Of course, lawyers aren’t the only ones whose livelihood is affected by their online postings.  There’s this, and this, and this.  Having one’s online activity be the basis of dismissal has increased so much that a new phrase – “Facebook fired” – has entered our lexicon. 

But being a lawyer means something more.  Lawyers have long been held to a higher standard of conduct than other members of society.  As the New York Times article points out, your “freedom to gripe is limited by codes of conduct.”  Thus, criticizing the court or revealing client details online – even if the lawyer thinks she’s veiled the true subject – can cause trouble for a lawyer because she runs the risk of violating rules of professional responsibility.

Similarly, when a lawyer’s online activity belies what he’s told his superiors or the court, trouble can follow.  According to the New York Times article, a lawyer asked a judge for trial delay because there was a death in his family.  The judge granted the delay, but noticed on the lawyer’s Facebook page that while there was indeed a death in the family, there were also a number of posts by the lawyer about partying and motorbiking.  When the lawyer asked for a second delay, the judge denied his request and notified his firm.  Repercussions for such conduct may be not only the loss of one’s job, as it might be for others in society, but also fines and discipline by the state’s board of bar examiners or other office of lawyer regulation.  In fact, some lawyer licensing organizations are considering or adopting policies whereby they examine applicants’ social networking sites as part of the licensing process.    

This topic, which can be broadly categorized as the professionalism of the younger generation of lawyers, is a topic that is often talked about in the legal academy, particularly among those of us who teach legal skills.  Our students are of a generation that has grown up with email and the Internet, with reality television shows, and a penchant for revealing to the public their personal lives and thoughts. 

However, most practicing lawyers grew up in generations that emphasized a certain formality of one’s conduct, and law has always been a more conservative profession than most.  The influx of a younger, more open generation into the profession means that there will inevitably be a difference in how each defines what it means to be a professional.  A younger lawyer would likely see nothing unprofessional with posting a rant about the partners at his firm, especially if he doesn’t expressly name them (e.g., “Suffered through a two-hour meeting today with the boring partner and the a-hole partner.”), whereas an older lawyer, who may think the exact same thing, would find such a public disclosure wholly unprofessional. 

 There are, I believe, positive aspects of social networking.  When life is so hectic, it’s nice to quickly catch up with family and friends all over the country by checking status updates on Facebook.  But not everything that goes on with my family and friends is something that I want to know – or think I should know.  There comes a point when what’s posted is too much information (TMI).  And most of the time, TMI often translates into “unprofessional,” especially if you’re a lawyer or lawyer-to-be.

As I read the text of President Obama’s speech, I find it hard to discern “socialist ideology” or even “paid political advertising.”  (Let us remember that pretty much everyone to whom his remarks are addressed is unable to vote!)  His remarks seem more “Republican” than not.  The themes of personal responsibility and hard work pervade the speech.  He says, “But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities”? He exhorts students to avoid making excuses about their role in their education.  “[T]he circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. . . . That’s no excuse for not trying.” And he reminds students that success is hard work and that they should learn from their failures.  “[Y]ou can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you.”

How could any parent find fault in such advice?  Is it simply because the messenger is from a different political party or is it something else entirely?  Barack Obama is the president of the United States.  A demanding job, to be sure, but also a job that is heavy with symbolism.  There shouldn’t be anything inherently political in the simple fact that the county’s figurehead wishes to press upon the country’s future – its school children – that they ought to do their best in school and work hard.

  We are very far removed from the time when the residents of a small New England town could gather together on an occasional basis and make communal decisions that governed their daily lives.  Today, members of congress are expected to use these forums to report back to their constituents, to answer questions and solicit concerns, and then to return to Washington, D.C. with a greater sense of the priorities of the voters.  This is not exactly direct democracy in action, along the classic New England model, but it is the closest that most of us can claim to actually participating in the machinery of our own government.

 At many of these town hall meetings, ostensibly intended to address the topic of health care reform, the proceedings have been anything but an exemplar of participatory democracy.  I am not referring to the “exaggerations and extrapolations” of the pending health care reform legislation that some attendees and some Republican opponents of the bill have espoused.  Trying to prove that something is a lie is like chasing your tail.  The task of separating truth from fiction is simply a never ending part of the human condition.  Nor am I particularly concerned over the shouting and the ill manners of many attendees.  I cannot think of any period in our nation’s history when politeness was the norm in political debate.

 Instead, my concern is with the future of democracy itself.  In 1922, in his book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann presented a pessimistic view of the public’s ability to govern itself through our nation’s democratic process.  Three years later, he followed up his critique in the book The Phantom Public.  If anything, the sequel held out even less hope for the meaningful participation of the general public in the shaping of the government policies that have such a dramatic impact on their lives.

 Ideologically, Walter Lippmann was a difficult person to pigeonhole.  He began his journalistic career as an avowed liberal, and over his long life he supported and advised presidents of both political parties.  After his death, his books were reprinted by the “Library of Conservative Thought.”  He was Jewish, but he embraced the concept of natural law and wrote admiringly of the moral authority of Catholicism.  Ronald Steel, in his magisterial biography Walter Lippmann and the American Century, points out the “deep vein of conservatism running through [Lippmann’s] brand of liberalism.” (Steel, p. 233).

 Here is how Steel summarizes Lippmann’s central critique of the modern political process:

 Political science [had previously] focused on how decisions were made – by political parties, voting, the branches of government.  In Public Opinion, Lippmann went behind such mechanics to scrutinize the centerpiece of democratic theory: the ‘omnicompetent citizen.’  That theory assumed that the average citizen, being rational, could make intelligent judgments on public issues if presented with the facts. . . .

  Now, however, [Lippmann] had to abandon that faith. . . .  People see what they are looking for and what their education and experience have trained them to see. ‘We do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see,’ Lippmann wrote.  Since no man can see everything, each creates for himself a reality that fits his experience, in effect a ‘pseudo environment’ that helps impose order on an otherwise chaotic world.  . . . 

 Steel goes on to explain the connection that Lippmann made between his insights about human nature and the mechanical operation of the political process:

 . . . For most people, the world had become literally ‘out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.’  This posed no serious problem in a small community where the decisions each citizen had to make rarely went beyond what he could directly experience.  This was the world that the eighteenth-century fathers of democratic theory had written about.  But modern man did not live in that world.  He was being asked to make judgments about issues he could not possibly experience firsthand: the tariff, the military budget, questions of war and peace.  What was reasonable in a Greek city-state was impossible in a modern technological society.  The outside world had grown too big for the ‘self-centered man’ to grasp.  This posed a political dilemma, for classic democracy ‘never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.’  They did not correspond for a number of reasons—stereotyping, prejudice, propaganda.  The result was to erode the whole foundation of popular government. . . .

 . . .  The Enlightenment conception of democracy—based on the assumption that every man had direct experience and understanding of the world around him—was totally inadequate to a mass society where men had contact with only a tiny part of the world on which they were being asked to make decisions.  What was possible in an eighteenth-century rural community was unworkable in great cities.  

Steel, pp. 180-182.

 Lippmann concluded, therefore, that the general public was incapable of directing the course of events on any rational basis and that it was folly to attempt this.  At best, the public had the ability to identify those persons or groups who were capable of making important decisions by either voting them in or out of power.  It is not so much that the members of the general public lack competence, it is that the general public lacks sufficient information with which to exercise any sort of rational thought process.

 Lippmann’s theories gave rise to the entire industry of public relations, they revolutionized the concept of advertising, and they greatly influenced every interest group who has since sought to influence the public’s desires and beliefs by “putting pictures in our heads.”  All of these forces in our society eschew rational argument in favor of molding opinion through the use of the symbols and the stereotypes that they believe the general public uses to understand reality.

By and large, the Republican Party has embraced Lippmann’s theories of political science more than the Democrats.  When Gary Wills wrote that Ronald Reagan asked the public to “reject historical record for historical fantasy” (Innocents at Home p. 387), or Henry Fairlie charged that Reagan offered voters an “escape from the present to the idyllic past” (Bite the Hand That Feeds You, p. 190), they were both marveling at Reagan’s ability to glide above the facts and connect with voters on a symbolic level.  One can interpret the political rise of Sarah Palin as a similar achievement.

 The Administration of George W. Bush unabashedly employed Lippmann’s theories of politics.  When reporter Ron Suskind quoted a senior advisor to President Bush speaking dismissively of the “reality-based community,” which embraced the illusion that solutions to problems arise from a study of discernible reality, the advisor was channeling Lippmann.  ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the advisor told Suskind. “[W]hen we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”  The main political sin of George W. Bush was not his attempt to manipulate reality, but his failure to successfully hide what he was doing.  

 While Lippmann’s genius has been universally recognized, there has always been a large contingent of liberals and progressives who have rejected his pessimistic conclusions.  For decades, they chose to focus instead on the expansion of the coalition of democratic interest groups– through the addition of women, minorities and the gay and lesbian community– as the key to enacting liberal legislative reforms.  More recently, liberal elements within the Democratic Party have seized upon technology, and the internet, as the key to building broader support for their agenda.  The “Great Health Care Debate” may finally convince these doubters that Lippmann was right all along.

 The town hall meeting experience demonstrates that many liberals continue to cling to the idea of an objective reality.  The Obama Administration approached the issue of health care reform as a process of rational decision-making, where a variety of interest groups would reach an accommodation based upon mutual self-interest.  While President Obama did not initially plan on using town hall meetings in order to promote health care reform, no one in his Administration seemed overly concerned over the prospect of the general public weighing in during the congressional recess.  Lo and behold, when the views of many of the attendees at the town hall meetings were solicited, these views revolved around death panels and the fact that any form of government sponsored health care is inherently evil (unless it is offered by Medicare or the Veterans Administration, both of which are sacrosanct).

Health care reform is too complicated an issue for any lay person to understand.  As a result, the general public falls back on the pictures in our heads to make sense of it all.  This facet of human nature makes us all vulnerable to powerful groups who gain and hold on to their power precisely because they are exceedingly good at creating those pictures.  Lippmann also recognized that when government policy gets too complicated for the average person to understand, it risks letting loose “all the submerged antagonisms within the state.” (Steel, p. 227). 

Corporate America, in contrast to the general public, participates in the legislative process quite successfully via the lobbying process.  It can afford to hire specialists with the knowledge and experience to direct legislative priorities and to influence the votes of legislators.  Without any real competition from a general public seeking to advance its own interests, it is clear that the legislative process has been captured by corporate interests.  Reform measures intended to address this imbalance, either by decreasing corporate influence through limits on campaign contributions or by increasing lawmaker independence through redistricting efforts, are too complicated themselves for the general public to understand.  If the general public cannot think rationally on the question of health care reform, what hope is there that it can rationally address a reform of the political process itself?

The fundamental question is whether we still have the capability to govern ourselves or whether we the people are destined to have our fates determined by elite interest groups.  Lippmann thought that the modern world was too complex for the former alternative.  He placed his hope in the education and morality of the elite, confident that they would act for the common good and not selfishly.  If that is where our nation’s best hope lies, then I am truly depressed.

Professor Mazzie contributed another column, in June of this year, entitled, “Conciseness in Legal Writing.” Past legal writing columns from Marquette’s legal writing faculty also included Jill Koch Hayford’s November 2008 piece, “Style Books, Websites, and Podcasts:  A Lawyer’s Guide to the Guides,” as well her March 2009 advice, “Update Contract Language to Meet 21st Century Readers.” A column about split infinitives, “Dispelling Grammar Myths:  ’To Split’ or ‘Not to Split’ the Infinitive,” by Rebecca K. Blemberg, appeared in the December 2008 issue.

The legal writing faculty will continue to write about legal writing for Wisconsin Lawyer magazine during the coming year.

If anyone is curious, here’s the full list:

1. “L.A. Law” (1986-94)
2. “Perry Mason” (1957-66)
3. “The Defenders” (1961-65)
4. “Law & Order” (1990-present)
5. “The Practice” (1997-2004)
6. “Ally McBeal “ (1997-2002)
7. “Rumpole of the Bailey” (1978-1992)
8. “Boston Legal” (2004-08)
9. “Damages” (2007-present)
10. “Night Court” (1984-1992)
11. “Judging Amy” (1999-2005
12. “Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law” (1971-74)
13. “JAG” (1995-2005)
14. “Shark” (2006-08)
15. “Civil Wars” (1991-93)
16. “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law” (2000-9)
17. “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” (2001-present)
18. “Murder One” (1995-97)
19. “Matlock” (1986-1995)
20. “Reasonable Doubts” (1991-93)
21. “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (1999-present)
22. “Judd for the Defense” (1967-69)
23. “Paper Chase” (1978-79, 1983-86)
24. “Petrocelli” (1974-76)
25. “Eli Stone” (2008-09)

Copyrights in India? Cool! But hang on a second—what’s that about “brands”?

Ah, I see, it’s another journalist confused about the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks. (The title of this post is the punchline of a joke told by Paul Goldstein about this problem.) It matters, to me at least, because copyright has enough of a public image problem without getting blamed for patent and trademark controversies as well.

But there is one up there as we speak from the Lehighton (Pa.) Time-News reporting my comment on the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStafano. I did issue some comments on Ricci through the Heartland Institute where I am a Policy Advisor.

But I didn’t say what was quoted in the article.

The quoted statement actually came from Chris Hage who is the President of the Chicago Lawyers’ Chapter of the Federalist Society of Law and Public Policy. I said this:

“Today’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano makes clear that employers may not use fear of litigation to justify hiring decisions based on race. If fear of a disparate impact claim under Title VII would permit employers to abandon nondiscriminatory hiring methods whenever those methods failed to produce an ‘acceptable’ number of minority hires, then the distinction between disparate treatment claims and mandatory quotas would be blurry at best. To allow the fear of litigation to justify racially based hiring in order to ‘get the numbers right’ would undermine the principle of racial evenhandedness that both Title VII and the Fourteenth Amendment are intended to guarantee.”

I don’t know if they wanted Mr. Hage’s statement and attributed it to me or wanted my statement and took Mr. Hage. I am sure, in any event, that Professor Secunda probably disagrees with my real remarks as much as what I didn’t say. But accuracy — both here and in Lehighton — is important.

 What follows is a deconstruction of my own op ed piece.  The final product as it appeared in the newspaper has its origins in the fundamentals of logic and rhetoric.  Law students, in particular, may be interested in the way in which I employ several classic techniques of persuasive writing in order to make my case.     

 Believe in Your Argument: It is not necessary to have an angel for a client, but it helps.  The most accomplished persuasive writing techniques will not hide the fact that your argument is a stinker.  My task is to persuade the reader that my belief – that Judge Sotomayor is a moderate jurist who should be confirmed to the Supreme Court-is one that they should adopt as well.  If I do not believe my own argument, I will not succeed in convincing the reader.  

 Know Your Audience:  My language is directed towards the non-specialist, so I consciously avoided legal technicalities.  Also, I assume that the average newspaper reader will be skimming the text rather than fully engaged in my arguments.  Therefore, I utilize simple and direct sentences as opposed to rhetorical questions or complex syllogisms that require greater concentration to follow.

 I also presume that a large segment of the public is already persuaded to either support or oppose the Sotomayor nomination.  This segment of the public is not likely to be swayed by my arguments.  Therefore, the tone and the specific arguments that I adopt are specifically designed to appeal to persuadable Republicans and/or wavering Democrats.  This leads to a focus on mainstream issues such as crime and away from “hot button” issues such as Affirmative Action.

 Establish Connection Between Reader and Subject Matter: Hispanics can be perceived as the “other” in our society, which immediately renders Hispanics as objects of suspicion or distrust in the media.  By opening with a Spanish phrase, I attempt to confront this perception by bringing it to the foreground.  However, I reveal that the Spanish phrase I invoke actually reflects a shared, non-threatening value (people should treat each other with common decency).  This invites the reader to focus on the commonalities between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, rather than on the differences.

 Maximize the Gender Gap:  Among my target audience, women are more likely to be open to persuasion given Judge Sotomayor’s position as the third woman nominated to the Supreme Court.  In my conversations with women about the nomination, I have noticed that the first subject that comes up is invariably the excellent qualifications of Judge Sotomayor.  Many women in the workplace feel that male co-workers ignore or minimize their qualifications, focusing on their gender rather than their talent.  These women will respond to arguments that Judge Sotomayor is being treated the same way.

 On the other hand, the “empathy” argument invoked against Judge Sotomayor plays on gender stereotypes.  Women are often portrayed in the media as nurturing and caring, and therefore not strong enough to protect society from threats such as violent crime.  At the same time, a fear of violent crime is often used as a rhetorical device to prevent wavering women voters from abandoning a political party’s preferred candidate (i.e., the Willie Horton example).

 By focusing on Judge Sotomayor’s “tough-on-crime” reputation, I anticipate and counter both the negative aspect of the “empathy” charge as well as a particular wedge issue of concern to many women.

 Appeal to the Reader’s Emotion: The piece makes a very clear and specific appeal to the emotions of the reader.  The words “shame” or shameless” are employed three times-twice in the opening paragraphs and again in the final paragraph.  The reader is asked to conclude that Judge Sotomayor is being subjected to unfair criticism, and to feel sympathy towards her.  

 Appeal to Authority: I do not expect the reader to believe my arguments based solely upon my own authority.  Therefore, I appeal to other sources of authority in order to support the point that Judge Sotomayor is a moderate judge.  I refer to objective reviewers of her record, and in fact there are many such objective reviews available on the internet (on SCOTUS Blog or from the Congressional Research Service).  I also consciously include a sentence that summarizes the results of a review of 100 opinions in which Judge Sotomayor participated involving race-based claims.  Used judiciously, numbers and statistics can impart an aura of objectivity to a piece of persuasive writing.  I also appeal to endorsements of Judge Sotomayor by national law enforcement organizations and by other appellate judges.        

 Do Not Dodge Your Opponent’s Best Argument: I do not find the “wise Latina” debate to be particularly interesting or significant.  However, given that those opposed to Judge Sotomayor’s nomination have made this the centerpiece of their campaign, it is necessary to raise and respond to this argument.  The most effective way to do this is to simply place her words back into the context from which they were severed.   I also try to turn the “empathy” criticism into a positive by invoking Judge Sotomayor’s empathy towards the victims of crime.  This signals to the reader that a judge’s empathy can benefit groups that are not defined along racial or gender lines, and that empathy can be a desirable attribute in a judge.

 Turn Your Opponents Rhetoric on Its Head:  The task of Judge Sotomayor’s opponents is to argue that she is an extremist and that the evidence supports this characterization of her record.  I argue that by opposing a true moderate, it is her opponents who are extreme.  I invite the reader to question the very ideological framework that conservative critics are using when they evaluate Judge Sotomayor.  If she is not acceptable to them, who is?

 Persuasive writing is a skill that is learned, and not a talent that comes naturally.  Go back and re-read the piece in light of this deconstruction.  By revealing the anatomy beneath my opinion piece, I hope that our students will understand why this is a skill worth developing.

Pointing out how often pundits’ predictions are not only wrong but egregiously wrong — a 36,000 Dow! euphoric Iraqis welcoming American soldiers with flowers! — is like shooting fish in a barrel, except in this case the fish refuse to die. No matter how often they miss the mark, pundits just won’t shut up. . . . The fact that being chronically, 180-degrees wrong does not disqualify pundits is in large part the media’s fault: cable news, talk radio and the blogosphere need all the punditry they can rustle up, track records be damned. But while we can’t shut pundits up, we can identify those more likely to have an accurate crystal ball when it comes to forecasts from the effect of the stimulus bill to the likelihood of civil unrest in China. Knowing who’s likely to be right comes down to something psychologists call cognitive style, and with that in mind Philip Tetlock, a research psychologist at Stanford University, would like to introduce you to foxes and hedgehogs.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times explained this further:

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock . . . . His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.  The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.  “It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.  Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

(And, on another Jim Cramer note, you can link here to the excellent interview that Jon Stewert did of Jim Cramer about his inaccurate predictions.)

Back to Kristof’s explanation of why pundits get it wrong:

Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.  This was the distinction that mattered most among the forecasters, not whether they had expertise. Over all, the foxes did significantly better, both in areas they knew well and in areas they didn’t.   Other studies have confirmed the general sense that expertise is overrated. In one experiment, clinical psychologists did no better than their secretaries in their diagnoses. In another, a white rat in a maze repeatedly beat groups of Yale undergraduates in understanding the optimal way to get food dropped in the maze. The students overanalyzed and saw patterns that didn’t exist, so they were beaten by the rodent.

Yes, let’s note that again — Yale students beaten by a rat.  I shall refrain from any obvious commentary (other than noting that I am sure that students from my undergraduate institution or law school would never  find themselves in a similar situation!).  As Sharon Begley explained further:

In short, what experts think matters far less than how they think, or their cognitive style. At one extreme, hedgehogs seek certainty and closure, dismiss information that undercuts their preconceptions and embrace evidence that reinforces them, in what is called “belief defense and bolstering.” At the other extreme, foxes are cognitively flexible, modest and open to self-criticism. White House economics czar Larry Summers is seldom accused of having a modest personality, but he displays the fox’s cognitive style: in briefing the president, he assigns numerical probabilities to possible outcomes of economic policies, rather than saying, “This will [or will not] happen.” Similarly, Yale economist Robert Shiller, who forecast the bursting of both the tech bubble in 2000 and the housing bubble in 2006, deploys a flexible cognitive style that works from the data up and not from one Big Idea down. Here’s how to identify fauna: foxes pepper their speech and writing with “however” and “but,” recognizing uncertainty in the face of competing forces. Hedgehogs suffer from no such doubts, which (combined with their adherence to a Big Idea) makes them especially prone to overpredict change: the House of Saud will fall, the European Monetary Union will collapse, Canada will disintegrate like Yugoslavia — in the last case, from the primal force of ethnicity. Leftist hedgehogs, applying the Big Idea that those who oppose dictators are virtuous, failed to foresee the fierce repressiveness of Iran’s 1979 revolution, which overthrew the shah; applying the Big Idea that involvement in regional war = quagmire, they predicted that the first Gulf war would last 20 years and claim 50,000 American lives. Oops.  The media, of course, eat this up. Bold, decisive assertions make better sound bites; bombast, swagger and certainty make for better TV. As a result, the marketplace of ideas does not punish poor punditry. Few of us even remember who got what wrong. We are instead impressed by credentials, affiliation, fame and even looks — traits that have no bearing on a pundit’s accuracy.

Lessons for negotiators?  Beware fame, expertise, or too much assurance.  After all, darts might be a better predictor than our counterpart.

Cross posted at Indisputably.

One of our alums who attended, Evelyn Ang, sent me this clip in light of what we had talked about regarding the impact of changing media. Truly an amazing video! Another alum, Amy Koltz, noted, “I found the speakers engaging and the presentations thought-provoking — I’m amazed at the group of presenters you were able to pull together and bring to Marquette.”  She also provided a link to this article from Haaretz on media coverage of Israel and noted that it could have been a presentation in the conference. Our own program manager and conference planner, Natalie Fleury, heard this story on NPR Monday morning about Al Qaida’s training manual on the Internet, directly linking to Gabriel Weimann’s talk on Saturday.

And, from 2L part-time law student (and full-time veterinarian) Marty Greer, came this summary of the conference for those who missed it:

The presenters were from all over the United States and the world: Israel, Belgium, Italy, California, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. Their backgrounds included journalism, academia, law, and conflict resolution. To say it was a rich and diverse experience sounds too trite for what happened there. These sad and overused terms cannot begin to describe the energy in the room. It was one part educational experience, one part idea exchange, and one part light bulbs going on over the attendees’ and presenters’ heads. Each of the presenters introduced new and exciting concepts – new even to the people heavily steeped in these areas. For the scholars, it was easy to see new ideas coming together and evolving into new research and a new paper. For the journalists, they developed a new appreciation of how their work can aid in reducing and resolving conflict. For the attorneys and others involved in the practice of conflict resolution, this was a great source of theoretical and hands-on experience that could be applied in the field. For those with short attention spans, each presentation was short, concise, and to the point. This allowed the opportunity for many viewpoints to be presented and plenty of time for the attendees and fellow presenters to delve into the topics they were most intrigued by. All in all, this was a unique and valuable experience, where we were allowed to rub shoulders with the leaders in these fields.

In future blogs, I will link to the webcasts and slideshow when they become available, and to the abstracts for our articles as they arrive.  My thanks to all our speakers and our great planning team here for a terrific conference.

Cross posted at Indisputably.

In addition to several distinguished law professors, the inter-disciplinary and international panelists will include:

• Professor Eytan Gilboa, Director, Center for International Communication, Bar-Ilan University, and Visiting Professor of Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California
• Professor Martin Euwema, Department of Psychology, University of Leuven
• Frediano Finucci, Late Night News Chief, Ufficio Centrale del telegiornale La7 Televisioni Spa Telecomitaliamedia
• Andrew Lee, University of Beijing
• Professor Alain Verbeke, Professor of Law, Universities of Leuven and Tilburg; Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School
• Professor Doug McLeod, UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication
• Professor Gordon Mitchell, Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh; Deputy Director, Ridgway Center for International Security Studies
• Professor Gabriel Weimann, Department of Communications, Haifa University
• Indira Lakshmanan, Journalist, Bloomberg News

You can find more information about the Conference on our website, and I will be blogging more about what we learned next week after the Conference.

Today of course the internet offers both access to far more newspapers than even an out-of-town newsstand (to use an almost anachronistic term) and a threat to their viability, it seems. I wonder what the effect of this will be on our own region.

While I have been wondering about this for a while (or at least since Doonesbury was recently removed from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, presumably for expense reasons), an essay in the most recent New Yorker by James Surowiecki particularly prompts this post.

Among the essay’s more interesting observations, at least for me as a one-time regulated-industries lawyer, is this: “In a famous 1960 article called ‘Marketing Myopia,’ Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.”

This is not the extent of Surowiecki’s observations. For example, he is not altogether critical of newspaper management, observing, in particular, that “[t]he peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular” (he refers, of course, to the blogosphere’s reliance on newspapers). And he states that “it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper.” This last is an especially arresting comment, as newspapers for well more than a century have played such a large role in defining cities’ sense of themselves.

I would be interested in others’ observations on these matters.