The Washington Post published an account of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s career as a law professor, Elizabeth Warren Faced Sexism, Shed a Husband and Found Her Voice Teaching Law in Houston, which you might find interesting regardless of your views about her politics. The article described her academic career starting in the late 1970s. She faced … Continue reading History of a Young Female Law Professor
I assume that you spend a lot of time reading and maybe a lot of time writing too. As someone who has done a lot of both, I have become sensitized to what I think is better or worse writing. I think it’s fair to say that there is much room for improvement. I notice … Continue reading Suggestions for Good Writing
BuzzFeed published a long article detailing Donald Trump’s long history of using arbitration clauses to keep his disputes secret. Not surprising. Of course, he’s not alone. [Click the title of this post to get the link to the article.]
I was going to post the piece below riffing on Arthur C. Brooks’s column about de-polarizing political biases. And then came the Democratic presidential debates this week, which provided a glaring example of how political biases often are generated and spread. This post uses these debates as an illustration of the process and then discusses … Continue reading Political De-Biasing
Have you seen the classic movie, Gaslight? It’s the story of a husband who slowly manipulates his wife into believing that she is insane because she imagines things, which are real, such as a gaslight flickering. This is the film noir version of the Marx Brothers quip, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying … Continue reading Un-Gaslighting
The New York Times “smarter living” column has an interesting piece about letting go of grudges and forgiving others. It cites research about the benefits of doing so. A 2006 study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology as part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, suggested that “skills-based forgiveness training may prove effective in reducing … Continue reading Letting Go and Forgiving
You are going to die. Before then, you may endure extended periods of suffering from illnesses and injuries (especially from falling down), grisly side effects from medical treatments, chronic physical and mental deterioration, disconnection from your earlier life, loss of control, family conflict, and entanglement with the medical and insurance industries. Some of that misery … Continue reading Helping People Make Hard Decisions – And Making Them Ourselves
Michelle Obama’s fabulous memoir, Becoming, has valuable lessons for us in legal education and practice. This post first summarizes the book and then describes some of these lessons. The book is a chronological narrative of Ms. Obama’s life, which is fascinating in itself, though I was particularly interested in her portrayals of the worlds she … Continue reading Becoming Ourselves
Universities generally ignored serious allegations of sexual assault until very recently. Did the Obama Administration policy go too far to correct this problem? That’s the view of Prof. Lara Bazelon, director of the criminal juvenile justice and the racial justice clinics at the University of San Francisco School of Law, who wrote a NYT op-ed, … Continue reading Designing a Fair Dispute System for Title IX Cases
The New York Times published an interesting article worth reading, which riffs on Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook would develop an independent body to make decisions about acceptability of posts on its platform. He mused that the body might be like a supreme court to make final decisions reflecting global social norms. The article was … Continue reading Dispute System Design for Facebook
