MULS 2009 Works-In-Progress Workshop (June Session)

champTo open my month as faculty blogger, I would first like to thank my colleague Michael O’Hear, whose dedication to, and work for, the Marquette Faculty Blog since its creation last summer have been incredible.  This is very much one of the major reasons why this project has been so successful and brought so many wonderful contributions to so many aspects of the law so far.

Another fundamental area where the Marquette Law School faculty is also showing important contributions to the law is the production of scholarship that results in law review articles, book chapters, textbooks, etc.  We often present and discuss these works when they are still in progress in conferences around the country with our colleagues in our areas at other schools.  Still, to facilitate even further these very important discussions, the MULS Academic Programs Committee, led by Professor Chad Oldfather, has organized two sessions of an in-house Works-in-Progress Workshop for June and July.

The June session was a great success. A group of eight of us met this past Wednesday and presented our works-in-progress, from very rough to more completed drafts of scholarship, to our colleagues participating in the program. 

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Women at the Bargaining Table . . . and on the Way to the White House

Andrea Schneider has two fascinating new papers on SSRN.  In different ways, both papers deal with what Andrea and her coauthers label the “double bind” facing women in leadership positions: “The incongruence of the core feminine stereotype with managerial effectiveness can result in women being perceived as competent but unlikable, or as likable but incompetent.”  The first paper, “Negotiating Your Public Identity: Women’s Path to Power,” illustrates the two options using two female politicians with clearly established public images: Hillary Clinton’s persona illustrates “competent but unlikable,” while Sarah Palin’s exemplifies “likable but incompetent.”  (As I suggested in an earlier post, some of the criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor as lacking “judicial temperament” may owe something, à la Hillary, to the “competent but unlikable” stereotype.)

Andrea and her coauthors offer a humorous, but also disheartening, review of media coverage from the 2008 election that typecast Clinton and Palin into their respective roles.  They also discuss social scientific research suggesting that the double bind arises from deeply entrenched gender stereotypes.  They conclude more hopefully, however, with suggested strategies for professional women to minimize the harmful effects of the double bind.

The second paper, “Women at the Bargaining Table: Pitfalls and Prospects,” presents some of these suggestions in more detail, with particular attention to the implications for teachers of negotiation. 

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Environmental Sentencing: Its Bark Is Worse Than Its Bite — Should We Care?

I have a new paper on SSRN about the sentencing of environmental offenders.  The title is “Bark and Bite: The Environmental Sentencing Guidelines after Booker.”  Using date collected by the United States Sentencing Commission, I show that judges sentence below the range recommended by the federal sentencing guidelines in an unusually high percentage of environmental cases, approaching sixty percent in some years.

Many environmentalists are apt to bristle at the apparent demonstration that federal judges are “soft” on environmental crime.  Given how little the government must prove to get an environmental conviction, however — prosecutors need not show either harm to the environment or an intent to harm the environment — I am not convinced that judges really are devaluing the environment through their sentencing decisions.  Still, I think the data warrant a rethinking of the environmental guidelines in order to give them more credibility with judges.

Here is the abstract: 

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