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The Hidden History of a Fictional Law School

Posted: 09 Apr 2011 03:15 PM PDT

Edward J. Bander, Suffolk University Law School, has published The Hidden History of Essex Law School (Trafford Publishing, 2010). Here is the abstract.


When law librarian Tom Jones is tapped by Dean Oberal to write the history for the one-hundred year anniversary celebration of Essex Law School he takes his assignment seriously. He soon discovers that the task will involve many challenges and will reveal even more surprises.

Such is the case when Tom interviews Mary McCarthy who served as secretary to the school's founder, Dean Seth Adams. Mary is a legend at the school and she says that the history Tom is writing won't reflect half of what she really knows. Mary reveals some interesting information about her relationship with Dean Adams.

What "One L" and "Paper Chase" were to first tier law schools, "Hidden History of Essex Law School" is to fourth tier law schools. This novel explores the intrigue, rivalry, and intellectual failure that make up the chemistry of legal education, particularly at the fictional Boston law schools: Commonwealth, Havad, Huntington and St. Francis. Tom Jones is the catalyst as he roams Boston, New York City, and Mt. Desert Island, ME to bring solace to Mary McCarthy's conscience and a conclusion to Essex Law School's future.
Download the table of contents from SSRN at the link.

An Analysis of Supreme Court Voting Alignments, 1838-2009

Posted: 09 Apr 2011 03:09 PM PDT

Christine Kexel Chabot, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and Benjamin Remy Chabot, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago & National Bureau of Economic Research, are publishing Mavericks, Moderates, or Drifters? Supreme Court Voting Alignments, 1838-2009 in the Missouri Law Review. Here is the abstract.
We introduce a new dataset recording the vote of every Justice in 18,812 Supreme Court cases decided between 1838 and 1949. We combine our data with existing datasets to examine votes in all opinions through 2009 and address previously unanswerable questions about the President's ability to appoint Supreme Court Justices of similar ideology. The President's odds of appointing a Justice who sides with appointees of his party have been no better than a coin flip. There is no historical correlation between divided government and the rate of appointees who vote across party lines. Indeed, the most prominent examples of failed appointments occurred when the Senate and President were of the same party.
These mavericks are not lone outliers, but part of a larger pattern of appointees whose votes departed or drifted away from executive expectations with surprising frequency throughout our nation's history.Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Law Students As Guinea Pigs

Posted: 09 Apr 2011 08:01 AM PDT

Scott DeVito, Florida Coastal School of Law, has published Experimenting on Law Students: Why Imposing no Ethical Constraints on Educational Research Using Law Students is a Bad Idea and Proposed Ethical Guidelines, at 40 Southwestern University Law Review 285 (2010). Here is the abstract.

Under current federal regulations, law school faculties are permitted to engage in human research using students as subjects with little or no ethical oversight. This freewheeling environment runs counter to well-established ethical guidelines for human research and to law professors' heightened moral duties as members of the Bar and the legal academy. In addition, it exposes students, law faculty, and the legal academy to risks arising out of the use of unregulated human experimentation in law schools. This is inimical to morally good practice. To remedy this ethical problem, this article provides a set of guidelines for law professors who wish to ethically engage in empirical research using students as subjects.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Achieving Social Justice

Posted: 09 Apr 2011 07:56 AM PDT

De Somnath has published Right to Social Justice. Here is the abstract.

By social justice I mean the creation of a society which treats human beings as embodiments of the sacred, supports them to realize their fullest human potential. The concept of social justice is taken in its most comprehensive sense- the legislative, the administrative and the judicial. It is true that the preamble to our constitution uses the term "social justice" and Article 38. And in wider sense various fundamental rights somehow protects the concept of social justice in India. But beyond this neither the constitution nor any subsequent legislation provides the key to precise connotation of expression "Social Justice". So as right to social justice only some fundamental rights with the judicial pronunciation comes into picture. The Preamble declares and secure to all citizens justice, social, economic and political. The concept of social justice is a revolutionary concept which provides meaning and significance to life and makes the rule of law dynamic. In Keshawanand Bharti Case Supreme Court held that preamble is the part of the Constitution. The Constitution inscribes Justice as the first promise of the Republic, which means that State Power will execute the pledge of Justice in favour of millions who are the Republic. I mean to say Social Justice is People's Justice where the tyranny of power is transformed into democracy of social good. The idea of welfare state is that the claims of social justice must be treated as cardinal and paramount. Social justice is not a blind concept or a preposterous dogma. It seeks to do justice to all the citizen of the state. In the Directive Principles, however, one finds an even clearer statement of the social revolution. They aim at making the Indian masses free in the positive sense, free from the abject physical conditions that had prevented them from fulfilling their best selves…. The essence of the Directive Principles lies in Article 38. In reality, the cry for "social justice" is a call for the State to do something to fix economic and relational inequities without any regard to a universal principle of justice. By describing justice in social rather than legal terms, our attention is immediately drawn to national problems that can only be fixed by a civil government with enough power to enforce its policies. So then, advocates of "social justice" believe that the State plays the major role in rectifying so-called social problems because they are national in scope. Justice and social order had a genetic role in moulding the Indian jurisprudence and notion of justice.If the rule of law and rule of life run close together, a jurisprudence where man matter will bourgeon there. The springs of social justice will arise then - only then.
Download the paper from SSRN at the link.
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