LawCulture

An Olympic Sense of Gender Equity

I learned this week, while watching the 2006 Winter Olympics, that the Olympic Committee has recently rescinded the rule that requires female figure skaters to wear skirts. I have not been able to discover the expressed rationale for the “skirts only” rule (any help would be welcome), although I can imagine that it has to do with skirts being perceived as traditional and therefore appropriate attire for women. And, also, perhaps skirts are perceived as the attire that best exposed the athleticism (read thighs and calves) of the skater.  Needless to say, I am not sorry to see that “skirts only” rule become a dead letter.  Or am I celebrating prematurely?  I also learned that the “pants only” rule for male skaters continues.  Given that the female ice dancers and figure skaters can now dress however (and however minimally) they want, I suggest that their male counterparts should be equally free to express their artistic and athletic abilities through their costume.  But why am I skeptical that we won’t see male figure skaters in skirts (or at least more men scantily clad) any time soon?  Is it because men haven’t been equally liberated? Or, is it because women haven’t really been liberated; they have only become more “free” to be attractive on ice, however that is culturally encoded for the 21^st century?

Arrant Nonsense Department

I heard Alan Dershowitz on NPR yesterday, claiming that Lawrence Summers’ resignation from the
Harvard presidency proved the power of the “hard left” on the Harvard faculty, and that he feared they would influence not only the choice of a future president but of faculty colleagues as well. It put me in mind of the remark by Helen Whitney, wife of Benno Schmidt, that her husband was chased from the Yale presidency by “the deconstructionists” on the Yale faculty. As a sometime non-deconstructionist Yale faculty member, I can testify that this judgment was arrant nonsense; and I suspect Dershowitz’s analysis of the Harvard situation was, too.

The “hard left” of the Harvard faculty is probably hard to find. And university faculties on the whole are slow to organize to take action against administrators they dislike: it generally takes years for faculty ire to build to the point of a non-confidence vote, such as that registered by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences last year, or the motion of censure of the Dean of Yale College voted by the Yale faculty during the academic year 1991-92—which led to the resignation of that Dean, then to Schmidt’s own. Summers after all is in year five of his presidency, and Schmidt lasted for six years.

Larry Summers to Resign the Harvard Presidency

For those who have been following the tumultuous presidency of Larry Summers at Harvard:  today Harvard announced that he's stepping down at the end of the academic year.   Summers' resignation letter says, "I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard's future. I believe, therefore, that it is best for the University to have new leadership."  Summers made this announcement in the face of a possible no-confidence vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 28.

A no-vote would have only been symbolic, as the faculty had neither hiring nor firing power.  In fact, in a similar vote not quite a year ago, the faculty voted 218-185 that they lacked confidence in Summers' leadership.  But this time around, there was a growing sense that the Harvard Corporation (who does have hiring and firing power) was considering action. The instigating  (but far from sole) issue a year ago was Summers' remarks at a conference suggesting that perhaps women's relatively low presence on mathmatics and science faculties resulted from a combination of (1) their relatively lower interest in high powered jobs that required massive professional commitment; and (2) innate difference in abilities. Summers' ever-so-slightly more nuanced version of the second point posited a different degree of variance across the sexes, which would mean that even if women were in aggregate as talented as men in math abilities, they might be underrepresented at the very high and very low ends of mathmatical aptitude.   Quite apart from the dubious merits of his claim, many deemed the remarks highly  inappropriate given his institutional position as Harvard's President.

(I won't even go into the substance of his earlier remarks, except to note that one of the many things that bugged me about his remarks at the time was that even if -- and it's a really big if -- there were truly more men at the far outer limits of mathematical aptitude, why should we be so sure that this should translate in a direct way into the sex make-up of, say, biology and chemistry faculties?  Math departments, okay, perhaps. But is there really such a clear correlation between pure math intelligence and success in creative research design and execution in the sciences more generally?  Is that empirically justifiable, or is it just the unwarranted assumption of an economist with math-envy?)

Derek Bok will serve as interim President until Harvard names a replacement.

Emails from Students

Rosa linked below to today's NYT article about students emailing professors.  The piece suggested that email has increased communication between students and professors, both for better and worse.  Better because it can provide instant feedback, a more comfortable venue for  shy students, and greater convenience than the phone or in-person meetings.  Worse because students may expect instant response and access in a way that isn't feasible or realistic, either creating or reflecting a sense of entitlement that (from the faculty's perspective) isn't justified, and perpetuating the idea of students as consumers.

Do most faculty members really suffer from a constant deluge of borderline inappropriate emails from students?  In my case, the answer is: no, not a deluge, but certainly a trickle. A few of my favorite examples:  the time when a student emailed me by accident in the middle of class no less, (ah, the joys of wireless access in the classroom) while trying to write some other 'Jennifer" (oh, the horror of 'auto-fill' technology). She whined about her ex-boyfriend and asked me to come with her to a party that night where she feared she'd run into him.  Ooops!  Then there was the time when a student wrote to me asking if I could tape record the next three classes for her because she was going to the carribean for a week because she got a really good deal on a resort.

Frankly, though, these are exceptions. Most of the academic year, the biggest problem I have with email is sheer quantity:  when my inbox is overrun, the information overload means that sometimes messages move off of my mental radar screen (and too far down my inbox) before I get to them.

When exam-time comes around, however, I do sometimes have real problems with student email.  Students will sometimes write very long and detailed questions mere days -- or sometimes hours -- before the exams.   Some of these are really good questions.  Some of them are really bad questions. (The ones that really get to me are when a student writes me instead of looking up something that is literally written down in the casebook or in the Federal Rules of Evidence.  Whatever my job is, it's surely NOT to spend my time directing you to the appropriate page of your book as finals approach in order to remind you that Rule 801(d)(2) clearly states in the language of the rule that it applies only when offered against a party. . . .)   So yes, I do wish that some of my students would better internatlize the basic adage: if you can figure out the answer yourself by doing five minutes of research, please don't bug the professor about it.

But this isn't the only issue, or perhaps even the main one.  At the end of term time, I've sometimes felt that I could  spend my entire workday answering student questions via email -- and I still might not get through all of them!  At some point a couple of years ago, when I'd spent at least half an hour answering just one student's extremely detailed email, and during that same half an hour, three more equally lengthy lists of questions had appeared in my inbox, I realized that this was going to have to stop.  So I've instituted a new rule:  I don't take substantive questions via email in the week before the exam.  I do set up lots of extra office hours during this time.  If students want to bother coming in, I'll certainly talk to them.  And during the course of the semester, I"m delighted to have students email me about substance. But email during exam period?  Uh-uh. 

I'd be interested in thoughts and reactions from both faculty and students?  Is this restriction  of mine draconian or legitimate self-protection? Do others place similar limits?

Wall St Journal article: "Law Reviews Adapt to New Era"

Readers of this blog will recall the minor blogosphere kerfuffle that followed my posting called "Goodbye to Law Reviews?"   In the Wall Street Journal, Brandt Goldstein reports on the debate:

Notes From the Ivory Tower

Law Reviews Adapt to New Era

By BRANDT GOLDSTEIN
Special to THE

WALL STREET

JOURNAL
February 21, 2006.  Last month, Rosa Brooks, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, tossed out a provocative thought on LawCulture, a blog about law and legal academia. Ms. Brooks questioned whether she would ever write again for the law reviews.... [the rest is here].

To: [email protected] Subject: Why It's All About Me

Here's a piece from today's NYT. I'd be interested to see how others react to it.

The New York Times

February 21, 2006

To: [email protected] Subject: Why It's All About Me

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

One student skipped class and then sent the professor an e-mail message asking for copies of her teaching notes. Another did not like her grade, and wrote a petulant message to the professor. Another explained that she was late for a Monday class because she was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party.  [Read the rest here].

Accountability for Higher Ed?

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education was chartered by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in September, 2005.  Its charge sounds bland enough, until you weigh the meaning of: “How well are institutions of higher education preparing our students . . . ?” in the context of the Bush administration’s obsession with outcomes testing.  The true mission of the Commission was clarified in a New York Times article on February 9, 2006: to create standardized testing to evaluate how well college students are learning.  The problem, according to Charles Miller (president of the Commission and former head of the Texas Board of Regents) is one of accountability.

As Secretary Spellings put it, “unlike K-12 education, we don’t ask a lot of questions about what we’re getting for our investment in higher education.”  Hmm.  Since college education and its effect on the future success of American children is something of a national obsession, it’s hard to believe that people aren’t more or less constantly looking at what we’re getting.  But of course that’s not the Secretary’s point, nor the point of the Commission: they are designed to make higher education accountable to the federal government.  No Young Adult Left Behind.

The Happiness Gap

Los Angeles Times

The Happiness Gap

Rosa Brooks

February 17, 2006.  IT'S BEEN A rough couple of weeks. Hamas won the Palestinian elections; protests over cartoons representing the prophet Muhammad raged around the world; more Americans and Iraqis were killed by suicide bombers; new Abu Ghraib photos were released; and, here at home, the vice president got violent.

But despite the trying times, we Americans are managing to keep our spirits up. This week, the Pew Research Center released a report on happiness in the United States. Of the Americans surveyed, 34% informed researchers that they were "very happy," while another 50% reported that they were "pretty happy." That's a happiness record in which our nation can take pride.

The rest of the column is here.

It's just a television show

I watched the television show Boston Legal last night -- not a bad show as television goes. More interesting to me than one of its plot lines (whether doctors and/or pharmacists in Massachusetts can legally refuse to provide emergency contraception) was that Boston Legal is only one of dozens of law and crime dramas on television these days.  At a commercial break, I started a list of present and recent past similar television shows: The Practice, Law and Order (in its seemingly infinite incarnations), NYPD Blue, LA Law, Conviction (coming soon), Homicide, Bones, Crossing Jordan, Judging Amy, Numb3rs, CSI, Forensic File, Court TV, Cold Case Files.  I am sure I have missed many many others.  (I’d love a more complete list in the comments.)

What does this tell me? Elayne Rapping in her recent book Law and Justice As Seen on TV says that the increase in crime drama shows reflects that “[w]e are living in an age when people are more and more fearful of crime, and we are seeing harsher penalties for criminals … People want vengeance, not rehabilitation." As so many of these shows are about violent crimes and the investigation (and not the due process) that the victims and accused endure, in my cynical moments I agree with Professor Rapping. In my less cynical moments, however, I wonder if the increase in crime and legal drama suggests (is there an increase, or am I just more aware of the shows these days?) a heightened awareness of – perhaps even vicarious participation in – the justice system.  To be sure, the genre of the courtroom drama is as old as film, and some of the first successful television serials were of the mystery/crime genre, but can we say that now, in 2006, the United States is producing (and exporting) more legal fictions than ever before – either touting constitutional norms or, indeed, their violation in the name of victim’s rights (as is fairly the case with NYPD Blue or Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit).  Richard Sherwin, in his book When Law Goes Pop bemoans the popular cultural turn in law because, among other things, he thinks it undermines the authority of the legal system as something that stands apart, that promises virtue and blind justice.  I have written elsewhere that I disagree with this argument, although I admire Professor Sherwin for making it so forcefully and for courageously forging what has become a thriving interdiscipline of law and popular cultural studies.  I disagree becaus I think most people know the difference between television drama and real life drama, between representations of crime and legal process on television and the unfortunate experience of crime and litigation in real life. And as that is the case, the television fantasies are just that, albeit with a very satisfying narrative climax (vengeance and justice).  Having a judge or a jury tell you (as the audience qua the protagonist of the show) that you were hurt and should be compensated, that the defendant was wrong and society will punish him, is deeply satisfying. The catharsis is enough to reproduce these shows over and over.  But is there more? Is there truly a cultural turn going on that should be accounted for, see Rapping and Sherwin, and if so, what does it mean?

Against Civility

My take on the Coretta Scott King funeral (I wanted to somehow work in great past funerals and also the flap over the Danish cartoons, but, well, 750 words...)

Los Angeles Times

When crass is called for

Rosa Brooks

February 10 2006

IT'S TIME TO TAKE a stand against civility, decency and appropriateness.

The complete article can be viewed here.