Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Osgoode/NYU Launch New 4-Year Degree Program to Earn Canadian LLB and American JD

MOVING TO THE FRONT from January 27, 2005, because of further updates, below.

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Osgoode Hall School of Law at York University, Toronto (Canada's oldest, and at least some say, most prestigious law school) and New York University School of Law have announced a new four-year program that will permit students to earn both a Canadian and American law degree, thus enabling a student to sit for the bar exam and practice in either country.  While there are some existing combined programs between Canadian and American law schools, this is the first program between top schools in each country.  The Osgoode press release is here.

As things stand, many of the top Canadian students pursue law degrees in America, but should they decide to return to Canada, they then have to take a variety of courses before they are eligible for admission to the bar.  This new combined degree option permits a student to do all the necessary schooling up front, and thus to be in a position to pursue practice in either country, or both.  Given the fierce competition for the top Canadian law students, this new program may give Osgoode an edge against its downtown rival, the University of Toronto, generally considered to be the other top law school in Canada.  Will Toronto follow suit in establishing a similar combined degree program?  We shall see...

UPDATE:  An Osgoode alum writes with a correction:  "Osgoode is many things but the oldest law faculty/school in Canada (common law or civil law) isn't one of them. Even OHLS, itself, doesn't claim that position.  Depending one's views of what one needs before there's officially a law school, Osgoode is either 2nd, 3rd or 4th oldest.  For example,  generally accepted working dates for the orgins for the law faculties at the four oldest schools are

University of Toronto 1887
Dalhousie 1883
McGill 1848 (I believe civil law only, at this stage)
Osgoode 1889

ANOTHER UPDATE:  A Canadian law professor writes that the University of Toronto Law Faculty "was founded in 1949.  (Their website does, it is true, fudge the issue:  it says 'The law school took on its modern form under the leadership of Cecil Wright in 1949, building on the foundations of the law school established at the University of Toronto in 1887.'  The 1887 dept, which expired, had nothing to do with the 1949 law school.)  Osgoode is the oldest law school in Upper Canada."  McGill is the oldest in lower Canada.  For a period of time, you could only practice law in Ontario (including Toronto) if you had graduated from Osgoode.

Of course, as someone else wrote to me, the really interesting issue is which of these two dominant schools in Canadian legal education is better.  From an American perspective, the striking thing about Toronto is that it is largely alone among Canadian law schools in having a significant presence in law & economics (Michael Trebilcock, Edward Iacobucci et al.), which in turn gives it significant visibility in American legal scholarship, where law & economics looms large.  Osgoode, by contrast, being the more politically left of the two schools, has never had a major law & economics presence (law & economics is not, as I understand it, much of a presence in Canadian law schools generally of course, but in the case of Osgoode, its absence has something to do with the left tradition on the faculty, not traditionalism about legal scholarship; in many other respects, Osgoode is highly interdisciplinary in its approach to legal scholarship).

The Iraqi "Elections" Have United...

the American Right and the liberals, which is something (or is it?).  Meanwhile, Juan Cole (History, Michigan) offers some pertinent reminders:

[T]his [electoral] process [in Iraq] is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.

Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.

So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections.

With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed "election"....The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. (This is the part of the process that I called a "joke," and I stand by that.)

This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament.

Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country. The new parliament is unlikely to make such a demand immediately, because its members will be afraid of being killed by the Baath military. One fears a certain amount of resentment among the electorate when this reticence becomes clear....

UPDATE:  More on the "get out the vote" efforts here.

The Imminent Military Draft

The right-wing Project for a New American Century--which includes various folks with close ties to Bush & his bestiary of madmen--on Friday called for reinstatement of a military draft, without, of course, using the word.  Their letter is here; an excerpt:

The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.

So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.

There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces....[A]fter almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice's term, a "generational commitment." The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership....

[T]he defense of the United States is the first priority of the government. This nation can afford a robust defense posture along with a strong fiscal posture. And we can afford both the necessary number of ground troops and what is needed for transformation of the military....

We do insist that we act responsibly to create the military we need to fight the war on terror and fulfill our other responsibilities around the world....

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution places the power and the duty to raise and support the military forces of the United States in the hands of the Congress. That is why we, the undersigned, a bipartisan [sic] group with diverse [sic] policy views, have come together to call upon you to act. You will be serving your country well if you insist on providing the military manpower we need to meet America's obligations, and to help ensure success in carrying out our foreign policy objectives in a dangerous, but also hopeful, world.

The normalization of the idea of a military draft now begins in earnest.  All that will be needed is a precipitating event, manufactured through provocation or simply invented (like the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964).  Any readers of draft age, or any readers with children of draft age, need to begin making plans before it is too late.

Most Important Books in the Philosophy of Mind?

David Chalmers (Philosophy, ANU) discusses the question here, and invites others to make their suggestions.

Wall Street Journal Defense of Creationist "Biologist" Sternberg Demolished...

...here by Sahotra Sarkar (Biology & Philosophy, Texas).

Rule by Cult

From a recent public lecture by Seymour Hersh:

[W]e all deal in "macro" [i.e., the "big picture"] in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions [to Rumsfeld], you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're going to have some very bad months ahead.

It turns out, by the way, that Hersh was correct in his charge that the Pentagon is already running secret military operations in Iran and elsewhere.

Bioethicist Peter Singer Part-Time to Melbourne

Details here: 

Although born in Melbourne, Professor Singer has for the last five years been based in the US where he is Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University. He has been offered an appointment as Laureate Professor under the University of Melbourne’s Eminent Scholars’ Program and will spend at least three months each year at Melbourne for the next five years, while continuing to hold his Princeton appointment.

(Thanks to Evan Willis for the link.)

"Freedom's Cause"

It's well-described by a columnist for The National Catholic Reporter:

[O]n U.S. Inauguration Day...the picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.

A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood.

No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here....

[L]ike the photo of a naked little girl bathed in napalm and running down a road in Vietnam served to crystallize the situation there for the rest of the world, I knew that this picture of a screaming, angry, helpless, orphaned child could do the same.

The soldiers standing in the dusk had called "halt," the story said, but no one did. Maybe the soldiers' accents were bad. Maybe the car motor was unduly noisy. Maybe the children were laughing loudly -- the way children do on family trips. Whatever the case, the car did not stop, the soldiers shot with deadly accuracy, seven lives changed in an instant: two died in body, five died in soul....

There are 54 million people in Iraq. Over half of them are under the age of 15. Of the over 100,000 civilians dead in this war, then, over half of them are children. We are killing children. The children are our enemy. And we are defeating them.

"I'll tell you why I voted for George Bush," a friend of mine said. "I voted for George Bush because he had the courage to do what Al Gore and John Kerry would never have done."

I've been thinking about that one.

Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still alive. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah are burning. But my government has the courage to kill children or their parents. And I'm supposed to be impressed.

That's an unfair assessment, of course. A lot of young soldiers have died, too. A lot of weekend soldiers are maimed for life. A lot of our kids went into the military only to get a college education and are now shattered in soul by what they had to do to other bodies.

A lot of adult civilians have been blasted out of their homes and their neighborhoods and their cars. More and more every day. According to U.N. Development Fund for Women, 15 percent of wartime casualties in World War I were civilians. In World War II, 65 percent were civilians. By the mid '90s, over 75 percent of wartime casualties were civilians.

In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14 other deaths, 93 percent of them are civilian. But those things happen in war, the story says. It's all for a greater good, we have to remember. It's all to free them. It's all being done to spread "liberty."

From where I stand, the only question now is who or what will free us from the 21st century's new definition of bravery. Who will free us from the notion that killing children or their civilian parents takes courage.

The Coming Military Draft, Vol. 9327

Yet another analysis of the facts sans fantasies and lies. 

(Thanks to Jason Walta for the pointer.)

The Horowitz Attack on Academic Freedom Arrives in Ohio

The bill introduced in the state legislature is here.  (Thanks to Joshua Smith for the pointer.)  As one news story (for which I could not locate a URL) stated, the bill would regulate what professors can say in class, and that's exactly right.  Here's some illustrative provisions:

A) The institution shall provide its students with a learning environment in which the students have access to a broad range of serious scholarly opinion pertaining to the subjects they study. In the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, the fostering of a plurality of serious scholarly methodologies and perspectives shall be a significant institutional purpose. In addition, curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social studies shall respect all human knowledge in these areas and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints.

Who could disagree?  The problem is that it is plainly within the purview of academic freedom for instructors to determine what counts as "serious scholarly opinion" and what counts as "human knowledge."  The only way, then, that this provision can have any bite is if it authorizes others (who exactly?  the Ohio legislature?) to override the instructor's academic freedom in setting the curriculum.

(B) Students shall be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study and shall not be discriminated against on the basis of their political, ideological, or religious beliefs. Faculty and instructors shall not use their courses or their positions for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination.

This provision is dangerously vague:  suppose the student's political, ideological, or religious beliefs with respect to the subject matter of the course are false, i.e., contradicted by "serious scholarly opinion" and "human knowledge" as assessed by the instructor?  Does the creationist get a free pass for her ignorance in evolutionary biology simply because she has a "religious belief" that conflicts with the scientific content of the course?  Is the NeoNazi entitled not to be graded down when he writes a paper for his Anthropology or Biology class defending his "ideological belief" that "the Jewish race is biologically inferior"?  As written, it is not clear why the proposed statute would not, indeed, protect both the NeoNazi and the Creationist.  (It would also constitute a massive violation of the academic freedom of the instructor, yet again.) 

Let's suppose, though, that a way is found to allow creationists and NeoNazis to be properly graded down for their false beliefs (insofar as they assert them, of course, in a class dealing with the subject of those beliefs).  There is still a serious threat to academic freedom here.  Must Terence Irwin or Julia Annas or John Cooper not mark down the student in a class on Plato who insists on the correctness of the Straussian reading of The Republic?  Is it not within the purview of the instructor's academic freedom to deem a particular scholarly or interpretive method--one that may have strong support elsewhere in the academy--unsound, and mark its application accordingly?

(C) Faculty and instructors shall not infringe the academic freedom and quality of education of their students by persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose.

This is clearly the most egregious of the provisions, the one that inspired the newspaper report about regulating what professors say in class (though the preceding two provisions would have that consequence too, if actually enforced as they are written).   Who is it that will determine what counts as "persistent" and as "controversial" and as having "no relation" to the "subject of study"?  The proposed legislation calls for the creation of "grievance procedures" at each institution (both public and private, by the way), which means that, in principle, every campus will soon be awash in grievance proceedings, in which instructors are called to task for their "persistence" and their "controversy" and their judgments about "relevance."  The whole system will be a disaster, for many of the reasons noted by the New York City Civil Liberties Union in connection with the Massad case.  And while it is right-wingers who are behind this initiative, bear in mind that, without a doubt, students from all over the political spectrum will quickly avail themselves of the grievance mechanisms.  At that point, academic freedom won't exist, and universities might as well shut down.

The Meaning of First-Semester First-Year Law School Grades

Orin Kerr (Law, George Washington) makes a number of sensible points here.

Exeter Makes Bid for Philosopher of Biology Moss

The University of Exeter has offered a Readership to Lenny Moss (philosophy of biology), who is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

Statistical Analysis of PGR Data

Kieran Healy (Sociology, Arizona) has prepared an informative analysis of (anonymized) data from the last PGR that I had supplied him.

Philosopher Pryor from Princeton to NYU

James Pryor (epistemology), currently Associate Professor at Princeton, has accepted the tenured offer from New York University.  He is presently a "visiting professor" at NYU this term, and will now be staying on.

The rich get richer...

Openly Gay Law Professor Sues Michigan Over Tenure Denial

Peter Hammer, an expert in health law who is now an Associate Professor of Law at Wayne State University, was denied tenure at the University of Michigan Law School in 2002; he has now sued the University, alleging discrimination against him as an openly gay man who lived with a same-sex domestic partner.  A copy of the complaint is here.

Having neither expertise in his area of legal scholarship, nor knowledge of the particulars of the tenure decision, I can not comment on the merits.  There are some general facts mentioned in the complaint perhaps worth commenting on, but which don't go to the ultimate merits.

The complaint notes that during the past 40 years "52 individuals have been considered for tenure [at Michigan Law] of which 48 were recommended for tenure within the standard time frame.  The only individuals not recommended for tenure within the standard time frame included one African-American woman (ultimately granted tenure after spending eight years in the rank of an untenured Associate Professor), two white women (one ultimately denied tenure and one who withdrew from consideration for tenure), and the Plaintiff (the only openly gay male to be considered for tenure)."  A few observations:

(1)  Tenure denials prior to the 1990s were extremely rare, even at the top law schools.  When I was a student at Michigan Law, there were a half-dozen-or-so senior faculty who clearly would not have been granted tenure during the 1990s.  And, of course, prior to the 1970s, top law schools clearly discriminated against both women and minorities in admissions and faculty hiring, so there were hardly any on the faculties who would have even been considered for tenure.  What that means is that the 40-year time frame is the wrong time frame for detecting a pattern of discrimination in tenure decisions.

(2)  What makes these cases so difficult is that one also needs to know something about the publication records of the individuals who did not get tenure in the normal time frame and something about the qualitative evaluation of those publications. 

(3)  The other gay men on the faculty were considered for tenure decades ago, and so it is less surprising that they were closeted at the time of their favorable tenure decision.

The law school, by the way, deemed "a substantially less prestigious institution" than Michigan in par. 22 of the complaint is the University of Wisconsin Law School.  Ouch!

Fame in Philosophy?

A graduate student from a top PhD program writes:  "Someone, I do not know who, made your picture from your webpage the wallpaper on all the computers in the graduate student offices--Andy Warhol style."  Me and Chairman Mao.

The Best (Truthful) Case for the Iraq War

Here.

Right-to-Left?

Or just right-to-right?  In either case, the conservative answer to Left2Right arrives!  (But what is the question?  We will find out in time, no doubt.)  The site has comments enabled, so all philosophers can enter the fray.

Philosopher Wilson from UBC to CUNY

Catherine Wilson (early modern philosophy, moral philosophy), currently at the University of British Columbia, has accepted a senior offer from the City University of New York Graduate Center, to start next fall.

Our "Independent" Media...

...pledges allegiance.

(Thanks to Scott Shapiro for the pointer.)

Larkin v. Horowitz on Academic Freedom

AAUP member Graham Larkin, an art historian at Stanford, continues to do battle with the disgraceful David Horowitz, proponent of the Orwellian "Academic Freedom [sic] Bill of Rights."

Philosopher Pettit Declines Australian Federation Fellowship

Philip Pettit (political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of social science), currently at Princeton University, has declined the Australian Federation Fellowship from the University of Sydney.  Readers will recall that last year, David Chalmers and Paul Griffiths accepted the Fellowships from, respectively, the Australian National University and the University of Queensland.

Citation Studies, Again

Awhile back, I reported on my law school ranking site, that I wouldn't be doing any more citation studies of individual faculty, because,

[C]itation counts [of individuals] are more misleading than informative, for reasons various readers have pointed out.  First, they say more about which areas are “hot” in the legal academy (and thus well-represented in law reviews) than about who is doing the most important work.  Thus, the lists, as before, are overwhelmingly dominated by scholars in the public law fields, Critical Race Theory, and some law and economics.  Second, the ordinal listing bears no relationship at all to actual judgments that informed scholars would make about the relative quality of the work of scholars on the top 50 list.  Third, while the list represents overall a strong and distinguished group of scholars, it’s still the case that a quarter of those on the list would have difficulty being appointed at many top law schools:  so judgments about the merit of the work still varies.  Fourth, and most seriously, the list misleads by whom it omits:  Joseph Raz, for example, is a better legal philosopher than Ronald Dworkin, but he is absent; many important members of the Yale faculty are represented, but at least equally talented faculty are missing (Carol Rose, Robert Ellickson, Alan Schwartz, Jerry Mashaw, Roberta Romano, etc.); the same for the Berkeley faculty (Robert Cooter, Franklin Zimring, Robert Merges, etc.), the Chicago faculty (where are Saul Levmore, Lisa Bernstein, R.H. Helmholz, etc.?), the Texas faculty (Lawrence Sager, Philip Bobbitt, Jane Stapleton, etc.), the Virginia faculty (G. Edward White, Robert Scott, Kenneth Abraham, Michael Klarman, etc.), the Columbia faculty (Thomas Merrill, Ronald Gilson, Kent Greenawalt, etc.) and on and on.  The sins of omission on lists like these are, I fear, too substantial to make it worthwhile to compile them in the future; perhaps someone else will undertake the task.

Overrepresentation of certain fields--which are perennial favorites in the law reviews--can, of course, be dealt with by looking to field-specific citation counts (an example is here).  And others have suggested that many omissions (as well, perhaps, as strange inclusions) would be cured by looking at citations per year in teaching to measure scholarly impact in a way that does not simply favor those who have been around longer.

To illustrate why that isn't right, take a look at the ten most-cited-per-year faculty in the U.S. in a field I know a bit about, namely, law and philosophy (approx. age of faculty member in parentheses)

1.  Ronald Dworkin (73) New York University/University College London (140/year)

2.  Jeremy Waldron (51), Columbia University (54/year)

3.  Martha Nussbaum (57), University of Chicago (46/year)

4.  Dennis Patterson (49), Rutgers University, Camden (39/year)

5.  Jules Coleman (57), Yale University (37/year)

5.  Michael Moore (61), University of Illinois (37/year)

7.  Larry Alexander (61), University of San Diego (36/year)

8.  Joseph Raz (65), Columbia University/Oxford University (33/year)

9.  Brian Leiter (42), University of Texas, Austin (32/year)

10. John Finnis (64), University of Notre Dame/Oxford University (28/year)

It is certainly amusing to come in one cite per year behind the most important living figure in legal philosophy, but it is also indicative of the limitations of the measure--as is the fact that Raz trails all the others on the list, including those, like Martha Nussbaum who don't do much work in legal philosophy at all.  The explanations for the odd ordering are simple:  Dworkin's work relates to constitutional law and theory, which is what accounts for most of his citations; Patterson and Moore also work in substantive areas (commercial law and criminal law, respectively), as well as legal philosophy; most of my citations come from my work on American Legal Realism and the philosophical foundations of evidence, both topics more popular in U.S. law reviews than, e.g., the nature of legal authority or reasons; Coleman has done seminal work in tort theory and the philosophical foundations of economic analysis of law, both topics of far more interest to law professors; and so on. 

The simple fact is that work at the core of legal philosophy is not much-discussed in law reviews, which is why someone like Raz who has done more important work than probably anyone on the core issues fares relatively poorly by citation measures.  The latter fact also explains why this top ten list omits a host of folks who would be on most experts' list of ten-or-so top writers at the intersection of law-and-philosophy in the U.S. (such as Liam Murphy and Stephen Perry at NYU, Leslie Green who is half-time at Texas, Scott Shapiro at Cardozo, and so on).

If citation studies are less illuminating than expert evaluations in particular fields, there is still reason to hope that across whole faculties some of the omissions will even out.  Certainly our last study of per capita scholarly impact produced a plausible rank-ordering of schools by faculty quality, even if certain schools (e.g., Georgetown) benefitted from prominence in "trendy" areas (like Critical Race Theory).  Perhaps it is the case that even if the ordinal listing of faculty by citations bears only a crude relationship to expert opinion in any particular area, an ordinal listing of faculties by per capita citations fares better because there are many fields where citations better track quality and academic reputation.  Although it has been awhile since I have updated the law school ranking site, the next major initiative will be an updated ranking of law schools by per capita citations.  We shall see if the results bear this out.

RFK Jr. on "Fascist America"

Of course, his Dad as Attorney General pioneered using the secret police to terrorize radical political groups in the U.S., but putting that aside Jr. is on the mark here:

In 2001, President Bush named the Justice Department building after RFK.

The young Kennedy attended the ceremony.

We asked him what he thought of President Bush naming the building after his dad.

He said he wouldn't comment on the record.

But he did call President Bush "the most corrupt and immoral President that we have had in American history."

Not that he was enamored with Senator John Kerry.

Early in the campaign, Kennedy endorsed Senator John Kerry for President, but last month he expressed disappointment in Kerry's campaign and in the Democratic Party.

"The Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt," Kennedy. "They are accepting money from the same corporations. And of course, that is going to corrupt you...."

Kennedy wrote a book last year that he hoped would change the direction of the country....It's called Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy (HarperCollins, 2004)....

In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis.

"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business," he writes. "My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as 'a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.' Sound familiar?"

He quotes Hitler's propaganda chief Herman Goerring: "It is always simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Kennedy then adds: "The White House has clearly grasped the lesson."

Kennedy also quotes Benito Mussolini's insight that "fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

"The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power," Kennedy told us. "There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on American democracy."

Hobsbawm on Bush

"The Dangers of Exporting Democracy."

(Thanks to John Turri for the pointer.)

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has a new website...

...here.  There is also now a very good search engine.

Plutocrats Excoriated

Here.  And a New York Times columnist even uses the word!

Former Stanford Law Dean Kathleen Sullivan to Join Law Firm

Details here.  The article reports she will remain on the Stanford faculty, though one would imagine the kind of practice she is charged with building will cut substantially into her classroom time.  Stanford will need to make some constitutional law appointments soon!

UPDATE:  A faculty member at Stanford writes:  "You're 100% right we need to make some additional appointments in con law, and we have a number of visiting and permanent offers out there already, and a number of past visitors who are under consideration.   But this is also the first time [in recent years] that
we have three sixty person sections of Con Law I that are all being taught
by permanent faculty members -- [Dean] Larry Kramer, Larry Lessig, and Pam Karlan.  (In recent years, we've had one of the sections taught by a visitor, except for the one year we had two ninety-person sections instead.)  And
notwithstanding Kathleen's new association with Quinn Emmanuel, her classroom hours will actually increase (once her sabbatical is over) because she's not deaning.  My guess, for what it's worth, is that she'll pretty regularly be teaching both Con Law I and Con Law II, a combination that she did only once in the last six years."

More Ominous Signs

On the heels of this and this, the New York Times today reports the following (plainly part of an orchestrated effort to prepare the country, again, for unnecessary war):

Vice President Dick Cheney said on Thursday that Iran was at the top of the administration's list of world trouble spots and expressed concern that Israel ``might well decide to act first'' to eliminate any nuclear threat from Tehran.

``You look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list,'' Cheney said in an interview aired on MSNBC on the day that George W. Bush was sworn in for a second four-year term as president.

Cheney, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, said the administration would continue to try to use diplomacy to address what he said were serious concerns about Iran's nuclear weapons program and ties to terrorism.

The administration has also accused Iran of interfering in the affairs of neighboring Iraq, where U.S. forces have been bogged down in a ferocious insurgency since the 2003 invasion.

If Iran resists demands to rein in its nuclear program, Cheney said the next step would be to take the matter to the U.N. Security Council and seek international sanctions ``to force them to live up to the commitments and obligations.''

Cheney described Iran's nuclear program as ``fairly robust.'' Iran denies its nuclear facilities are to be used to make weapons. Cheney, who was a leading advocate for the Iraq invasion, said one concern was that Israel might act against the Iranians ``without being asked.''

``If, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had significant nuclear capability, given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards,'' Cheney said....

``We don't want a war in the Middle East, if we can avoid it. And certainly in the case of the Iranian situation, I think everybody would be best suited by or best treated and dealt with if we could deal with it diplomatically,'' Cheney said.

Like Cheney, Bush has stressed the importance of diplomacy in dealing with Iran, but said this week, ``I will never take any option off the table.'...'

After being sworn in on Thursday Bush admonished what he called ``the rulers of outlaw regimes'' and said, ``We will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary.''

Notice that in the last paragraph, there is an oblique recognition that Bush's inaugural speech was a declaration of war.

Oh, how I long to be deeply, and profoundly, wrong, even as it seems the rhinos gather yet again for a new, terrifying stampede.

UPDATE:  There is, by the way, no reason to think Bush's rush to war with Iran will encounter any real opposition from the Democrats in Washington.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  A sound analysis of what's really going on.

Well-Known Clinical Prof Marshall from Northwestern to Stanford Law

Lawrence Marshall, currently at Northwestern, now joins the long list of faculty to depart under the tenure of Dean Van Zandt:  Marshall has accepted a post to run the clinical programs at Stanford Law School, where he is visiting this year.

(Thanks to John Elias for the pointer.)

Bush Declares World War III

For his inauguration, George W. Bush essentially declared war on much of the world.  He did so, of course, without using that word; today's sociopathic heads of state are well-tutored in the art of rhetoric.  Here are some relevant bits from today's declaration of universal war, interspersed with a few observations and translations into unadorned language:

[I]t is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture [unless we are doing active business with them], with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world [a goal that will clearly require armed military interventions, given the number of tyrannies out there, and even discounting those we are presently doing business with]

This is not primarily the task of arms [though it is, admittedly, a task of arms], though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary....[including "defending" ourselves and them when there is no actual threat, as in Iraq]

The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.  [Get ready for a lot more bloodshed!  And don't be wimpy about it!] America's influence [read:  military might] is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed [who are not killed or slaughtered by the invading forces], America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.

My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people from further attacks and emerging threats [i.e., make-believe threats, or threats visible to no one other than Bush & his bestiary of madmen]. Some have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve, and have found it firm.

We will persistently clarify [as we did with Saddam] the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong [unless we do business with you], and freedom, which is eternally right....  [In other words, it will now suffice as a pretext for military invasions that the country we are invading is not on the side of eternal rightness, of which the U.S. is the arbiter]

Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world [i.e., you are now being warned]...:

The rulers of outlaw regimes [i.e., Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela et al.--but not Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, et al.] can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God [whose instrument is the United States], cannot long retain it.

The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people, you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice and America will walk at your side....[Don't do as we say, and we will attack you]

All Americans have witnessed this idealism [i.e., the invasion of foreign nations and the toppling of their governments], and some for the first time. I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.  [In other words, brace yourselves to be drafted.]

Very dark days lie ahead for humanity.  On the most charitable (and implausible) interpretation, the talk about freedom is genuine.  Even so, the idea that a single country would take it upon itself to "free" all those countries ruled by tyrannies would promise a global holocaust and bloodbath of unimaginable proportions. 

On the more realistic interpretation, the talk about freedom is pure rhetorical pretense:  the nation that enthusiastically supported tyrants and butchers in Indonesia, in Guatemala, in the Philippines, in Iran and Chile and Brazil and the list goes on; the nation that, today, does business with tyrants and monsters in the Central Asian Republics, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, and elsewhere; this nation's profession of a commitment to "freedom" is a worldwide joke--a particularly sick joke coming from an Administration staffed by many of the architects and servants of the horrors just noted.

This is the most lunatic public address by a leader of America I can recall in my lifetime.  That Bush gave this as his inaugural address portends disaster.  Tyrannies may or may not be toppled in the years ahead, and they may or may not be replaced by new tyrannies, as has often happened in the wake of U.S. aggression.  But what is a certainty is that if the Bush Administration acts on these threats, then, as in Iraq, tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) will be killed, crippled, wounded, and then thrown to the cruel mercies of decimated nations riven by religious and ethnic rivalry and more bloodshed, as in Afghanistan and, as seems increasingly likely, in Iraq.  That is what "freedom's cause" means to the madmen who now rule the United States.

UPDATE:  Thank you Fafblog!  And Palast is good on this topic too!

A New "Carnival of the Godless" is Planned

Details here.

"Wedging Creationism into the Academy"

Useful article here detailing the ways in which the creationist conmen try to establish for themselves a veneer of academic respectability.

The horrors on the horizon...

...move closer:

The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.

The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.

Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."

One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."

The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq....

Bush has warned Iran in recent weeks against meddling in Iraqi elections.

The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.

The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.

In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Hersh reported that Bush has already "signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia."

Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA's covert activities overseas.

The complete article is here, which also notes:

The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

Provocation of a war with Iran is one of the more likely precipitating events that will be used as rationale for reinstatement of a military draft.  If, as we speculated previously, the Israelis are charged with the task of an initial military strike against Iranian nuclear capabilities, the predictable retalitation by the Iranians against a "valued U.S. ally" will form an easy pretext for calling for conscription, given the over-extension of U.S. forces as a consequence of the criminal and immoral invasion of Iraq.  Since Iran, unlike Iraq at the time of the U.S. assault, is not a decimated country with non-existent military capabilities, the need for more cannon fodder will be essential if the war-mongers in the current Administration are to realize their ambitions.  I shall go out on a limb and hazard a guess that the Bush twins will not be the first to enlist when the time comes.

UPDATE:  Ironically, Thomas "no ideas and the ability to express them" Friedman is already beginning the process of getting us accustomed to the new horrors on the horizon, with a line buried in today's column, in which he refers to "Iran, where many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq."  The childish idiocy of this remark almost defies belief, coming as it does from a "liberal" columnist in a "liberal" newspaper.  There are many Iranians still alive who no doubt recall the consequences of the last U.S. invasion of their country; more importantly--and this is what makes this offhand remark so disgusting--to remark blithely that people would welcome the horrors of war, like that visited upon their neighbor, and to suggest that on the basis of no evidence, suggests a kind of moral callousness and defect of empathetic capacity which might stand as emblematic of the place of the United States in the world today.

A Newish Blog by Two Corporate Law Professors

Here, by Gordon Smith from Wisconsin and Christine Hurt (one of our distinguished alumnae, as it happens) at Marquette.  Sorry this notice is a bit late in coming.

Pathological Liars at the Discovery [sic] Institute are at it again!

Details, and demolition, here.

Raz on Our Intellectual and Philosophical Culture

Interesting interview with Joseph Raz here; an excerpt:

[C]ontemporary life, including philosophical life, is marked by its short span of attention. Within months of a new book by a respected author being published conferences about it are held, and special issues of journals dedicated to it are published, only to be superseded the following year by the new stars of that year. We think that we live in a dynamic and innovative age, whereas we live in a culture devoted to the ephemeral. In this intellectual climate much of our work is to try to stop people from forgetting today what everyone knew yesterday, and to reduce the intoxication with the latest word. A necessary task, but not one conducive to the longevity of the work. Perhaps in our hyperactive world the mode of progress in philosophy has changed. Perhaps it now lies less with the singular achievements of exceptional thinkers like the classics of modern philosophy: Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and others, and more in the cumulative products of hundreds of worker ants. This would suggest that the history of philosophy may assume the relation to philosophy that the history of physics has to physics. It would even make the ephemerality and forgetfulness of the age less regrettable. I doubt, however, that that can be the whole story. It is probably yet another manifestation of the lack of clear horizons in contemporary philosophical thought.

Comments are open; no anonymous postings, of course.

Harvard President Summers Puts Both Feet in Mouth...

...and swallows them.  Pharyngula comments.

Tax scholar Lederman from George Mason to Indiana

Leandra Lederman (tax, law and economics), currently at George Mason, has accepted a Chair in the law school at Indiana University, Bloomington.  In addition to substantial contributions to tax scholarship, she is also a very good teacher, as we learned when she visited at Texas a couple of years ago.  A good catch for Indiana!

The Texas Taliban Move to England?

Thanks to Michael Otsuka (Philosophy, UCL) for calling to my attention more disconcerting evidence of Tony Blair's blurring of the line between church and state: 

Tracy Morton and Kay Wilkinson, from Conisbrough, a sometime mining community not far from Doncaster, have been engaged in a passionate fight against the government, Doncaster's elected Labour mayor and Sir Peter Vardy, a man recently described by the Times Education Supplement as a "Christian fundamentalist car dealer". Their battleground: a schools policy to which the government now pledges heartfelt allegiance, namely the replacement of "bog-standard comprehensives" with the gleaming new creations known as "academies"....

Kay and Tracy...both had high-achieving daughters at Northcliffe, a comprehensive school that serves Conisbrough and nearby Denaby....Both had benefited from Northcliffe's so-called Gifted And Talented programme....

In 2001, Northcliffe was inspected by Ofsted and credited with being "a good and improving school". Both that year and the next, the DfES gave Northcliffe a School Achievement Award. In 2003, the school's pupils produced the best SATs and GCSE results in its history. Three months later, however, Northcliffe was placed in Special Measures by the Schools Inspectorate - the category denotes a school that is "failing or likely to fail to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education"....

Five months after that, Doncaster's local education authority (LEA) unveiled plans to replace Northcliffe with an academy run by a charitable organisation called the Vardy Foundation....

Academies, initially known as City Academies, were publicly rolled out in 2000 by David Blunkett, who aimed to use them to replace schools that were either in Special Measures or deemed to be "underachieving". Four years later, the government planted the idea at the core of its education platform for the general election, announcing plans to open up to 200. The idea is roughly this: for a fee of £2m - payable in random instalments - private benefactors are handed effective control of brand new state schools, although the taxpayer meets the lion's share of both building and running costs (which tend to involve an initial sum of at least £20m, and annual payments of around £5m). The relatively small size of their contribution has little bearing on the sponsors' clout: they can appoint the majority of the school's governors and thereby have the crucial say in the appointment of senior management, and shape the school's practices without having to worry about the national curriculum. Stranger still, academies are not bound by national agreements on teachers' pay and conditions.

Among those who had got in early was Sir Peter Vardy, a millionaire car dealer and evangelist from Durham. Under the auspices of the Thatcher government's not entirely dissimilar City Technology Colleges Programme, his Vardy Foundation, run by his brother David, had already seen to the opening of a school called Emmanuel College in Gateshead. Thanks to the City Academies initiative, September 2003 marked the arrival of a second school, the King's Academy in Middlesbrough. The following March, it was ceremonially opened by none other than Tony Blair, who was presented with a Middlesbrough FC shirt bearing his surname. Two weeks later, he enthused about his visit during prime minister's question time. "There is nothing more inspiring," he said, "particularly when one knew the old school that the King's Academy replaced, than to see the brand new buildings, the total commitment of the teachers and staff, and the pupils there eager to learn"....

Vardy's Christian beliefs are shared by John Burn, sometime head of Emmanuel College and now education adviser to the Vardy Foundation, and Nigel McQuoid, principal at the King's Academy. Papers they have co-authored give a flavour of their stance: "If relativist philosophy is acceptable, then sadomasochism, bestiality and self-abuse are to be considered as wholesome activities," runs one. "It is very important that young people begin to realise that activities which are 'private and personal' often degrade oneself and are not necessarily good and acceptable." By way of clarifying the latter position, McQuoid recently told the Observer that "the Bible says clearly that homosexual activity is against God's design. I would indicate that to young folk."

Most notoriously, Vardy schools accord equal importance to both creationism and theories of evolution. According to McQuoid, though state schools are required to teach evolutionary theory, "also, schools should teach the creation theory as literally depicted in Genesis". The 300-year reign of the enlightenment apparently counts for very little: in his view, creation and evolution are both "faith positions". Blair, it should be noted, has claimed to have no problem with such a stance. In 2002, when asked by the Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge if he was happy about creationism being taught alongside evolution in state schools, he replied, "I am very happy. I know that the honourable lady is referring to a school in the north-east [ie, Emmanuel College], and I think that certain reports about what it has been teaching are somewhat exaggerated. It would be very unfortunate if concerns about that issue were seen to remove the very strong incentive to ensure that we get as diverse a school system as we properly can."

This does raise a question for my friends in Britain:  namely, why hasn't Tony Blair been voted out?  Is it simply that the Tories are too ridiculous?  First, Blair joins cause with Bush & his bestiary of madmen in the criminal and immoral invasion of Iraq.  Now the Prime Minister, in a nation of atheists and agnostics no less, throws the government behind schools which teach lies and misinformation, and sponsor religious indoctrination.   Even the Archbishop of Canterbury knows the Book of Genesis is engaging fiction, a "creation myth" not empirical science.  Has not the Prime Minister heard?

UPDATE:  Professor Otsuka sends along a possible answer as to how Blair has survived:

The answer to your question provides a cautionary tale for US Democrats of what can happen when a party sacrifices principles for the sake of electability: The Tories win four successive general elections -- three under Thatcher plus John Major's unexpected victory in 1992. Demoralized by Major's victory and desperate to return to power, Labour elect a Tory in all but name to lead their party in 1994. This strategy works too well, as they go on to win a landslide general election in 1997, thus conferring saviour status on their leader Tony Blair and giving him a huge Parliamentary majority which empowers him to legislate at will. The global and therefore Britain's economy fare better under Blair than under Major, for which Blair and his Chancellor get credit, a modest amount of which is deserved. The Tories haven't helped themselves by squeezing themselves to the right in response to the rightward march of Labour. But what choice did they have? They needed to present an alternative to Labour and couldn't credibly have refashioned themselves to the left of Labour, nor would they have be allowed to by their reactionary Home Counties grassroots members. The Liberal Democrats are now to the left of Labour. But they're a third party without many seats in Parliament or a large base of loyal, habitual voters on which to draw. They've also got an amiable but ineffective leader whom people find difficult to imagine as Prime Minister, and there's no credible alternative to him on the horizon. Therefore, the most likely scenario in which Tony Blair is removed from power is one in which he is deposed as party leader by his Parliamentary colleagues. Like the Pope, however, Blair has managed to promote loyalists up through the ranks during the past several years. Moreover, he will be especially keen to cling to power these next few years. Being an admirer of Thatcher and a shallow and unprincipled man, Blair's main goal in life now is probably to ensure a positive line in the history books by supplanting Mrs T as the 'longest serving Prime Minister in 150 years', for which he will need to win and serve an entire third term. All of his other bids for a flattering place in the history books have failed: Iraq was a complete disaster, he hasn't managed to get Britain into the Euro, he hasn't managed to broker a stable peace in Northern Ireland, etc.

8th Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

A Plutocrat Speaks

This blogger says what needs to be said:

I was watching a program on Fox News last evening where the CEO of Walmart was being interviewed. He suggested that not all of the company’s critics were motivated by personal gain. Both the host and I sat in stunned silence.

Law Schools with Largest 10-Year Tuition Hikes

The January 2005 National Jurist has striking data on which law schools have raised tuition the most in the last ten years; unsurprisingly, state schools dominate the list (yet most still remain far cheaper than their peer privates).  Strikingly, the University of California law schools are four of the top ten!  Here are the ten law schools that have raised tuition the most between 1993 and 2003; next to each school's name is the percentage increase and the 03-04 (resident) tuition.

1.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (589.7% increase, $10,429)

2.  University of Hawaii (376.2% increase, $10,942)

3.  University of California, Davis (294.5%, $17,195)

4.  University of California, Los Angeles (277.8%, $17,012)

5.  University of Arizona (272.9%, $10,604)

6.  University of California, Berkeley (269.1%, $16,294)

7.  University of California, Hastings (257.7%, $15,615)

8.  University of Washington, Seattle (242.6%, $13,630)

9.  Arizona State University (235.6%, $9,545)

10. University of Idaho (214.7%, $6,696)

Of the other top state law schools besides Berkeley and UCLA, Michigan--which is already de facto private (in terms of state support and percentage of state residents)--had the lowest increase during the 10-year period, of 123.5%.  But that still left it with an eye-popping tuition of $27,884, higher than many private law schools, and just a few thousand less than the top private law school that raised tuition the most over the last decade, Northwestern (which increased 86.5%, to $33,896).  Virginia, which has also become de facto private, raised tuition the most, 214.4%, for a 2003-04 tuition of $23,798.  Texas was in the middle, raising tuition 159.4%, but coming in with a rather modest $11,462 2003-04 tuition, making it (happily) still the cheapest of the top law schools.

Indeed, with the exception of Michigan and Virginia, the other notable fact remains how much cheaper the state schools still are by comparison to the privates.  Harvard Law School, for example, ranked 104th for largest 10-year increase (76.4%), but comes in with a typical top private school tuition of $32,392.  Emory, at 100th (78.8% increase), charged $30,692 in 2003-04:  triple North Carolina and double Hastings, schools that might be deemed reasonably comparable state-supported schools.   Northwestern, as we saw, is nearly double UCLA, and triple Texas.

Also striking is that some traditionally strong state law schools have not raised tuition nearly as much as others (typically because of legislative prohibitions on doing so).  Wisconsin, for example, came in at 50th, raising tuition a "mere" 119.8%, and charging a very modest $9,557 in 2003-04.  Colorado came in at 83rd, with a tuition hike of 88.2% over the decade, and an even more modest $7,645 in tuition in 03-04.  But Colorado has also been bleeding faculty (in both law and philosophy), a fact not unrelated to the low tuition, and Wisconsin has been punished in U.S. News because of its low per capita expenditures (and lower-than-average salaries compared to peer schools), also a function of the low tuitions.

The writing on the wall is, sadly, clear:  those "state" schools that follow the University of California system model (or, at the extreme, the Michigan and Virginia models) will thrive over the next decade, those that don't, won't.  But the equally predictable outcome is that a decade from now, the tuition gap between nominally public and genuinely private law schools is likely to be very modest, much like the gap between Michigan and Northwestern today.

UPDATE:  A reader familiar with the situation at Colorado writes:

There is a significant tuition increase effective the current academic year, after the survey period.  It has now gone to about $11,000 for in-state and some $26,000 for out-of-state.  See here.  They are also increasing class size somewhat.  In addition, they have finally secured the funding for a new building, which will be complete in time for the 06-07 academic year.  (Much of that funding comes from the University).

This is bad news, as you suggested, for the continued existence of low-cost alternatives of reasonable quality (though Colorado is still a bargain, even for out-of-staters, only because everything is relative).  But as you also suggested, it is probably necessary in the current climate, and probably good news for the school's faculty quality going forward. 

More Photos of Liberated Iraqis

Follow the links here.  Share this with your Republican friends to celebrate the coronation of the war criminal and moral monster Bush later this week.

Political Philosopher Harrison from Cambridge to UCL

Ross Harrison, the distinguished political philosopher and historian of moral and political thought, who is currently Reader in Philosophy at Cambridge University, has accepted the Quain Chair in Jurisprudence at University College London, where he will augment an already strong group in political philosophy spread throughout the University, including Michael Otsuka and Jonathan Wolff in philosophy, and Ronald Dworkin, who remains in a part-time post on the law faculty.

The Denouement of the Non-Story about Rathergate

One illustrative example of the degraded state of public discourse in America--and of the venal contribution of the blogosphere to this state of affairs--was last year's "Rathergate" fantasy, in which "courageous" (read:  trivial and right-wing) bloggers exposed a tree (a document of dubious authenticity), and missed the forest (there is ample evidence that Bush dodged Vietnam service; Rather's error pales by comparison to real journalistic misinformation and careless reporting, of the kind that led to the Iraq war).  Greg Palast has apt comments on the denouement to the whole sorry saga:

CBS said, "The Panel found that Mapes ignored information that cast doubt on the story she had set out to report -- that President Bush had received special treatment 30 years ago, getting to the [Texas Air National] Guard ahead of many other applicants …."

Well, excuse me, but that story is stone cold solid, irrefutable, backed-up, sourced, proven to a fare-thee-well. I know, because I'm one of the reporters who broke that story … way back in 1999, for the Guardian papers of Britain. No one has challenged the Guardian report, or my follow-up for BBC Television, whatsoever, though we've begged the White House for a response from our self-proclaimed "war president."

CBS did not "break" this Chicken-Hawk George story; it's just that Dan Rather, with Mapes' encouragement, found his journalistic soul and the cojones, finally, after 5 years delay, to report it. Did Bush get special treatment to get into the Guard? Baby Bush tested in the 25th percentile out of 100. Yet, he leaped ahead of thousands of other Vietnam evaders because the then-Speaker of the Texas legislature sent a message to General Craig Rose, head of the Guard, to let in Little George and a few other sons of well-placed politicos.

[See some of the documentation at http://www.gregpalast.com/ulf/documents/draftdodgeblanked.jpg and a clip from the BBC Television report at http://www.gregpalast.com/images/TrailerClips.mov

Mapes and Rather did make a mistake, citing a memo which could not be authenticated. But let's get serious folks: this "Killian" memo had not a darn thing to do with the story-in-chief -- the President's using his daddy's connections to duck out of Vietnam. The Killian memo was a goofy little addition to the story (not included in my Guardian or BBC reports).

So CBS inquisitors took this minor error and used it to discredit the story and ruin careers of reporters who allowed themselves an unguarded moment of courage. And, crucial to the network's real agenda, this nonsensical distraction allowed the White House to resurrect the fake reputation of George Bush as Vietnam-era top gun....

[T]he American press itself, notably the New York Times, has joined in the lynch mob, repeating the allegations against the investigative reporters without any independent verification of the charges whatsoever.

I would note that neither CBS nor the New York Times punished a single reporter for passing on, as hard news, the Bush Administration fibs and whoppers about Saddam Hussein's nuclear and biological weapons programs. Shameful repetitions of propaganda produced no resignations -- indeed, picked up an Emmy or two.

Yes, I believe heads should roll at CBS: those of the "news" chieftains who for five years ignored the screaming evidence about George Bush's dodging the draft during the war in Vietnam.

UPDATE:  Another amusing item to the same effect (via For the Record). 

The F- Word

Interesting article here, with lots of good links; an excerpt:

I'm not suggesting that the state has become fascist. We remain a bourgeois democracy, in which you are free to vote for the corporate-sponsored Republican or Democrat of your choice. You can still maneuver around as best you can in a marketplace controlled by ever fewer people. You can access a broad range of websites, protest in the streets (under carefully controlled conditions), and say what we think in emails and phone calls (although the authorities can legally monitor them as they please). You can still write and maybe have published letters to the editor criticizing the regime. The country itself remains pre-fascist.

Nor is there, a mass-based fascist party yet. The Republicans may morph into such, but there remain the occasional Ron Pauls. (I have to note, though, that the Texas Republican Congressman himself opines that "a total police state is fast approaching.") What we have is a fascist movement, even if its storm troops themselves do not, by and large, conceive of it as such. Many of them simply think they're God's Army, having nothing in common with Hitler's Brownshirts, whom they learned in school were bad people defeated by fine Americans. They will be insulted if told they resemble the Nazi supporters of the 1930s, but in many respects they do.

Fascism feeds on fear. Hitler's Reichmarshall Hermann Goering declared that "people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and attack the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." Question for discussion, ladies and gentlemen: How does this apply here? Are the myriad threats the movement has used to frighten all who will listen (weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds over New York, Muslims in general, liberal college professors, homosexuals) working to get people to do the bidding of leaders in this country?

Fascism also feeds on ignorance. "Good Germans" were truly persuaded that Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks threatened them in 1939. Fascism is inherently anti-intellectual, deploying emotions (national pride, resentment at "outsiders," feelings of injury, millenarian hope) and targeting prominently among internal enemies those who challenge its self-validating myths. A key factor in the American variety is a frontal assault on whole fields of science, especially those challenging the Biblical depiction of the earth as merely 6000 years old.

A top Bush aide actually told the New York Times' Ron Suskind that administration officials disparagingly dismiss what they call "the reality-based community"---specifically, people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" as irrelevant. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he declared. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality---judiciously, as you will---we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

In other words, truth is for wimps; forget about it. We are the champions, the powerful, we make it up as we go along and if you want a piece of it, embrace the delusion. We will punish the French for rationally rejecting the attack on Iraq, and for that matter for inflicting the Enlightenment (with its emphasis on unmanly, unheroic rational empiricism) a few centuries back. We will punish the CIA for obnoxiously promoting reality-based intelligence over the requested, required disinformation before the Iraq attack. This is the sort of fascistic thought not only trumpeted by right wing talk radio, but from countless pulpits, cable news, and the White House---proudly irrational, fear mongering, sneering, creating its own reality with the calculated support of large sections of corporate America.

Legal philosopher Himma to Seattle Pacific

Kenneth Himma, who has been an important and prolific contributor to many recent debates in philosophy of law, is moving from the University of Washington at Seattle (where he has been a lecturer for a number of years) to Seattle Pacific University, where he will be Associate Professor of Philosophy.  This is particularly worth noting because Washington's rating in philosophy of law in the last PGR had a lot to do with Himma's presence there.

Independent Judiciary Strikes Again, Dealing Setback to the Georgia Taliban

Thanks to the many readers who flagged for me the decision by the Federal Court for the Northern District of Georgia holding unconstitutional the "evolution is theory, not fact" stickers that Cobb County mandated be placed on biology textbooks back in 2002.  (The Court decision is here; news stories are here and here).  This is a big setback for the zealots, since the actions of the Georgia Taliban were, by the standards of the anti-evolution know-nothings, relatively mild, and yet still the court struck it down.  There is a useful legal analysis of the opinion here, which I commend to everyone's attention.

Brownshirt Wannabes

What will it take for them to act on their delusions and resentment?  An excerpt:

On the Thursday before Christmas, Al Neuharth, former Gannett bigwig and founder of USA Today, suggested in his weekly column for that newspaper that the U.S. should start bringing home our troops from Iraq “sooner rather than later.”

This hardly seemed like a radical, traitorous notion. For one thing, it appeared in an opinion column, and surely, in our country, every American has a right to his or her opinion? Secondly, it came at a time when, according to the latest Gallup poll, a majority of American believe it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place, and feel the war is not going well for us.

Finally, since so few in the media have called for a withdrawal, you would think those who strongly support the war would not feel unduly threatened by one man's opinion. The New York Times, for example, wants the U.S. to send more troops there.

Yet, our brief article about the Neuharth column (which did not endorse his position) got linked at numerous other Web sites, and drew more letters than virtually any story we have ever posted. We presented a few excerpts from those letters, pro and con, in a second article on Dec. 24, but we did not quote from some of the nastiest--and, believe me, there were plenty in that category to choose from.

Just to give you an idea of what's out there, in the zeitgeist, here are a few additional extracts. Sadly, they represent dozens of others in the same vein....One should keep in mind that Neuharth, besides his professional accomplishments, served his country in World War II as an infantryman in France, Germany and the Phillippines, and won a Bronze Star.

***
George Wyman: “Mr. Neuharth is simply UnAmerican.”

Frank Butash, West Hartford, CT.: “Apparently it's easier to run with jackals than to stand up for your country when it needs support.”

Kenneth Genest: “They had two of these in World War 2. One was called Tokyo Rose and the other Axis Sally. Their job was to discourage the American soldiers. I see they have one now at USA Today.”

Dan Clawson, Fresno,m CA.: "A disgrace to the men and women who serve. USA Today supporting the terrorist cause."

Jerry Martin, San Francisco, CA.: “Yet another self-defeating fool with a large bank account shoots himself in the foot. Their dissent equals treason. The terrorists got him just like all the other rich liberals who side against our victory. They forget that wars end, and then the country takes stock of who was where. I encourage the fool to keep mouthing against our victory over the Muslim jihad, he'll pay the social price in the end.”

T. Conway: “Mr. Neuharth has made a serious business mistake. Watch the circulation drop over the next year. The Los Angeles Times experienced the same drop after they attacked Gov. Schwarzenegger...some never learn. P.S. What side did Mr. Neuharth fight for in WW II?”

Peter Kessler: “And as for the good war, WW II, the lefties were four-square for that one. Yes sir, they were saving the USSR, Stalin and Communism. It's sad we didn't join Hitler until he wiped out the USSR. Alger Hiss and the Uptown Daily Worker (The New York Times) be damned. I see you've joined the club. Well, you're probably a founding member.”

Joe McBride, Fort Dodge, Iowa: “Mr. Neuharth, thanks to you and your ignorance the terrorists are probably booking their flights to the U.S. now! If we pull out of Iraq with the job unfinished the terrorists will be bombing McDonalds, and blowing up malls and schools here, killing our innocent men, women and children.”

Boots Harvey, Brentwood, CA: “One must recall that Churchill had to put up with the likes of Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, and his propaganda during WWII. In the end William Joyce was executed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy during war time. Would that the same fate befall Al Neuharth!”

Mel Gibbs: “The Patriot Act will put both of you (Neuharth and Mitchell) on trial for treason and convict and execute both of you as traitors for running these stories in a time of war and it should be done on TV for other communist traitors like you two to know we mean business. This is war and you should be put in prison NOW for talking like this. Who the hell do you people think you are? You give aid and comfort to our enemies and aid them in murdering our proud soldiers. You people are a disgrace to America. Your families should be put in prison with you, then be made to leave and move to the Middle East ...This is a great Christian nation and god wants us to lead the world out of darkness with great leaders like President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Communists like Al and Greg will soon be in prison and on death row for your ugly papers. We won the election and now you are mad. We own America and all the rights, you people are trash, go back to Russia and Africa and take your friends with before we put you on death row after a fair trial.”

The unknown is how many people there are like this.  Even civilized countries have wannabe fascists in their midst, but most are harmless nobodies.  What does it take to rouse them?  That is the question, is it not?