Archive for the ‘Weird’ Category

To a Worm In Horseradish, the World is Horseradish

posted by Dave Hoffman

I can across this saying recently in a post about the perils of blogging by Todd Henderson.  It allegedly is a Yiddish proverb, made popular in a speech by Malcolm Gladwell.  I’m actually not so sure it’s a real piece of Yiddishkeit.  None of my (Hungarian) Yiddish-speaking relatives have heard of it, and I can’t find the real Yiddish version anywhere.  Rather, I think the expression is best sourced to Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote an English short story with the expression in the title, and who used variants in several other pieces. (If anyone knows different, please feel free to comment.)

Anyway, it’s a useful expression for someone who feels trapped by a bad situation.  I thought I’d pass it along.  It’s an illustration, incidentally, of how bizarre associations can make writing more vivid.  (What’s the worm doing in horseradish?  Why horseradish?  Are worms kosher for Passover?)  It’s also a useful reminder, in this new year, that it’s pretty bad to be a worm in horseradish.

  January 3, 2012 at 7:31 pm   Posted in: Weird   Print This Post   13 Comments

Space Law and Richard Posner

posted by Gerard Magliocca

So I was doing research on space law (don’t ask), and I learned something new–Richard Posner’s first publication was a book review in the Harvard Law Review entitled “Law and Public Order in Space.”  You can find it at 77 Harv. L. Rev. 1370 (1964).  My favorite line is:

“The most glaring example of the authors’ unwillingness to recognize that their subject has any bounds is the chapter on “Potential Interaction With Advanced Forms of Non-Earth Life” (ch. 9, pp. 974-1021). The problem of men from Mars (and elsewhere) is still, mercifully, in the realm of science fiction, and it is therefore not surprising that the authors have almost nothing to contribute to its solution.”

  January 2, 2012 at 2:41 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized, Weird   Print This Post   2 Comments

My Holiday Card to Concurring Opinions Readers

posted by Kyle Graham

TORTS

Final Examination
Professor Graham
Holiday 2011 Semester

PROFESSOR’S INSTRUCTIONS:

1. You have three hours to complete the exam,
which consists of a single question.

2. This is a closed-book exam.

3. Assume that the facts as given are true, and take place in the fictitious State of Confusion.

4. Good luck!

QUESTION ONE

On Christmas Eve 2011, Santa Claus landed his sleigh atop the roof of the Adams household. After squeezing down the chimney, he left gifts for the Adams family, ate the milk and cookies that had been left out for him, and then shimmied back up the chimney to the roof.

As Santa prepared to board his sleigh, he slipped and fell on an icy shingle. Santa tumbled down the roof and crashed into the bushes below, hurting his back. Mr. Adams had seen the ice on his roof earlier that day, but decided not to clear it off; the task seemed like a lot of work, it was cold outside, and there was a good football game on TV. As Santa lay injured in the bushes, a partially unwrapped gift—a Chia Pet—inexplicably fell from (or was disgustedly tossed out of) a window at the Adams residence, and clobbered Santa on the head.

The tumult caused Santa’s reindeer to panic and fly off without him. The out-of-control reindeer and sleigh crashed into and pulverized the chimney at the nearby Batista household. Meanwhile, the Chen and Davis children had been “nice” this year, but received no presents due to Santa’s injury and the runaway sleigh. Believing that Santa considered them “naughty,” the Chen and Davis kids suffered serious emotional distress.

Later that night, one of the gifts that Santa had left for the Adams family, a Sniggie® blanket (like a Snuggie, only cheaper), spontaneously burst into flames. The ensuing fire burnt the Adams house down to the ground.

Finally, the events related above caused some scales to topple onto a woman standing at a train station in Brooklyn.

Identify and evaluate the torts implicated by the foregoing facts, taking care to consider, inter alia:

1) Whether Santa is best classified as an invitee, licensee, or trespasser at the Adams household, assuming that the State of Confusion continues to adhere to these categories;

2) Whether the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur applies to the defenestrated Chia Pet;

3) Whether Santa would be liable for the chimney damage in a “fence out” jurisdiction;

4) Whether any duty existed to protect the Chen and Davis children from the harms that they suffered; and

5) Whether Santa can be held strictly liable as a “distributor” of the defective Sniggie® blanket.

Happy Holidays!

  December 6, 2011 at 1:13 pm   Posted in: Humor, Tort Law, Weird   Print This Post   6 Comments

Progress and Pumpkins

posted by Dave Hoffman

The great state of Delaware, which brought you most of your corporate law and some nasty traffic jams in Newark, hosts the annual Punkin Chunkin competition this weekend.  The object is to throw a pumpkin (by mechanical means) as far as you can, without having the pumpkin become pie in midair.  I was looking at Wikipedia’s reporting of the “competition” results, and I noticed the following trend:

 

Do you see what I’m seeing?  Basically, the same kind of “lost decade” that we’ve seen in other fields — ranging from employment, to the 99′s% wages, to innovation in the pharmaceutical pipeline.   Actually now that I think about it, if we take seriously Bainbridge’s idea that law is a “mature industry,” that curve starts to strike pretty close to home.

It’s depressing to think that after only 20 years, the technology to create an air cannon that will throw a pumpkin over a mile has already reached its apparent apogee.  At this point, we might predict that rather than rewarding skill, the Punkin Chunkin competition really will turn on luck — puffs of wind, pumpkin skin viscosity, humidity, the passing pigeon’s path.  Nevertheless, we’ll probably come to believe that the winners in the pumpkin chunkin competition are virtuous and the losers defective, and that the results reflect some kind of fair & stable & natural ordering.  That view would be wrong.

  November 3, 2011 at 8:53 pm   Posted in: Weird   Print This Post   13 Comments

Which Yale College Has Produced the Most Law Professors?

posted by Dave Hoffman

I was talking to my college classmate Rafael Pardo (JE ’98, teaching at U.W.) at the AALS hiring conference, and we came to conclude that Jonathan Edwards College dominates Yale’s inferior colleges in the number (and quality) of law professor alumni it produces.  (And, needless to say, Harvard’s “houses” aren’t particularly relevant to this discussion.) Off the top of our heads, we came up with a bunch of folks — which, in a previous version of this post, I listed.  On reconsideration, and after being told that the AYA prefers not to use the search function in this way, I’m taking down the list in an abundance of caution. People should feel free to use the comment thread to continue inter-college rivalries as they like. And folks who didn’t participate in odd & goofy Yale College traditions should celebrate the interdepartmental units in their respective undergraduate institutions that they belonged to, and tease those who didn’t.

As they say, JE Sux!  Anyone have a different view?

  October 18, 2011 at 8:32 am   Posted in: Weird   Print This Post   9 Comments

Facebook, Bullet Not Dodged Yet (Part Deux)

posted by Danielle Citron

In June, I blogged about the dreaded question (for parents of teenagers): “Mom, can I have a Facebook profile?”  At the time, we talked about its benefits and drawbacks.  On the one hand, it’s a gateway to socializing that she had been missing given her late birthday.  Different sports leagues had Facebook groups, perhaps she needed to join, and other activities would as well.  On the other hand, her privacy and reputation could be jeopardized, by her own hand or her “friends.”  Facebook’s privacy settings are notoriously whimsical, and more importantly as Steve Bellovin’s work shows notoriously misunderstood–setting up an account was indeed a game of chance, or as Bob Keller notes, like giving your kid a pipe of crystal meth.  We gave our thirteen year old kid the choice and told her to talk to us when she was ready to get started.  The summer came and went and all was quiet.  So now, a good five months later and a good five months wiser, my kid has decided that she wants to think about getting a Facebook page again.  And the conversation went something like this (she did all of the talking):  So I’m feeling excited about this.  Facebook would let me stay in touch with my sleep-away camp friends who live all over the place and I could friend kids that I meet from other schools in the area, at games, mixers, etc.  And I am jazzed about this new close friends feature that everyone’s been talking about.  This way I can share photographs only with my five best pals and I don’t have to worry.  (Pause).  But, I really want to friend the kids from camp and want them to see what I am up to, so this close friends feature may not work.  And what if those camp friends have weird friends or end up being strange themselves.  I can’t de-friend them, can I and still pal around at camp?  And I don’t want other people making judgments about me based on what those not-so-close friends are up to?  Will colleges see what I am doing, when it comes time?  And what if someone goes on my close friend’s computer and copy and pastes my silly remarks and it goes viral, like the Friday girl who ended up getting death threats and harassed.  Can I put up my favorite artists?  I definitely can say I like the Beatles and Elton John, but can I say Kesha?  Will people think I am appropriate if I put Kesha down or Katy Perry?  Some of their songs are, err, a little inappropriate.

After all of that, my kid said she needed to think about it, it all seemed so, well, complicated.  That seemed just the right word: complicated.  But the question seems even more tricky now than it did in June.  Who is she doing this for?  Taking cues from Erving Goffman, life is a performance.  Some of it is just for you–a way to develop oneself, experiment, play, and figure out who you are as much as who you are not.  Much of it is for others.  We perform different roles for the people in our lives: friends, parents, co-workers, coach, priest/imam/rabbi, acquaintances, and strangers.  Some performances are oppressive: we cover or pass as best we can in the face of stigma and prejudice.  And we perform at a time of extensive social and political surveillance.  We feel watched, and for good reason.  Companies give us social influence scores.  Employers, marketers, and businesses use those scores to benefit some, leaving others less favored and less fortunate.  Maybe we perform online for them?  Colleges look at social media profiles.  (danah boyd has a great piece about a question a college asked her about a student’s MySpace page, which seemingly contradicted his college essay.)  Do young people perform for them?  At the same time, government monitors our online presence, searching for threats to critical infrastructure and the like.  Government 2.0 social media sites may be keeping track of the stories we like, the friends we make, and pictures we post.  Who knows?  Agencies aren’t promising not to watch us, so maybe being careful is smart.  Are we performing for fusion centers and our government social media friends?  All of this watching brings to mind Julie Cohen’s book Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2011, see her talk here)–more on that in early 2012 in our online symposium on the book.  Navigating those questions every time one posts on Facebook is bewildering, especially because we can’t really control what happens to the information posted there.  A commentator on my previous post basically said that I had better get a grip on reality, that nothing I did or said could influence what she did and she would hate me anyway.  I guess we just fundamentally disagree.  Parenting is a huge responsibility, and lots of what my kid is mulling comes from long, long conversations we have had about being a responsible and smart digital citizen.  I am looking forward to talking it through again, once she has a better idea of what she wants to do.

P.S. Sorry about the light blogging, working on my first book on cyber mobs and hate (forthcoming Harvard University Press).

H/T Susan McCarty (who helped me find the db piece) , JJC

  October 6, 2011 at 9:07 am   Posted in: Culture, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0, Weird   Print This Post   5 Comments

Public Service Reminder: Baby Selling is Illegal.

posted by Dave Hoffman

Yikes.

For less than the price of a new car, police said, Bridget Wismer, 33, of Brookside Park, Del., sold her month-old son to John Gavaghan, of Old Newtown Road near Tremont in Bustleton.

The transaction is believed to have occurred between Sept. 28 and Sept. 30, when police executed a search warrant on Gavaghan’s home and found him with the child, said Cpl. John Weglarz of the New Castle County, Del., police.

Police there said they began their investigation on Sept. 4, when members of Wismer’s family expressed concerns that she might be trying to sell the newborn to a man from Philadelphia.

Despite investigations and interviews, police were initially unable to confirm the allegations. Then Gavaghan was caught on video filling out papers about the sordid transaction while at Delaware Park and Casino in Wilmington, Weglarz said.

“It sounds ridiculous . . . but he was on video surveillance seen completing documents regarding the sale of a baby,” Weglarz said. “It was clearly visible.”

This kind of illicit and unregulated sale of children is, of course, exactly what Posner said results from the current adoption regime.

 

(H/T:  Law student A.D.)

  October 5, 2011 at 11:33 am   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Weird   Print This Post   No Comments

Armenian genocide and the Third Amendment

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

As Tom Bell has noted, the Third Amendment gets no respect. It is as likely to be mentioned by comedians as by courts, and holds a position of honor among the odd clauses of the Constitution, where it is so infrequently used that even non-uses draw attention. But this neglected amendment has one potential application today, where it could play an important role in a somewhat high-profile case.

I’m talking, of course, about the Armenian genocide litigation.

Here’s a snippet from a recent story in the Armenian Weekly (with emphasis added):

In July, Armenian American attorneys sued the Republic of Turkey and its two major banks, seeking compensation for confiscated properties and loss of income. A new federal lawsuit was filed last week by attorneys Vartkes Yeghiayan, Kathryn Lee Boyd, and David Schwarcz, along with international law expert Michael Bazyler, against the Republic of Turkey, the Central Bank, and the Ziraat Bank for “unlawful expropriation and unjust enrichment.” The plaintiffs are Los Angeles-area residents Rita Mahdessian and Anais Haroutunian, and Alex Bakalian of Washington, D.C. The three Armenian Americans, who have deeds proving ownership of properties stolen from their families during the genocide, are seeking compensation for 122 acres of land in the Adana region. The strategic Incirlik U.S. Air Base is partly located on their property.

That’s right. Armenian-Americans are seeking to recover property seized by Turkey during the Armenian genocide. And significant portions of that land are currently used to quarter American troops. Read the rest of this post »

  September 13, 2011 at 1:31 am   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Property Law, Weird   Print This Post   8 Comments

The Pink’s Paradox: excessively long food lines as overly strong signals of quality

posted by David Fagundes

There is a great hot dog joint here in Los Angeles called Pink’s Famous Hot Dogs.  I love their delicious chili dogs.  I am a huge fan of the location’s classic L.A. style (parts of the best film ever made were filmed on the site, and there’s a probably false rumor that Orson Welles got obese because he was addicted to Pink’s chili dogs).  They’re located a quick drive from where I work.  And I never, ever go there.

What explains this apparently counterintuitive result?  Why don’t I patronize this nearby beloved eatery more often, or at least some of the time?  My reason is simple:  The wait is way, way too long.  Pink’s doesn’t  just have a 15-20 minute wait at meal times like many local eateries. Rather, at almost any time of day, the line to get a Pink’s chili (or any other) dog snakes through a few switchbacks, up La Brea, and back into their parking lot, frequently lasting a good hour.  At peak times, the line has been said to approach 1.5 or two hours (and here, I’m going on word of mouth because, as you’ll gather from this post so far, I’m deterred by the long line and haven’t actually experienced it).

Classic L&E would suggest that this isn’t a paradox at all, and that the line merely reveals the unusually strong preferences of the public for Pink’s chili dogs, meaning that they really are worth the interminable wait.  And while this is an empirical question, and while tastes are subjective and highly variable, I can’t buy that account.  I can understand waiting in line for hours, say, to obtain critical medical services, or in a bread line in Soviet Russia where the only alternative is starving.  I can even imagine waiting in line for a couple hours to get tickets for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see your favorite performer appear live.  But for chili dogs?  No way.  Something more than simple preference satisfaction has to be going on.

So what explains the Pink’s paradox?  Why is it that demand for these chili dogs continues to grow, even as the experience costs and actual costs associated with its food increase at an even greater rate (and appear to swamp the benefits of eating even the tastiest chili dog)?  And what does this tell us about the rationality (or irrationality) of line-waiting generally?  I discuss possible conjectures responding to each of these questions below the fold.

Read the rest of this post »

  August 17, 2011 at 5:50 pm   Posted in: Culture, Food, Weird   Print This Post   35 Comments

Summertime in the South

posted by Marc Roark

So one of the things we all love about being a law professor is the flexibility to do what we do in lots of different places.  Each summer, for the last three years, I have split my time between Columbia Missouri and California teaching payment systems for Missou — a nice way to subsidize our family’s vacations back to the Midwest and the South.

This summer in Columbia was the summer of the seven year cicada cycle.  Cicadas are small locust like bugs that every seven years emerge from the earth and mate and then die.  The sing a delightful sound, that frankly can be deafening when they all decide to sing together (which is about two to three weeks per cycle). You may have heard that one Columbia Missouri vendor Sparky’s Ice Cream made a concoction of cicada ice cream before being advised by the Missouri Health Department to cease.  (I went to Sparky’s several weeks ago to try some Cicada ice cream, but they already were told to stop serving the concoction.  Thus, I had boring coffee ice cream instead).

So despite the fact that I did not get to enjoy ice cream with bug parts mixed in, I am happy to say that my summer in the south has been enjoyable. And there is still a month to go. This weekend we are sailing homemade cardboard box boats in a race on July Fourth — my father-in-law constructed two twelve foot cardboard canoes, insulated by gallons of paint.  We are planning a trip to Santa Fe in mid-July, and then back to California.

Summer is definitely my favorite time of year. I am going to blog later about how law students renewed my faith in baseball — reminding me once again of why summer is magical.   For now, I’ll just say, thank you for having me at Concurring Opinions.   I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts on various things, perhaps post some pictures of our travels (including the cardboard boats), and talk about what I am writing and working on.

Marc

  July 2, 2011 at 5:23 pm  Tags: MLR  Posted in: Weird   Print This Post   4 Comments

Questioning Body Modification, from Botox Mom to Chelsea Charms

posted by Frank Pasquale

[I've decided to put the whole post beneath the fold, since the topic reminds me of Leontius's Tale, and I don't want anyone to accidentally click through to something they don't want to see.]
Read the rest of this post »

  May 17, 2011 at 1:18 am   Posted in: Health Law, Uncategorized, Weird   Print This Post   7 Comments

Bad Words Like Tasked

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

From the bad words department (e.g., concerning incent): “General Washington tasked the troops to battle on the Brandywine” may be a fine use of the transitive verb.  But is that so of “Professor Cunningham tasked the class to brief the Drennan case”?  It seems better to say “Cunningham assigned the class . . . . ”

Before the mid-1990s, tasked tended to be limited to usage relating to military matters.  For example, in legal scholarship, it appeared almost exclusively in military law journals.  But the word gradually crept into other settings in the late 1990s, in part after consulting firms began to talk that way.  Until recently, though, the usage was relatively scarce.  In legal scholarship, for instance, the word never appeared more than 100 times annually through 1998 and never more than 300 until 2004.  

In 2010, however, usage is set to exceed 1000 times.   Staggeringly, the word’s frequency has increased steadily nearly every year from 1989 through 2010: 16, 16, 22, 20, 27, 55, 56, 55, 75, 95, 105, 120, 141, 184, 218, 294, 368, 435, 591, 719, 880, 905 (partial count for 2010).  

This is lamentable.  The stultifying jargon of the military aside, the usage, in general and certainly in legal scholarship, sounds terrible and should be laid to rest.

  January 12, 2011 at 2:22 pm   Posted in: Culture, Weird   Print This Post   13 Comments

Tea Partier New Year’s Resolutions

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Heard around town amid the blizzard, some top New Year’s Resolutions Tea Party members are considering this year.

1. Get education by home schooling or charter schools, not public schools—skip the Department of Education at all governmental levels.

2. Buy all medicine in Canada, not in the United States—skip the Food and Drug Administration and government-sanctioned patent laws.

3. Never fly commercial—take only charter flights and beat not only the crowds but the Federal Aviation Administration.

4. Buy all guns in interior states—minimize oversight by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

5. Conduct all political activities using a 501(c) to avoid public disclosure of political activity and regulation by the Federal Election Commission.

6. Submit all legal disputes to binding private arbitration—never use public courts.

7. Take advantage of all off-shore opportunities, especially tax shelters, to minimize payments to the Internal Revenue Service.

8. Raise financial capital using private equity, not an IPO—skip regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

9. Use off-balance sheet financing as much as possible—skip adherence to statements of the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

10. Guard US citizenship jealously—subject immigrants to strict oversight and law enforcement by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Privatizing life has never been easier!

  December 27, 2010 at 4:42 pm   Posted in: Humor, Weird   Print This Post   13 Comments

Amazon, WikiLeaks, Lieberman: Power and Contract

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Public officials interfere with private contracts too often. But most private parties have the guts to push back when deciding that freedom of contract and the law of contracts trump officious intermeddlers from the state. That friction explains stern denials by amazon.com that government pressure influenced its decision to terminate its Web-server lease agreement with the notorious WikiLeaks, publicist of precious secrets, including a cache of diplomatic cables roiling public officials in capitals across the globe.

Amazon cited a clause in its provider contract where customers represent that they own all content posted on the site. WikiLeaks obviously breached that representation, giving amazon contractual grounds to terminate. Despite amazon’s stern denials, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s government affairs committee acknowledged that its staffers hectored the company about letting WikiLeaks use its space. The corporate denials are thus dubious. But at least amazon is right to cite its contract and the clear clause in it that makes its termination valid and at least the staffers were merely requesting information, rather than the Senator applying direct pressure.

In other visible examples of political intermeddling in contractual relations, at least one side has not come out looking so good. Three examples illustrate.

Read the rest of this post »

  December 3, 2010 at 10:18 am   Posted in: Current Events, Weird   Print This Post   8 Comments

Charismatic Megafauna Take the Fall

posted by Frank Pasquale

Recently American thought on ecology has taken a turn in a religious direction. And it’s not toward that boring old talk about a sustainable creation. Rather, a contender for the House Energy and Commerce Committee chair has “maintain[ed] that we do not have to worry about climate change because God promised in the Bible not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood.” Glad that’s settled.

But nature does still pose a few threats to us. Reacting to a recent bear attack in Yellowstone, the American Family Association’s Director of Issues Analysis has stated that “there is no number of live grizzlies worth one dead human being. If it’s a choice between grizzlies and humans, the grizzlies have to go. And it’s time.” Sharks, rattlesnakes, scorpions, pit bulls, and even golden retrievers had better watch out!

Perhaps Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Bear shaped Fischer’s imagination. As Herzog stated in the film:

And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that [the protagonist of Grizzly Bear] ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. . . . I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

Perhaps Fischer is just throwing back at the universe its nasty tendency to disregard us.

Photo Credit: Joseph Wu Origami.

  November 9, 2010 at 4:10 pm   Posted in: Environmental Law, Religion, Weird   Print This Post   5 Comments

Nicolas Cage Broke on $20 Million A Year

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Include the Hollywood-based actor Nicolas Cage on the list of victims amid the real estate crisis and ensuing foreclosure flood. A California court last week ordered him to honor the judgment of a Nevada court by paying $2.4 million to a lender who foreclosed on the actor’s Las Vegas resort home. As with many other borrowers, though, Cage doesn’t have the money to pay.

That may sound astonishing for an actor whose 50 roles in big films over 20 years make him among the highest paid people in the world. Cage’s problem apparently is that, despite the massive cash, he still lives beyond its means.

Besides an apparent spending compulsion, during the real estate boom of the 2000s, he acquired dozens of properties whose prices seem to have risen catastrophically just before he bought them, and fell to the depths in the last three years. Not having any savings to buffer the losses, he’s in default not only on housing bills but owes millions in back taxes.

Financial embarrassment is compounded by bad publicity about his lifestyle. Some he brought on himself. By filing a $20 million lawsuit blaming his straits on his manager, Samuel Levin, Cage provoked a counterclaim with mortifying allegations of a life out of control, even by Hollywood standards.

The allegations in Cage’s complaint sound far-fetched; Levin’s counterclaim sought a mere $120,000 for unpaid fees, small under a contract that paid Levin 5% of Cage’s income since 2001 (running to many millions). That may explain reports saying the suit and countersuit have been dismissed. But some of the pleadings are salacious–with lessons for everyone.
Read the rest of this post »

  October 28, 2010 at 5:19 pm   Posted in: Consumer Protection Law, Current Events, Uncategorized, Weird   Print This Post   11 Comments

Law Review’s Thin Filter and Law’s Low Eigenfactor

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

What’s your Eigenfactor?  Scholars can find out now by looking at their scholarship page on the Social Science Research Network. Since inception a decade ago, SSRN ranks scholars by downloads; in the past few years, it refined that coarse measure using a separate list of citations, but only to other papers in SSRN.  Now comes the eigenfactor, an integrated metric of scholarly influence.

This will be an interesting addition to the dashboard data used in  studies of scholarly influence .  All these figures, old and new, are endlessly contestable.   The new figure adds a new ranking column which, naturally, differs from the downloads or citations columns. 

Often, the difference is of limited significance: scholars with high downloads often have high citations and now have high Eigenfactors.  But sometimes the differences are wild: there are people who rank at the top of downloads but lack many citations at all.    A few of those still have an impressive Eigenfactor rank, but most tumble way down the ladder.   

More striking is how the rank differences among these columns are less pronounced among economists and finance professors, as a cohort, compared to law professors, as a group.  Based on an impressionistic skimming of the columns for the first few hundred, there’s greater stickiness among non-law profs than among law profs. 

Economsits with high downloads still tend to have high Eigenfactors and vice versa; for law profs, though, other than the download leader, Lucian Bebchuk, even those with the highest downloads (ranked in the single or double digits), bounce way down the Eigenfactor rankings into the 200s, 1000s, 5000s or deeper. 

Many theories appear.   Mine attributes this to the student-gatekeeping function at law reviews.  Nearly every piece of legal scholarship gets posted and published because the selection process is modest; the filter comes in citation practice.   The filter in other social sciences is extremely tough ahead of publishing and posting; the practice of citation isn’t much of a filter at all. 

There may be other reasons for this impressionistic difference too.  Perhaps legal scholarship just isn’t as hot out there in the networks that Eigenfactor captures, compared to economic and financial scholarship.  But, no, that doesn’t seem right, does it?

  October 5, 2010 at 6:17 pm   Posted in: Humor, Technology, Uncategorized, Weird   Print This Post   11 Comments

Tea Party Incoherence

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

The Tea Party’s manifesto, called the Contract from America, contains many interesting and some strange ideas.  Its authors proclaim a passionate devotion to the Constitution and its original text, accusing the nation’s political elite of failing to adhere to the grand charter.  Among the ten items in its plank, the first says: “Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.”  The document doesn’t say what provision of the Constitution supports that prescription.

  September 24, 2010 at 8:36 am   Posted in: Humor, Weird   Print This Post   13 Comments

A Modest Proposal for Climate Change Adaptation

posted by Frank Pasquale

Dan Farber has recently complained that many “Senate candidates are signatories of the Koch Industries’ Americans For Prosperity No Climate Tax pledge.” I must assume that Prof. Farber has not heard about technological fixes for the climate change problem. As Jane Mayer reports, the “David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change.” The exhibit proposes practical responses for the future:

[Exhibit] text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

In other words, don’t worry, be Eloi! “Short, compact bodies” might also fit the new 23-inch airline seats better. Perhaps critics of Social Security and the Air & Space Museum can develop an exhibition based on Regis Debray’s Modest Proposal: A Plan for the Golden Years.

  September 14, 2010 at 11:09 am   Posted in: Environmental Law, Technology, Uncategorized, Weird   Print This Post   No Comments

Chatroulette, Julia Child, and the Virtues of Virtual Friendship

posted by Glenn Cohen

A Hispanic teenager listening to music through headphones, a masturbating man, 3 young caucasian women (probably American), two young middle eastern men dressed in army fatigues and a child with a kafiah covering his face shouting something in Arabic and smiling, another masturbating man, 3 japanese young women.

This was what I saw in ten minutes of Chatroulette, an intriguing web site that anyone with a webcam can try. I wanted to try it and blog about it after reading an interesting article in the New Yorker on its teenage Russian founder. You turn on your webcam and are randomly paired with someone else on the site with their webcam on, to whom you can chat vocally or by typing. Either party can push a button that spins the wheel again at any time to be connected with a new partner, and there is no penalty for doing so.

Perhaps 31-year-old law professors are not the favored species in this realm, but I was “nexted” almost immediately in each of the cases except the middle eastern men at whom I started laughing and they laughed back as well. At some point, though, I felt uncomfortable enough myself that I ended the interaction.

Chatroulette is only the newest and strangest instantiation of a phenomenon I’ve been thinking about – virtual friendship. Can one be friends with someone that one has never met, and what kinds of benefits do this form of friendship offer over or to compliment non-virtual friendship? In recently watching Julie and Julia, I was struck by a scene where Julia meets up with the woman, Avis, she has been writing throughout the film.  We discover that the two women have never actually met in person despite being extremely close; they have just been pen pals for years.

The disadvantages of virtual friendship are pretty straightforward, but what might the advantages be? Total honesty if it retains an air of anonymity or removal from one’s social circle? The ability to compose oneself (like a piece of music), that is present a very specific slice of oneself? Many people I’ve talked to of a certain age (usually under 35, those who have had socializing technologies for some period of their youth) have had a virtual friend or two at some point.  These relationships, however, do not seem very long-lived, certainly not like the decade long correspondence of Avid and Julia. Is that just because our social circles are thicker or there is more competing stimuli than in earlier periods?

To add a legal angle on chatroulette, after seeing Robin Wilson present her paper on Sex Play In Virtual Worlds at a conference this summer, I wondered whether the masturbating men on the site might be subject to criminal liability in some jurisdictions if some of their viewers turned out to be children.  Robin (she’ll correct me if I have this wrong) was of the view that on Second Life or other virtual environments that don’t even involve actual images of actual people, under existing doctrine in some states adults can be criminally liable for sexually suggestive remarks and virtual activities.  Under existing doctrine this is true even if those minors represent themselves as adults, the perpetrator has a good faith belief they are adults, and even if the service has an 18+ policy (even if enforced by something like requiring a credit card).  If that’s right, the comparably less virtual and less regulated domain of chatroulette would seem to be full of potential criminal liability.  I am neither a criminal law nor a cyberlaw scholar so I will be curious what those with more expertise think….

  September 3, 2010 at 9:06 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Criminal Law, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Law and Humanities, Media Law, Technology, Web 2.0, Weird   Print This Post   4 Comments

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