Legal Education: “Both/And” not “Either/Or”

Lisa’s post on international law in legal education brought to mind an ongoing internet debate about the impact of the supposed demise of “Big Law” (large firms) on law schools. The argument is that, if large firms hire fewer lawyers, law schools won’t be able to command the same tuition or attract the same number of students and will have to become more like trade schools, emphasizing the practical and putting aside more theoretical and interdisciplinary course offerings. Law professors will need to become more “instructor” (in a narrow sense) than professor and scholar. (The point is not that Big Law wants more theoretical and interdisciplinary courses – there is a seperate debate about that – but that large starting salaries induce students to be willing to pay for them.)

Part of my reaction to debate like this is that it something that is largely irrelevant to the majority of American law schools who neither offer a steady stream of courses on Kantian Perspectives on Third Party Practice nor limit themselves to the graduation of superannuated paralegals. Nor does it seem that the nature of legal education at these schools is much related to the health of Big Law since most of their students know that they will never be at a large firm (and that is not necessarily a bad thing).

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Christian Realism, Subsidiarity, and the Economic Crisis

Over the weekend, the the Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis hosted a conference entitled “Realism in Christian Public Theology: Catholic and Protestant Perspectives.” It was an interdisciplinary conference bringing together law professors, theologians, ethicists and political scientists. I spoke on Friday, presenting a paper entitled “Christian Realism, Subsidiarity and the Economic Crisis.” 

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What Is a Lie and Is It Constitutionally Protected?

I think that the three judge panel’s decision to recommend dismissal of ethics charges against Justice Michael Gableman is the right outcome. I doubt that we really want tribunals passing upon the truth and falsity of campaign speech – even for judges.

There were differing approaches taken by the panel judges. Judges Snyder and Deininger found that the Gableman campaign’s ad criticizing Louis Butler for “finding a loophole” for a convicted rapist who went on to offend again was literally true, nohwithstanding that “the loophole” did not result in Butler’s client’s release and he offended again only after serving his sentence.  It was, they believed, a misleading ad but true because each sentence in the ad, taken in isolation, was literally true. Although the Judicial Code also addresses true, but misleading statements, its admonition against such statements is only aspirational and cannot form the basis for discipline.

Judge Fine, on the other hand, wants to take the statement as a whole and that has substantial intuitive appeal.  We don’t, in common discourse,  isolate a message’s individual words, phrases and sentences to discern its meaning.

He goes on, however, to find that the Code’s prohibition on knowingly false statements to be unconstitutional. But that finding  seems itself to be a function of his willingness to apply the language of that Code in a more expansive way. 

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