I Am the Author

walrusYour faithful blog committee moderates posts and comments on  a rotating basis.  I was  “on call” on Tuesday evening and, returning home in despair after a night at Miller Park,  inadvertently published posts by Professors Greipp and Papke under my own name. The mistake was fixed in the morning.

But I found the latter error intriguing. Here I was, ostensibly the “author” of a post regretting “dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.” It was as if someone had replaced my bedside Edmund Burke with Jean-Paul Sartre.

But here’s the thing. I do agree – in a sense – with David’s point.

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The Importance of Student Organizations

sl0012Student organizations enrich a law student’s experience.  Whether it is bringing in practitioners to discuss the practice of law or bringing in scholars to debate important legal issues, student organizations—and the events they sponsor—help law students think about the law.  To be successful and to produce successful lawyers, a law school should encourage students to think about the law outside the classroom.  It is outside the classroom where a student may pursue the law in more depth and choose a topic that is important and interesting to him or her.

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Ashcroft v. Iqbal and the Pleading Standard

Law professors teaching Civil Procedure this fall may have reason to revise their lecture notes covering the pleading standard in federal courts for the first time in a long time.  This pleading standard, as articulated in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) Rule 8(a), has presented a very low hurdle for plaintiffs since the Supreme Court addressed the issue in Conley v. Gibson in 1957.  That is, perhaps, until Ashcroft v. Iqbal , a Supreme Court detainee case decided this spring that may end up significantly heightening the pleading standard for federal civil courts.

Depending on where you look, you can find members of the legal community making different predictions of where the courts will land on Iqbal.  Some are dismissing the significance of the case, and others are declaring it a major obstacle for plaintiffs and a coup for corporate defense.

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