http://www.volokh.com/2010/12/12/incest/

1) Should it be illegal, and, if so, exactly why? Is it just because it’s immoral? Because legalizing incest would, by making a future sexual relationship more speakable and legitimate, potentially affect the family relationship even while the child is underage (the view to which I tentatively incline)? Because it involves a heightened risk of birth defects (a view I’m skeptical about, given that we don’t criminalize sex by carriers of genes that make serious hereditary disease much more likely than incest does)?

(2) Given Lawrence v. Texas — and similar pre-Lawrence decisions in several states, applying their state constitutions — what exactly is the basis for outlawing incest? Is it that bans on gay sex are irrational but bans on adult incest are rational, and rationality is all that’s required for regulations of adult sex? Is it that bans on gay sex don’t pass strict scrutiny (or some such demanding test) but bans on adult incest do? Is it that Lawrence rested on the fact that bans on gay sex largely foreclose all personally meaningful sexual relationships for those who are purely homosexual in orientation, whereas incest bans only foreclose a few possible sexual partners? UPDATE: For court cases on this, see here (stepfather-stepdaughter) and here (brother-sister).

(3) If adult incest is indeed criminalized, what should the penalties be (assuming lack of further aggravating circumstances, such as force, strong evidence of grooming for future adult incest during childhood, and so on)? Should the penalty be relatively light, on the theory that only consenting adults were involved (much as the penalty for prostitution is relatively light)? Should it be very grave, on the theory that it’s important to send a firm, unambiguous message that such behavior is wrong, or perhaps on the theory that one party is likely to have seriously harmed the other even though the other consented?

(4) Should all this apply to adult brother-sister incest, or are the arguments chiefly limited to what one sees as the likely special emotional control that parents might have over children?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2543178&forum_id=2#25381532)

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/antitrustprof_blog/2012/08/most-cited-tenure-track-antitrust-law-professors-in-the-jlr-database-2012-edition.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2543178&forum_id=2#25381640)