Viscous and vacuous

This post serves notice to once, current, and future educational administrators: If you write fatuous prose from your perch, critics such as the Scathing Online Schoolmarm (Margaret Soltan of University Diaries) and the Gopher Gadfly (Bill Gleason of The Periodic Table) will expose the flaws in your reasoning and your rhetoric, in your sense and your syntax, for the world to enjoy.

Chortling aside, I do wish to make a serious MoneyLaw point. Educational administration is serious, demanding work. Universities devote substantial resources to chancellors, presidents, provosts, and deans, in the form of substantial salaries and gutwrenching search processes. These leaders are hired, one must hope, to lead. And as between leading by deed and leading by word, presumably leading by word is the easier task.

Why then do so many academic leaders write such viscous, vacuous prose? Lack of talent is no excuse; as a rule, universities draw leaders from their own academic ranks or from those of other universities. In this forum, I have touted the intelligence of one of the leaders lampooned by Soltan and Gleason. A more powerful explanation, I suspect, lies in the factors that motivate academic leaders and inform their decisions.

Among other reasons, academic leadership is hard because every decision has the potential to offend at least one powerful constituency. Unlike the professorial posts that academic leaders have almost invariably held at earlier stages in their careers, the seat in the front office is not protected by tenure. To the extent that an academic leader is motivated by the naked desire to stay in office — which after all brings more power, prestige, and pay than the alternative of returning to the faculty ranks — let alone by the ambition to advance to next level or to a more prestigious institution, one way to avoid professional damage is to do nothing. From there it is a short logical step to adopt a complementary communicative style: say nothing. If you must dribble prose across a newspaper page or blog post, then drown any substance in a syrup of viscous, vacuous verbiage.

There is a different way, one I have endeavored to follow and one I shall strive never to abandon. A place in academic leadership represents a rare, perhaps fleeting, opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of those who depend most heavily on academic excellence. You make decisions in the comfort of knowing that you'll never have to work for any institution that would fire or demote you for doing the right thing. And having made good decisions, describe and defend them boldly.

Florida Trial Judge Rules That State's Ban on Gay Adoptions Is Unconstitutional

Today in the news there was yet another interesting development in the world of gay rights, this one in Florida: Florida ban on gay adoptions ruled unconstitutional - MiamiHerald.com.

EXCERPT FROM MIAMI HERALD ARTICLE OF TODAY:
BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER (cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com)

A Miami-Dade circuit judge Tuesday declared Florida's 30-year-old ban on gay adoption unconstitutional, allowing a North Miami man to adopt two foster kids he has raised since 2004.

In a 53-page order that sets the stage for what could become a constitutional showdown, Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman permitted 47-year-old Frank Gill to adopt the 4- and 8-year-old boys he and his partner have raised since just before Christmas four years ago. A child abuse investigator had asked Gill to care for the boys temporarily; they were never able to return to their birth parents.

''This is the forum where we try to heal children, find permanent families for them so they can get another chance at what every child should know and feel from birth, and go on to lead productive lives,'' Lederman said in court before releasing the order. ``We pray for them to thrive, but that is a word we rarely hear in dependency court.''

''These children are thriving; it is uncontroverted,'' the judge added.

Moments after Lederman released the ruling, attorneys for Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced they would appeal the decision to the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami.

.....

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Real genius

Once again Jeff Harrison has lamented, in ways I appreciate, that the legal academy seems to hire a significant number of professors who are neither intellectually interesting enough (as a static matter) nor intellectually curious enough (as a dynamic matter) to make better teachers and smarter colleagues of themselves. I don't endorse Jeff's attempt to link the phenomenon to the academy's addiction to elite educational credentials. I must also stress that character trumps talent in faculty hiring, as in all other questions of law school management. I nevertheless do think that Jeff raises a legitimate issue. However gaudy or modest their degrees may be, a significant number of law teaching candidates are simply boring. Given how competitive the market is, and given how much is at stake in faculty hiring, law schools have every right — and arguably have a responsibility — to favor, ceteris paribus, creative over boring candidates.

Read the rest of this post . . . .In previous posts, Breaking the elitist stranglehold and Legal academia's rookie combine, I have touted, with variable degrees of directness, the work of Howard Gardner. In works such as Frames of Mind (1983) and Intelligence Reframed (1999), Gardner identified no fewer than eight manifestations of multiple intelligences:

• Linguistic
• Logical-mathematical
• Musical
• Bodily-kinesthetic
• Spatial
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal
• Naturalist

Every aspect of legal education, from faculty hiring to classroom instruction, privileges a single, narrow set of analytical skills over all other forms of intelligence. In Gardner's terms, we seek the peculiar mix of some linguistic talent with enough logical prowess that translates into mastery of the Langdellian curriculum, delivered via some version of the Socratic method. By and large we get the people we seek, because traditional legal education has excelled in filtering people according to these criteria, and no one who stumbled over this hurdle during law school should expect a law faculty appointment.

I question whether this combination of linguistic and logical intelligence is enough. It is far more prevalent than we legal academics might care to admit, because these are some of the most widely distributed and easily evaluated forms of intelligence. Absent tragic circumstances, every human exposed to speech masters it. Moreover, aside from mastery of phonology, morphology, and syntax, the ability to recognize aural and visual patterns is probably the species property of Homo sapiens, like heat detection in pit vipers or echolocation in bats. Top-ranked law students are freaks of nature in this respect, and their instructors are even more so.

But all too often, freakish analytical talent falls short. When it is paired with abominably stunted development in intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence, we get the ingredients for a faculty member so monstrous, so odious that the academy and the profession would benefit from her or his absence. That is the extreme case. The far more common (and much more difficult) situation involves a would-be professor who has mastered everything asked of her or him during law school but exhibits none of the spark and the commitment that would ever justify a lifetime academic appointment.

Success in the legal profession hinges on many forms of intelligence. Graduates at the bottom of their classes often excel in real-world settings that put a premium on attributes that law schools ignore or even denigrate. Every law school should prepare its students to master as many of the forms of intelligence that translate into professional success. For this reason alone, to say nothing of advancing faculty excellence or the collective knowledge base available to legal academia and the legal profession, I believe that it is entirely reasonable to press faculty candidates in ways that reveal their intellectual curiosity, creative propensities, and social intelligence — the very attributes overlooked by the academy's devotion to analytical acumen.

Searching for Outliers

I'd like to say there is a debate about the fascination law school hiring committees have with candidates with elite credentials. I am not sure it is a debate, however, if no one is listening to one side of the argument. If it is a debate, it is one that I and the six or seven people who agree with me (and I do not mean at my school but in the world) always lose. Nevertheless, here I go again.

First I think it is a fact that schools at the level of mine and lower only rarely attract candidates who graduated from top ranked schools at the top of their classes. Thus, the decision is between lower (and sometimes very low ranked) graduates from elite schools and the tip top graduates from other schools. By "other schools" I do not mean bad ones. No, I mean ones maybe just outside the top 10. Still, it continues -- the brand name trumps almost every other indicator of intellect and work ethic.

This is not a matter of relying on an accurate indicator of success. A little study I did last year indicated that grads from elite schools who end up at mid level schools are no more productive than the hand full of non elite grads. In addition, on average I think elite grads are less well educated than non elite grads who end up teaching at mid level schools. The elites (again, on average, not uniformly) seem to be narrowly educated. Very few seem to be able to talk about art, history, politics or any thing other than a very narrow range of topics. (They also seem relatively humorless -- not an irreverent bone to be found -- but that is another story.) They seem more technicianish.

I've tried to put aside my anti elite bias and identify why it is that non elites seem to have more going for them than elites. The only factor I have been able to come up with so far is that the non elites in legal education are very likely to have been, as children, and continue to be voracious readers. They are basically self-educated. (Don't misunderstand. Elites can be voracious readers and self-educated but they also have many other ways to become law professors the principal ones of which are branding and self-referential hiring tendencies.)

This means a number of things but the most important is that somewhere somehow, hard-wired or socialized (unlikely), the non elites were intellectual curious at an outlier level. Learning itself was a reward and not because it meant getting an A or performing well as a "trophy child."

So, if I were on a hiring committee, what I would ask, in addition to the lists I have posted before that were designed find to lower socioeconomic class people, would be:

1. What was your favorite book at age 15.
2. What were the last 10 books you read that had nothing to do with law.
3. Name your favorite opera, aria, sonata, symphony or any non pop, folk, alt music. (I mean one that gets you in the gut.)
4. What non law book is on the top of the stack on your night stand.
5a. What is your car book -- the one you keep in the car for waiting in lines or waiting rooms.
5b. What is your favorite pasta? (Opps, this question snuck in from the Italian cooking blog.)
6. Who was your favorite teacher before law school and why?

and finally,

6. How would a Rawlsian design the faculty recruitment process?

There are no right answers but there should be answers that come quickly and with a sense of excitement.

Mythical law school rankings

Pallas Athena and the Pigskin

As the college football season winds down, it bears remembering that the NCAA recognizes no official champion for the Football Bowl Subdivision (which real fans will forever call Division I-A). Even if this season's BCS National Championship Game manages somehow to reprise the 2006 Cotton Bowl with a rematch of Alabama versus Texas Tech (this time with zero rather than two losses apiece), major college football will stage a mythical national championship:

A mythical national championship . . . is a colloquial term used to describe a champion in a sport in which a championship is determined without the use of a playoff or tournament of some kind. It is most commonly used when referring to NCAA Division-I college football, since there is no playoff in that sport.

Bo Schembechler, longtime coach of the once-great Michigan Wolverines, provided the definitive statement on mythical national championships:

"If there are any Big Ten teams that shoot for a national championship, they're damn fools," Schembechler said . . . . "You play to win the Big Ten championship, and if you win it and go to the Rose Bowl and win it, then you've had a great season. If they choose to vote you number one, then you're the national champion. But a national champion is a mythical national champion, and I think you guys ought to know that. It's mythical."

Yeah, it's mythical. And it's stupid. Ask the President-Elect:

And even if this isn't change college football traditionalists and university presidents can believe in, never fear. Legal academia seems committed, if solely by reason of inertia, to mythical law school rankings.

Championships, athletic or academic, are bogus if they depend on subjective voting. College football deserves better, and if the NCAA heeds Barack Obama's advice, we might at last see a Division I-A football playoff. By contrast, legal academia is still struggling to meet a challenge that MoneyLaw laid down in its infancy:

No academic ratings system is valid if it depends in whole or in part on a subjective survey of academic reputation.

Beetles, Frogs, and Lawyers

I think and write a lot about models and their limits, and what is "Moneyball" or "Moneylaw" if not a model?

That's my lame connection to a piece I have just posted on SSRN, Beetles, Frogs, and Lawyers:  The Scientific Demarcation Problem in the Gilson Theory of Value Creation.  Here's the abstract:

Recently, Ronald Gilson described a transactional lawyer turned law professor as someone who was a beetle, but became an entomologist. This is not the first non-mammalian metaphor used by an economically inclined legal academic to demarcate those who study and those who are studied. As Richard Posner so colorfully explained rational actors as they appear to economists studying them objectively: "it would not be a solecism to speak of a rational frog." In this short essay, I suggest that both say something about the prevailing view of theorizing that is entitled to privileged epistemic status in the legal academy. I assess Professor Gilson's classic 1984 article on value creation by lawyers in terms of its implicit claims to (social) scientific truth.

Oh, and, by the way, for a view on Daniel Henninger's suggestion in the Wall Street Journal this morning that Southern evangelical approach to religion would be an effective ballast to over-reliance on credit risk models, click on over to Legal Profession Blog.

Harvard Law's second United States President

On a tip from a blog post written by my history-loving colleague, Kurt X. Metzmeier, and featured in the University of Louisville's law faculty blog, I looked it up:

Yes, Barack Obama will be the second United States President with a law degree from Harvard. The first, Rutherford B. Hayes, was elected under circumstances more reminiscent of the 2000 election. One thing is certain: Obama's victory pulls Harvard back into a first place tie with Yale among universities that have conferred law degrees on future Presidents of the United States. Yale's pair? Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton.

An elegant bibliographical solution

The chambers of a nautilus are arranged according to an approximate logarithmic spiral that can be calculated in polar coordinates according to this simple formula:

r = ae^bθ

where r represents the radial coordinate, θ represents the angular coordinate, e is the base of natural logarithms, and a and b are constants that (1) are arbitrary in modeling and (2) are empirically determined in real-world applications of logarithmic spirals.

I post this picture of the nautilus, which graces the banner for BioLaw: Law and the Life Sciences, because it is beautiful. It reminds us that beautiful things are often beautiful because they work. The nautilus and its relatives, after all, have cruised the seas for half a billion years with very few evolutionary adaptations.

For technical details, see Wikipedia's excellent articles on logarithmic spirals and polar coordinates. Extra intellectual credit goes to readers who tackle the article on spherical coordinates as well.

Jeff Harrison has finally found a reason to like SSRN. I demur, if only because the result he advocates would be ugly.

Jeff snickers — correctly, in my opinion — at the true motivation of law schools that now promote their faculty exclusively in terms of SSRN citations. Jeff thinks that these schools are motivated by a desire to maximize their faculties' collective SSRN downloads. But he lauds SSRN-only citations for their incidental effect on the signaling value of law review placements. On balance, Jeff thinks that the reduction of student law review editors' influence outweighs any reinforcement of law schools' excessive reliance on SSRN download statistics. Hence his surprising title, "Yes to SSRN."

Both Jeff and the law schools he backhandedly compliments are overlooking the real purpose of listing faculty publications. The whole point of legal bibliography is to communicate information. Primarily, it must be said, bibliographies convey information about the content of the books and articles listed and where those items can be found. If readers infer something about the quality of those items strictly from the identity of their publishers, with any degree of accuracy vel non, that isn't something that the bibliographic artist can or should control.

In other words, tell them what it is, and tell them where to find it. SSRN links provide another way of finding some (though not all) legal scholarship. The trick is to provide SSRN links without wrecking traditional legal bibliography or telegraphing, too transparently, your law school's yearning for more downloads.

In crafting individual and collective bibliographies, law schools should follow the citation forms and norms that prevail throughout the legal profession. No one disputes the proper way of citing Supreme Court cases. You cite Harper v. Virginia Department of Taxation according to its volume and first page in United States Reports, plus the year of decision. Thus: 509 U.S. 86 (1993). You can find Harper quite a few places on the Web for free. Copying and pasting the entire case name, including its citation, into a Google search field, will generate the full list of options. I suppose that you could insist on typing out a complete URL, such as http://caselaw.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=509&invol=86, for the benefit of a technologically illiterate reader who doesn't know how to conduct a Google search but, amazingly, does know how to type a URL into her or his browser's address field. Then again, slapping a string of 70+ characters, including numbers and punctuation marks, into your bibliography is likelier to dissuade your reader from looking up Harper in the first place.

The beauty of HTML is that you can bury ugly URLs into links. You can cite Harper v. Virginia Department of Taxation, 509 U.S. 86 (1993), like a normal lawyer, and still give your online reader the benefit of the link to one of many free sites listing the entire text of this case.

I now offer an example drawn from my own home page at the University of Louisville School of Law. I have in hand the reprint from this article:

Biolaw: Cracking the Code, 56 Kan. L. Rev. 1029 (2008)

Note how I've gone ahead and embedded the SSRN link into the name of the article. I suppose I could add the SSRN address, http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1115332, to the citation, but it would be ugly. Ugly citations don't invite anyone to look things up. And I suppose I could replace the conventional law review citation, 56 Kan. L. Rev. 1029 (2008), with the SSRN address, http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1115332, but most readers would assume that this item had not yet been published in a traditional law review.

SSRN's URLs could be even worse. If you type http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1115332 into your browser, that address will actually lead you to an even more unwieldy URL, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1115332. For its part, SSRN promotes its own citation form, which combines all the aforementioned particles of information with some further SSRN-specific tidbits:

Biolaw: Cracking the Code. Kansas Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 4, 2008; University of Louisville School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 2008-12. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1115332

I've left out the clickable link to the SSRN address because SSRN also left it out. This isn't affirmatively ugly, but it is a long-winded mess.

For my money, which I've put where my mouth is by designing my own online bibliography this way, I'll stick with a citation form that looks just as it would in a legal document, enhanced with a simple HTML link:

Jim Chen, Biolaw: Cracking the Code, 56 Kan. L. Rev. 1029 (2008)

Yes to SSRN

I've shared my views on what SSRN downloads mean but the story is not all negative. This occurred to me (probably later than to most) when a friend noted that some schools in sending out their reports of faculty scholarship include only SSRN cites. He thinks the objective is to drive up downloads or possibly to make it more convenient for attorneys to access the articles. My more cynical hunch is that it is a way of not revealing how poorly the scholarship placed.

I emphasize poorly because law review placement is one of those strange things. A great many of us say law review placement is not important and then act completely differently. Maybe SSRN citation only is a way out of this inconsistency. Plus, the SSRN-citation-only idea is a great way of removing, largely 24 or 25 year old, students from the law school and law professor ranking process. Put differently, maybe very differently, isn't a system of no referees better than the current system of student referees? SSRN provides that opportunity.

Even if the schools listing only SSRN cites are doing it just to drive up downloads (the importance of which I think is massively overstated), it seems to me that it is a trend others might consider following.

California, Arizona and Florida Join Long List of States Banning Gay Marriage

Two more states besides California - namely, Arizona and Florida - have joined the list of nearly 30 U.S. states banning gay marriage, as the result of last week's elections. Although California still has civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, most of the states with bans, including Arizona and Florida, do not have civil unions, domestic partnerships, or any kind of recognition of these relationships. For a basic overview, see this New York Times article about the three state bans, and also read this from the New Hampshire Family Law Blog.

It seems the Northeast, and particularly New England, is exceptional. Massachusetts and Connecticut are now the only states sanctioning gay marriage. Vermont and New Hampshire have civil unions and Maine also has a degree of recognition of same-sex relationships through domestic partnerships. New York recognizes same-sex marriages formed in other states, and New Jersey also has civil unions. Outside this, our very tolerant area of the country, only the West Coast states have some formal, legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples: California still has civil unions, while Oregon and Washington have domestic partnerships.

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

The Ex-Donald Bren School of Law

The U.C. Irvine School of Law recently announced that it will not carry the name, "Bren," contrary to an earlier agreement honoring a $20 million gift by philanthropist Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company. Why the change of plans? According to an Irvine Company spokesman, "part of the reason to drop the name was to avoid confusion with other schools that are named after Bren on the campus of UC Irvine" (emphasis added). That careful phrasing suggests other, unnamed, reasons also played a role in the name change.

It certainly seems as if Bren now means to distance himself from the fledgling law school. Note that his website's description of Bren's philanthropy makes no mention of his $20 million gift to U.C. Irvine School of Law. The omission appears deliberate, moreover, given that the gift would rank among the most generous he has made. Even more tellingly, reference to the Internet Archives shows that the same webpage formerly gave Bren's gift to the law school top billing.

Does that mean that the U.C. Irvine School of Law has lost Bren's gift? The Orange County Business Journal reports that "Bren still is good for $20 million," a somewhat cryptic phrasing—one that leaves open the possibility that Bren withdrew the gift but that he stands ready to reinstate it upon certain conditions. Consistent with that reading, the same source added, "Bren's name could be added later."

UPDATE Marla Jo Fisher, a reporter at the Orange County Register and a fellow blogger at College Life O.C., got this update from UCI spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon: “There has been no renegotiation of the gift agreement. We do not have to give back the $20 million.”

She also got this email from the Irvine Company:
UCI requested the name change in order to be consistent with other UC
schools and the trend away from naming law schools after major donors,
and Mr. Bren agreed to accommodate UCI’s request. His earlier announced
gift of $20 million remains intact and we look forward to a world-class
law school at UCI.
Hope that helps. Please let me know if you need any additional
information.
Best,
John Christensen
Vice President, Media Relations
Irvine Company


[Crossposted at MoneyLaw and College Life O.C.]

California Electorate Voted to Ban Gay Marriage; Legislators Try Hail Mary Pass to California Supreme Court

California voters approved the gay marriage ban in that state, by voting for Proposition 8, during their election last week. Meanwhile, Democratic legislators are asking the California Supreme Court to void Proposition 8, in what the manager of the Proposition 8 campaign derides as a "Hail Mary" pass: Democratic legislators ask state Supreme Court to void Prop. 8 - Los Angeles Times. Some gay and lesbian couples have already gotten married in California, between the time the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage and the time when the gay marriage ban was approved last week. Their future is unclear.

Meanwhile, it is likely this development will improve the tourism prospects for Massachusetts and Connecticut, as these New England states, now the only states currently sanctioning gay marriage, should have a monopoly on the gay destination wedding market in the U.S.

EXCERPT FROM LA TIMES ARTICLE, BY DAN MORAIN, 11/11/08:

Reporting from Sacramento -- Forty-three Democratic legislators, including leaders of the California Senate and Assembly, filed a brief Monday urging the California Supreme Court to void Proposition 8.

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata and incoming President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg signed the friend of the court brief, filed with the state Supreme Court.

No Republican legislator signed the petition, though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, denounced the anti-gay marriage measure over the weekend.

With almost 11 million ballots tallied, Proposition 8 had 52.3% of the vote to 47.7%. Although many ballots remain to be counted, the 500,000-vote spread is viewed as insurmountable.

"The citizens of California rely on the Legislature and the courts to safeguard against unlawful discrimination by temporary, and often short-lived, majorities," the legislators said in the document, written by attorneys at the firm Gibson, Dunn &Crutcher.

"This is a Hail Mary, no question about it," said Frank Schubert, manager of the Proposition 8 campaign.

....

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Are We Done Yet?

I worry that the posts to Moneylaw seem to have fallen off (in quantity, not quality). I really enjoyed reading the views of the original core of writers. So, what's up?

But, by asking "are we done yet" I am not referring to Moneylaw and other blogs remaining from the "blog boom." It's more about public legal education. It seems like the ideal outcome in terms of legal training is the absence of public law schools. In other words, whatever public legal education produces would be produced in sufficient quantity and quality by private markets. Unless public legal education is just a device for redistributing income (in which case we could just write checks and forgo the huge expense of what would amount to money laundering) this must be the case. When the "public good" rationale is no longer viable, doesn't it mean the end of public legal education? I am not sure, but it seems like most would agree.

If so, how does that square with so many efforts to "build programs." I do not mean programs that generate income or pay for themselves but efforts 1) to offer new programs to attract students who otherwise would have no interest in law school 2) to compete for students who have more than enough choices. One explanation is that each School spends its money most effectively when it educates the best students, and not those who are likely to squander the public investment. That's a nice idea but how does that square with measuring success by placing students with high end law firms where the benefits of the training are most likely to be internalized by the students, partners, and well-heeled clients. And, how does it square with empire building that seems unrelated to any sense of obligation to shareholders. Pretty clearly, even when public legal education is done in the sense the public good rationale is gone (if it is not already) public law schools and various faculty special interests will be slugging it out to "build their programs."

This reminds of a odd interaction this week that falls into the category of is it "economics or ethics." At a meeting I expressed my now boring view that a public law school should study a state's needs and shape its curriculum accordingly. (I am such a broken record on this that I am surprised no one has said, "No reason to talk, Jeff. We know what you are getting ready to say." But when you think about it this could apply to most law professors. Most faculties could save time by canceling all faculty meetings and just alert people when someone has something new to say.) At my law school most graduates stay in the State and most work for relatively small firms. The competing position was that should adopt a curriculum that would make the students attractive in the national market most notably large law firms. Frankly, not much separates these views and it's a good faith debate that probably goes on at most mid level schools. After the meeting, I was told that it was interesting to hear the economic perspective Huh?!! Is it a matter of economics to believe those who pay the bills deserve the benefits of their investment? Or is it a matter of simple ethics and the observance fiduciary obligations?

New & Improved Child Support Guidelines To Go Into Effect on January 1

New child support guidelines have just been promulgated, and they will go into effect in Massachusetts on January 1, 2009. See the Massachusetts Court System Press Release - November 5, 2008. I am one of the many attorneys, litigants, and other concerned citizens, who have long complained before that our current guidelines are not appropriate for our times, particularly as they are not precise and comprehensive enough to cover enough of our families.

The new guidelines, for the first time, will address some of the longstanding concerns many of us have had. For one, I see the task force has for the first time made it clear how to determine child support when there is joint physical custody. It is good to see that the task force this time included Fathers and Families founder Ned Holstein, as well as many of the usual participants (attorneys and judges and other family law establishment people). After I have time to give it a complete review, I will post my analysis. But right away, after a quick scan, I can already say it is a wonderful improvement over the guidelines that are currently in effect. Have a read for yourself and tell me what you think: http://www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport/guidelines.pdf.

Excerpt from Press Release of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court:

Chief Justice for Administration & Management Robert A. Mulligan today announced the promulgation of revised Child Support Guidelines to be effective on January 1, 2009, based on a comprehensive review of the guidelines by the Child Support Guidelines Task Force he appointed in 2006. The 12-member Task Force was chaired by Probate and Family Court Chief Justice Paula M. Carey.

The report recommended significant, broad-based changes intended to make the guidelines more simple, clear, comprehensive and consistent with economic and societal changes of the last two decades. The report of the Task Force, available at www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport, explains the rationale behind the guidelines to assist attorneys and litigants in understanding and using them.

The recommendations include provisions that place greater value and emphasis on the involvement of both parents in the lives of children; consider the increase in health insurance costs and the requirement of mandatory health insurance in Massachusetts; provide greater guidance relative to when a child support order should be modified; and set forth specific deviation factors for deviation from the guidelines. These guidelines will apply to the circumstances of many more families in the Commonwealth.

....

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

America: Freedom to Fascism

Double click video for full screen

Man who saved the life of the Browns, gets sentenced to 36 years in prison.

Why you ask, because he stood with the Browns in support of their inquiry as to what law makes them liable for an income tax.


Current Mood: Depressed
Why: Most of my heroes are dead, or in Jail.

The powerlessness of faculty politics

On Election Day 2008, MoneyLaw takes a quick look at faculty politics. By "faculty politics," if only for this day, I mean the electoral preferences of college professors.

Do professors' political proclivities influence their students' views? According to April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner, authors of Investigating the Impact of Politics in the Classroom: Considering Whether Students Recognize and React to Faculty Politics, the answer appears to be "no."

False Applause

This poem by Donald Burness from his collection, Brutal Like All Olympics Are, makes my cynicism about legal academics look positively Pollyannaish.

MY ENEMIES

gnathonic toads infesting fleas
this is the tribe of my enemies
joyless drones self-righteous frauds
they honor each other with false applause
jealous knaves consumed by hate
ever eager to extirpate
dull lifeless they cannot soar
on winds of dancing metaphors
what a paltry pathetic thing
to honor Mediocrity as your king
and when the king lets out a fart
they love the smell with all their heart
I wish them scrofulous days ahead
and may they rightly be remembered
as zeros when they're dead

The brush is a bit broad even for me but the phrases "false applause," strikes a chord. Just exactly what chord I am not sure. Is it that the applause is fake in that people do not mean it or is it false in the sense that the forms of praise really do not mean much. Maybe it does not matter since there seems to a fair amount of both. In the first case, are colleagues sincerely happy for you or are they saying one thing and thinking another.

It is the second version, though, that I think is more harmful. I have already written somewhere on this blog about the market for positive tenure and promotion letters. I've also questioned exactly was SSRN downloads signify and, specifically, what it means to be on one of the SSRN top ten lists. Needless to say, brand name school credentials also fit the profile. Accolades seem very cheap at times -- "false applause" in a sense.

I have also questioned the value of symposium articles and the applause their authors expect. This is sensitive and it should be. I am not saying that all or even most symposium articles are poor articles. I do think they are more likely than standard articles to rehash something already said. In fact, the authors are often selected because of what they are are expected to say and not because they they are particularly insightful or creative. In fact for those who complain about the "good ol boy" network, it is alive and well in the form of symposia efforts. Some people tell me they do not do them as a rule because they would like to move on to something new. I have tremedous respect for those people -- passing up a free resume line to do something riskier.

It can create an interesting one-two punch like the professors who arranged symposium appearances by junior faculty, then review the work and announced publicly that it is marvelous. It may be! But then again, do you think may law professors are going to arrange a symposium opportunity for a junior colleague and then concede it was a mistake?? That is, unless there has been a falling out of some other kind.

False applause is like the pill in the the Matrix, it makes you feel good but keeps you from knowing if you actually are "good."

Underdogs and wonderdogs

Underdogs and Wonderdogs

Few days in this year's college football season will be more decisive than November 1. And the two games that dominate today's agenda — #8 Georgia against #5 Florida and #6 Texas Tech against #1 Texas — offer in tandem a glimpse at managerial traits that matter, in higher education as in football.

Let's speak first of pure genius. Mike Leach of Texas Tech is probably the smartest coach in college football. He needs to be; Texas Tech historically draws talent only after Texas, Texas A&M, and perhaps other Big XII powers have had their pick among high school players from one of the country's most football-crazed states. And his innovation is a thing of beauty. Very traditional college football coaches treat the forward pass as a deviant play; Woody Hayes's "three yards and a cloud of dust" grew out of a suspicion that only three things could happen on a pass play, and two of them (incompletion, interception) were bad. Almost all coaches, when they do use the forward pass, set their players in predictable formations and then ask eligible receivers to run complex routes.

Not Mike Leach. He treats the pass as the default play, since the thrown ball usually travels faster than any player. He spreads his players as far apart as he can. They run very simple routes, but out of a stunning variety of seemingly improvised, unpredictable formations. Handoffs are for losers; Texas Tech football is all about players covering the entire field. He has literally changed the geometry of the game.

And then there is Mark Richt of Georgia. His challenge is to catapult Georgia, mired for a quarter century on the cusp of near-greatness, into the elite ranks. Today's game against Florida distills a lesson he learned during last year's Bulldog-Gator tilt:

In the upper echelon of the Southeastern Conference, the difference in talent is so slight that games can be won inside the players’ helmets as often as inside the hash marks.

That is the defining lesson that Georgia Coach Mark Richt says he learned last season. His Bulldogs used a single motivational ploy to redefine their image and transform their program into a contender for the national championship.

In a search for more emotion, Richt instructed his players before their game last year against Florida in Jacksonville, Fla., to be sure to get a penalty for excess celebration after their first touchdown. They ended up being called for two after about 70 players stormed the field and danced in the end zone.

Georgia went on to a 42-30 victory, suddenly altering a rivalry in which Florida had won 15 of the previous 17 meetings.

In Leach and Richt, we see two faces of superior coaching. These two profiles in athletic prowess might as well be two lessons in academic leadership. Leach is innovation; Richt is inspiration. Their underdogs, the Red Raiders of Texas Tech and the Georgia Bulldogs, need all of that and more in rivalry games that are, for all practical purposes, elimination games for their respective conference championships, let alone the national title. Surely MoneyLaw readers will cheer Leach and Richt over established superpowers in Texas and Florida, in the belief that innovation and inspiration do matter and in the hope that these traits might yet prevail.

Update: Georgia failed, so miserably that I now vow never again to mention that game. Texas Tech, on the other hand, won one of the most entertaining games I've ever watched. I wouldn't mind watching a rematch of the 2006 Cotton Bowl in roughly two months — for all the marbles in college football.