Lex Ferenda

Mark Davys’ unique approach to teaching land law (blogged about as part of the coverage of the UKCLE legal education conference in January) is now set out in full detail (complete with scripts) here

A typically entertaining find and follow-up comment from Peter Black on his Freedom to Differ blog, about the dress sense (or lack of sense) of law professors (or in our way of doing things, law lecturers!). Read the post here. Peter cites a whimsical article that I too spotted and had a good giggle at - Law School Attire: A Call for a Uniform Uniform Code by Eric Jensen (download it here).

Peter says (edited by me):

When I studied law at the University of Queensland, I think every lecturer I had wore a tie on the days when they were lecturing, but they didn’t feel the need to wear a tie when they weren’t teaching or if they only had tutorials on that day. Of course, some wore a tie every day (generally some of the older members of staff and some of the professors) … When I took up an appointment at [QUT], I followed the example set years earlier at the University of Queensland, so I wore a suit and tie when I was lecturing, but was happy to discard the tie on days when I only had tutorials or was not teaching at all. I persisted with this approach for my first semester of teaching, before realising no-one else seemed to adopt this approach … since then I usually wear trousers (occasionally even jeans) with a shirt (frequently quite bright, usually designed by Tommy Hilfiger). I wouldn’t say I’m the most casually dressed member of the staff - indeed far from it (I can think of one colleague who seems to only ever wear jeans and a t-shirt)…

It’s a point that interests me a lot as I make the slow transition from law student to law teacher and law researcher (although, like Peter, being involved in the ‘trendy’ area of cyberlaw means that we must also note our own true uniform). Even contemporaries and colleagues around me differ in their practice - some arrive in suit and tie for the tutorial teaching that most PhD students engage in, others in super-casual t-shirt etc. (I tend to fall somewhere in the middle, and don’t like to wear ties). On the other hand, we in Ireland and the UK are spared the dilemna of many other law lecturers and wannabe lecturers around the world, in that we don’t have the issue of looking professional in hot weather (cause we don’t get hot weather worth planning for!).

Oh, and Peter has a poll too, so vote in it. I wonder if the modern recommendation has a fashion section…

Bailii Books!

Professor Philip Leith (Queen’s University Belfast, former chair of BILETA and a trustee of Bailii) tells Jeremy Phillips at IPKat that

Bailii is currently undertaking a trial of publishing out of print monographs dealing with legal issues … Most publishers have no commercial interest in books after the print run has finished and they are happy to reassign copyright to the author, if copyright was assigned to them. Bailii will only republish a text if there are no copyright limitations. An author wishing to make his out of print monographs available to Bailii will normally thus provide the original word processed files from which the publisher worked….Authors can also revise a work before it is republished….Bailii has no password protection, students can link directly from reading lists to the specified work, and there are none of the constraints on making copies/printing/saving which are usual with commercial systems…It would be helpful if you gave feedback on formatting, ease of system use, and any other comments you might have. Bailii’s structure is oriented towards case law, so comments on how books might best be handled are particularly relevant. Please email me here, with the header ‘Bailii Books’. (edited; read full post here)

Two books that Leith himself worked on are already available - who will be next?

• Harmonisation of Intellectual Property in Europe: a case study in patent procedure (1998)

• The Barrister’s World and the Nature of Law (1992) (co-authored with Jon Morison).

I had some useful conversations with library and disability service staff in my own institution this year about the availability (or non-availability) of in-print texts in various computer formats (frequently, no document or text version was available, just PDFs - this normally means that the text was submitted in document, laid out in something like Quark and then further changes made, thus the Quark version (as subsequently PDFed) is the only accurate version). However, in the case of older, out-of-print texts, there may well be a few authors out there that have a decrepit WordPerfect version lying around on a floppy disk somewhere (what’s a floppy disk, Daddy?). If so, Bailii would love to hear from you!

Some interesting developments in Irish legal education to ponder…

The University of Limerick’s School of Law (website) has been advertising its “Law Plus” option (admissions info). The modular course involves the familiar essential law courses (i.e. the foundation courses, which overlap with some of the ones you need for post-degree professional courses in Ireland), and the options can be chosen from the School of Law or from other schools (including Japanese, Irish traditional music, politics and more). There’s also one semester (of the four-year, i.e. eight-semester degree) spent in a work placement. Now, it would still be necessary for a student to take some of the optional semesters in certain law courses if they wanted to cover the professional course entry requirements - but certainly it seems possible to do this and also take optional law and non-law modules within the degree.

Download the brochure here (PDF).

The Kings Inns (responsible for the training of barristers) has announced that the BL (barrister-at-law) degree will be available on a part-time basis from next year. Fair is fair, I should welcome this - I have been a strong critic of the Inns and its decision a few years ago to get rid of the part-time course and substitute a full-time, 12k-in-fees course for it. This was a regressive step and the Inns were rightly criticised by others too for this, especially given the fact that non-law graduates could take the diploma (i.e. the ‘conversion course’) by evening classes but were then required to give up their job and then find 12k while being unable to work to take the course - a significant and inexplicable restriction on access to education and to the profession. However, the Inns should be congratulated on its decision (flagged quite a lot in the last few months, but officially announced last week) to reintroduce part-time study (alongside the new full-time course). The course will be taught on weekends over two years with occasional weekday events (presumably in the courts etc!). Not to say that further reforms are unnecessary - they certainly are - but this is cause for (some) celebration. In the context of the Competition Authority’s report on the legal profession, which included the education and training systems (discussed here), this is a step in the right direction.

My supervisor, Eoin O’Dell, has been blogging about the more general question of the relationship between legal education and the legal profession, and on future directions for law schools; he writes:

On the one hand, law schools must recognise the reality that many of our graduates go on to practice (this is more true in the US than in Ireland), and take this into account in constructing syllabi; on the other hand, the legal profession must recognise that there is more to a university law school than simply vocational training for practice, and that university research and research-driven - often interdisciplinary - teaching are valuable not merely instrumentally as providing potential tools in the toolkit of the practitioner but also in their own right.

Read his full post here and add your own comments.

Times Higher Education (the THE; wonder how that will be indexed) is a relaunched version of the Times Higher Education Supplement (which neither belongs to the Times nor is a supplement, giving accuracy of only 50%). It’s also a magazine rather than a tabloid now, and the website is no longer behind a pay wall.

The first issue was published last week, and by coincidence (or not?) there’s a nicely interconnected series of articles on students, higher education and the law. (The interconnection is all in my head and the context/comments are also all mine, so don’t blame The The if you think it’s silly). The (primarily England and Wales) Higher Education Act 2004 is the common link.

The Act infamously introduced the top-up fee system and reformed aspects of higher education funding. An ongoing issue that institutions and students have tried to deal with is the question of student expectations and the role of contract. This issue was raised by education officer Wes Streeting of the National Union of Students on a number of occasions at the start of the 2006/7 academic year (see for example this Guardian story from September 2006) and a lot of criticism was expressed of the piecemeal approach. In 2007, Universities UK (the association of universities) carried out a survey (PDF), which had some particularly interesting results, not least:

Members were specifically asked whether they considered that they had a de-facto contract in place. This question aimed to clarify the legal context in terms of the current debate which has largely been framed around the concept that the use of a student contract is a new development. Virtually all respondents considered that they had a de-facto contract in place, generally established at the point at which a student accepts a place at university. Confusion over the contractual relationship may arise from the number of documents which make up the de-facto contract. This issue was reflected in the survey results. A common response to the question about de-facto contracts was a description of the documents which formed the contract, for example the offer of a place, the student’s acceptance, issue of a joining pack, the student’s signature on the enrolment form, student access to University regulations and guidance material, re-enrolment, assessment etc. One institution commented that they were currently trying to identify what documents constituted the de-facto contract.

Last year, I reported on the apparent increase in complaints. That was interesting. But moving to 2008, we have the first of our stories from THE (I’ll stop calling it The The now, honest), reporting on a new (and seemingly popular) template for a ’statement of terms’ (no longer a contract) developed by the Universities and Colleges Education Law Network (UCELNET). Tragically, I can’t get any info on the network as the website is members-only (and only HE institutions are members), but it does seem that the draft document is broader than the headline (which is, for the record, Fees ‘do not buy’ a guaranteed degree - a good point, but hardly the only one for a student contract statement of terms. I do wonder (but cannot confirm) how this contract statement of terms will be classified and enforced…

On that fees issue, though, it is reported in our second story that Coventry University has expelled 3% of it students and blocked 11% from accessing resources due to the non-payment of tuition fees. Perhaps a contract statement of terms will have something to say about that issue too - it does seem quite disturbing.

The final issue relates not just to these contractual issues but also to a further part of the Higher Education Act - the student complaints scheme. Part 2 (and associated Schedules) of the Act set up this new scheme and also excluded the jurisdiction of any university Visitor (if such jurisdiction existed) in relation to student complaints. The scheme is administered by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education and the adjudicator is Baroness Ruth Deech. So our final article is a report on a recent court decision that clarified that judicial review can be sought of OIAHE decisions. The decision, R (Siborurema) v OIA (which THE should really have linked to - why can’t print publications realise that a website is different to a piece of paper and that the occasional hyperlink wouldn’t kill them?) was handed down in December and has been published online [2007] EWCA Civ 1365 and summarised in the (actual) Times.

The adjudicator made what I see as quite a worrying assertion:

As to the amenability of OIA to judicial review, Baroness Deech in her statement expressed the firm belief that the efforts of OIA to serve students and HEI’s cheaply and efficiently would be hindered significantly if decisions made under the Scheme were to be subject to judicial review. OIA regarded the Scheme as a true alternative system to recourse the courts, without precluding such recourse. (Pill LJ, para 41)

The Court of Appeal does not accept this argument, and reasserts the supervisory role of judicial review, particularly in relation to a question raised in this case on whether the operation of the scheme was in accordance with the Act. This is quite important in the context of the way in which the office was set up (the Minister is allowed to recognise a body if it is acting in accordance with particular principles - very similar to the proposed method in the Defamation Bill here and in line with a prevailing ‘co-regulation’ trend). As it turns out, the applicant has a particularly poor case and the OIA is found to have acted in accordance with law.

Some other interesting nuggets from the opinions: Moore-Bick LJ says that “the Act therefore contemplates that the designated operator, currently the OIA, will be performing a public function, albeit not one that involves the determination of the legal rights and obligations of the parties involved in the complaint. As such it cannot be equated to a body established by one or more institutions to act as an arbitrator, mediator or conciliator in a purely private capacity” (para 69) and Richards LJ adds, in the context of the intensity of review, that “in this, as in other matters, little assistance is to be derived from reference to the former jurisdiction of the university visitor, which the statute abolished. The Scheme represents a new approach to the review of qualifying complaints and is not intended to replicate the old system.”

For some other thoughts on student complaints in higher education and the law, see Neville Harris’s detailed survey (which mentions the Siborurema case in its earlier stage) in Legal Studies 27(4) here), and a shorter summary by Liz Buckton here (Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education 12(1)).

For the new year, I’ve been sent to Coventry - but don’t worry, it’s just for the day. Hello from the University of Warwick (a few miles outside said city), where I’m attending a conference on legal education. These are my notes - fairly rough in parts. (Note: I’m publishing this later in the evening, back in Dublin, having experienced some problems accessing my blog during the day. I’ve combined all the stuff I was writing as I went into a single entry. I hope you don’t mind…)

(Dis)integration…designs on the law curriculum - Learning In Law Annual Conference 2008

General

My heart goes out to the organisers of the event, the Learning in Law Annual Conference (LILAC). They are the wonderful UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE; shame they couldn’t make the acronym UKELELE). They have been organising and promoting the conference for much of 2007, and now the day of the event has dawned, with biblical plagues being sent down upon them. For example, it’s very cold. Ready to snow, in fact. The British railway system is having one of its periodic meltdowns, with the West Coast Main Line (serving Coventry, the nearest station to the University of Warwick) being closed due to ‘overrunning engineering works’, and apparently the traffic is awful (one pair of speakers already cancelled due to being stuck on the M1). I came through Birmingham Airport; no trouble there, although yesterday there was a fire at the airport’s railway station (all we need now are the locusts). It’s a day-and-a-half-long extravaganza but is a little on the pricey side (thankfully there is a student discount), so I’m just attending one of the days.

Law Teacher of the Year

A particular feature of the conference is the showcasing of the nominees for Law Teacher of the Year. One brave nominee, John Tribe (Kingston) even brought along the antique pillories (thankfully - are there any other kind?) that he uses to support the teaching of insolvency law (presumably for visual and pedagogical purposes rather than for better in-class discipline), stored in his Museum of Bankruptcy Law. My good friend and fellow blogger Fernando Barrio (see his blog) is a nominee and was setting up his stand as I arrived this morning.

Parallel Session 1 - Engagement

The parallel sessions grouped papers around keywords - and ‘engagement’ was the keyword for the option I chose to start things off at (around) 9.45.

Jane Henderson and Laurie Lomas: Concept Mapping in Higher Education

This talk dealt with the use of ‘concept mapping’ in teaching at King’s College London, in particular in a project for first year contract law tutorials.

There’s a difference between mindmap and concept mapping, although there are some similarities. The main difference here is that the arrows are labelled. The label can change the meaning.; the focus is how you link concepts together.

We, the audience, demonstrated this ourselves by doing a concept map on paper with sticky notes and lots of arrows on ‘what is a law teacher’. While completing this, the presenters explained how this approach was particularly helpful for supporting legal education, and reported on the results of their analysis of student concept maps. Students were asked to create a concept map of contract law, at the start and at an intermediate point of the semester.

Significant changes were recorded in the detail of the maps created by their students - related to the substantive learning during the semester. Spokes, chains and networks were differentiated (networks being the best, and really only came about in later maps). Differences in whether the labels were merely descriptive or also had elements of further knowledge / causation / etc were also recorded; some tentative correlations to student performance were also mentioned.

Alison Bone: Designing student learning by promoting formative assessment

Alison Bone opened with a further tale of woe involving a cold hotel room, a bath and a power cut. She also admitted that the title is a lie; you can’t actually ‘design’ student learning (”you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink…”).

Students are generally unsatisfied with assessment and feedback, although they’re generally happy with their courses (source: NSS). However, in a survey as part of a previous project by Bone, it turns out that very few UK law students have an opportunity to do ‘pure formative assessment’ (i.e. assessment with no summative component at all).

Pilot project - the main assignment was 2500 words on ‘recent developments’ in employment law; students were allowed to submit 500 words in advance (whether from the same material or not), optional, for formative assessment. Promised within 2 weeks. Nearly two-thirds of those who responded to a subsequent questionnaire said that they didn’t do it, and the vast majority of those said that it was due to lack of time, with only two of them saying that their reason was that they did not think it would help. Fiona Cowlie (Keele) commented on an experiment where she found that after students requested more feedback, a significant group of students did not even collect it! For those who didn’t do the assignment, the response to a question on ‘in hindsight, would it have been useful’ was mixed, and seemingly tainted by the marks received! Bone distinguished between ‘feedback’ and ‘feed-forward’, an increasingly familiar but still interesting nuance. Jane Henderson (one of the earlier speakers) asked about the impact of student fees. Most did find it helpful but for various reasons, including time management, feedback received, etc. From the slides - “A useful suggestion was made that a generic feedback sheet could be given to the whole group after the samples had been returned pointing out eg common errors and good practice – this is currently only done for summative assessment A useful suggestion was made that a generic feedback sheet could be given to the whole group after the samples had been returned pointing out eg common errors and good practice – this is currently only done for summative assessment.”

Keynote

Avrom Sherr (IALS, London) gave a keynote address entitled ‘Language Cuckoos, Cultural Hegemony and Legal Education in the EU: The “Commonisation” of European Law’.

He spoke about two trends that seemed to be in conflict - British isolationism from the EU and Europe in general and educational terms (Euroscepticism, not fitting correctly into Bologna, political context, etc) but also English-language dominance of law and lawyers - becoming a lingua franca (what he referred to as being a phrase “in Italian, about French, meaning English”). The results of some basic research on Italian and German law schools were presented - English strongly dominant in Italy (some foreign language education is required, although a lot of it is pass/fail or ungraded), Germany requires law schools to have a course (module) on foreign law (taught in the foreign langauge) or a law-based foreign language course - again, much of this is in English. There are “Law and” programmes as well of various sorts. Munster even get various native speakers to teach the courses…and it’s even happening in Paris!

He cited this interesting post from Concurring Opinions: “Coming to law school is sort of like learning another language” (here) and told a fun story about Babelfish (Guardian story: “How Babel Fish almost caused a diplomatic incident“). Futher honourable mentions went to Gramsci on power/culture/symbol of language, linguistic hegemony, the market effects of English dominance (Francois Grin, The Economics of Language, 2006) and even Robert Phillipson (someone I’ve read a lot of in the context of linguistic imperialism) - English as the ‘cuckoo‘ in European higher education. We heard about the role of common law legal education more generally, and its ‘fundamentally conservat(ism)’ (Burridge & Webb, (2007) 10(1) Legal Ethics 72-97 (forthcoming)).

Sherr’s conclusion was, by his own admission, inconclusive. The question time was very very short, unfortunately. I would have liked to have raised issues like the role of EU multilingual policies, particularly when it comes to the translation of legal documents, the procedures of the European Parliament, etc. I’m sure others would have liked to consider the classic comparative law questions of the role of common law in the European legal sphere, not to mention the tantalising references made by the speaker to the cultural and normative impact of using a ‘foreign’ language to discuss the law in a given country.

Parallel Session 2 (Integration):

“It’s Land Law, Captain, but not as we know it”: using drama to enhance large group teaching
Mark Davys and Jenny Smith

These speakers, from Keele, gave a very entertaining and engaging presentation about the subject that must have been my least favourite as a law student, land law. With falling attendance and a perception of difficulty, they faced a particular challenge. Davys started by bringing certain dramatic elements into the classroom, making it more interesting - would it get students into the room, even if only to see what the mad idiot did next? So we heard about things like dressing up as James Bond (licensed to register), or channelling Prof. Dumbledorm (Hogworths School of Conveyencing) - and not to mention Star Trek (complete with the backing music from the original 1960s series). But didn’t work in full, so they thought about it some more. They discovered that drama helped to break the material (and the lecture) up into manageable chunks. Change of style/break from learning was helpful to maximise student learning. Furthermore, linking concepts to (contemporary) culture did help to make it more memorable . For example, Peter Birks’ “five keys to land law” were reorganised to spell TARDIS. Thus, Davys reconfigured the ‘fun’ to ensure that it was used to highlight key terminology and new material. An example was an end-of-class discussion of how land law allows control over time and space (Daleks made an appearance here, in audio form). Another example was a song that he performed (and reprised for our benefit) as a summary of material covered to date, to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

A very Interesting point was made by Smith, that land law presents a particular challenge, as students of college age unlikely to have experience of land ownership - and find it hard to relate? I agree - and it is much easier, for example, to discuss principles of consumer contracts, when most students engage in this sort of interaction every weekend. (I’m quite lucky with the technology law elements of my teaching, as the Internet is just made for real case studies!). Their response was, through the virtual learning environment (I think they said they used WebCT, but it’s not relevant), where a ‘real life’ soap-style story was told about a group of second year undergraduate students dealing with a landlady and even considering the purchase of a house between them.

What do the learners have to say? Feedback - some students think drama/music has helped in understanding. Some less positive though. Davys concluded that he was surprised at some resistance by students to teaching not aimed at their own learning preferences, and noted with some amusement that one student found the use of music and drama “inappropriate for a university” - he (Davys) wondered whether lecturing and notetaking is itself appropriate?

Parallel Session 3

PodLaw - Chris Hull (St. Mary’s University College, Twickenham).

I didn’t even know there is a St. Mary’s University College in England - there is an institution (teacher training etc) with the exact same name in Belfast. You learn something new and unusual every day….

Hull spoke about expanding flexible learning and study options to portable learning devices, arguing that this does not represent a significant jump from VLEs, PowerPoint, etc, it’s just that a lot of educators are not aware of how easy it is to make this possible.

His institution uses Blackboard - initially for slides, additional notes, links, submission of assignments - and then a discussion forum. But there were problems - students don’t always access it (they don’t necessarily want to do more than the basic), time is a problem, access to a machine at home (with Net connection) too. Commuting a particular issue for this institution, not to mention students working while studying. (Hull gave the particular example of company policies of no computers for personal use that prevent students from accessing higher education material from office computers during breaks etc - perhaps something for IBEC and ICTU to consider the next time they are promoting part-time studies). I was delighted that the speaker also raised the issue of students with learning difficulties - dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia - ADHD, etc.

Various solutions and applications were discussed, including straightforward podcasting (noting the use of iTalk to record lectures without fuss), converting slides to JPEG and promoting mobile phone use, converting notes to .txt for use on phones, iPods, etc, breaking up audio files (with Audacity or similar) for ease of use, iPod Notes Packer, iWriter, and the very interesting-sounding iQuiz Maker. Another thing that cheered me was a reference in questions and answers to students sharing downloads, notes etc via Bluetooth (phone to phone, no costs incurred). (I’ve written my own things about slides and podcasting here).

That’s all the notes I have, although I did attend a couple of other sessions that I didn’t take as detailed notes on (which is no reflection on their quality). I’ll return to the topic with a more general post tomorrow where I add my own reflections/responses to some of the issues raised.

A couple (literally) of things that caught my eye this week. Happy new year! Normal blogging will be up and running soon.

• A wide-ranging survey of reaction to new law on online expression in Australia from Peter Black. Follow-up post with more links here.
• Contract law getting you down? Just whistle while you work. Story about a singing law professor from Boston, reported by NPR and seen at Concurring Opinions

A suspected terrorist who is subject to a control order is being prevented from studying for AS-levels in chemistry and human biology. The Home Office says the courses provide information which could aid terrorism. The man, known as AE, is an unemployed Iraqi national in his mid-30s who was a medical student, according to the journal Nature. He is subject to restrictions running to 15 pages, including a 16-hour curfew and travel limits. His solicitor, Mohammed Ayub, of Chambers Solicitors in Bradford, said the curbs were excessive as the curriculum was readily available in libraries.

The Guardian, last Thursday.

Why stop at this, though? Poetry is dangerous, especially if you own books at the same time. But it’s OK, because the police assure us that in that case, “She had the ideology, ability and determination to access and download material, which could have been useful to terrorists. Merely possessing this material is a serious criminal offence.” Note the ‘could’, there. And yes, it’s the information-that-could-aid-terrorism weasel words there, backed up by s 58 of the Terrorism Act which makes such possession a crime, in many circumstances.

And we used to think the Offences Against The State legislation was draconian… indeed, even the huge Hederman Report on the package of legislation, where the majority favoured the let’s-keep-the-offences approach in most cases, found that our ‘useful information’ section (the OAS Amendment Act 1998, s should be repealed. (Worth mentioning in that regard that the defence under the Irish act seems a little better than that in the Terrorism Act over the water).

As far as I know, we don’t have any plans to introduce control orders in Ireland - yet. If we do get them, though, and then apply them as in the science case of last week, then why stop there? Indeed, as the solicitor says, the materials are available in libraries - so we should go after them too (not that that’s ever happened before, right?). And of course, judges and human rights lawyers are a fairly big threat, too. Control orders for budding law students, anyone? What’s more dangerous, in the Daily Mail mind - school-level chemistry or a degree in human rights (’bleeding heart soft-on-terror liberal’) law?

This seems like an interesting event - a conference (obviously with a particular starting point for debate) on commercialisation in Irish education, organised by the Campaign for Commercial-Free Education (hence the starting point) with the support of various unions (teacher and student) and school principals, and taking place in TCD Saturday week. I won’t be at it as I have a schedule clash, but the programme (and guest speaker, author Alex Molnar) may interest some of you….

Welcome to what I’m told is the first Irish-hosted Blawg Review, coming to you from Trinity College Dublin. Now, today (Monday October 1st) is the first day for our newest cohort of first year undergraduate students. A little late, you say? Well, as this institution of higher learning has been around for 400-odd years (some of them particularly odd), you may be able to forgive our occasional tardiness. Indeed, our continuing students aren’t back for another week (and my own tutorial teaching won’t start for a few more weeks after that); but of course, those of us hard at work on our PhDs have been (cough) working hard all summer.

Finding new distractions is more like it, and this edition of the Blawg Review is one of the best that has come along so far! Today, with a nod to familiar new (academic) year resolutions, I’m taking a look at some interesting blog posts, both from the familiar Lex Ferenda zones of cyberlaw, media studies and legal education, and from the general blawgosphere and the blog o’sphere. For the information of the regular readers (all ten of you … the Lex Ferendans, perhaps?), Blawg Review is a great ‘blog carnival’ site, and you should subscribe to it, if you want to be really cool and popular and the envy of all your friends

For what it’s worth, it’s also Banned Books Week (says the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom blog), and the start of the baseball postseason (with the Baseball Crank (a lawyer and a Mets fan - sorry for your troubles, sir) taking a wry look at lawyers and civility this week). But enough of that, and off we go:

Choose your courses (carefully?)

Lots of people have been writing about a new paper by Douglas Rush and Hisako Matsuo (the paper is here) on course choice at Law School vs success at bar exams. Responses come from the great and the good, including Dave Hoffman, Business Associations Blog, PrawfsBlawg and even Freakonomics. Meanwhile, Charon QC has a podcast about the recognition of for-profit law school BPP by the Privy Council across the water in the UK.

Buy new books

Wendy Seltzer at the Citizen Media Law Center’s blog wrote about the Harvard Coop’s unusual argument that ISBNs are protected by copyright and taking them down can get you kicked out of the bookstore. Then again, Simon Fodden at slaw.ca wants to buy the Magna Carta…

Take advice from those who have come before you

Bridget Crawford has some detailed advice for the new feminist law professor; this covers everything except the sunscreen.

But why bother with another year in the academic world? Well, you could do worse than take a look at Scott Greenfield’s Top 10 Reasons For Keeping Law Schools (and his follow-up on whether law school is really that bad…

Find out about financial assistance

Our own Ed wonders whether there should be a Blogging Scholarship at law schools. A great idea!

Look for a new job

Daniel Schwartz and George Lenard have written at length about background checks, with an eye to how new technologies and new procedures make the job of the checker so much easier.

Stay out of trouble

Brett Trout, who has been blawgging for years and is in tour with a new book on cyberlaw, has put together some practical tips on keeping your blog out of court. If turning to Crime 2.0 might seem tempting, see Sox First (the sox being the 2002 federal law rather than the triumphant Bostonians), looking at increasing interest in policing virtual crime.

Start a campaign

Students love campaigns, and new technological toys, too. But poor Verizon got themselves in a spot of bother this week, with a decision (quickly reversed) to deny service to pro-choice activists NARAL, on the grounds that the messages would be ‘controversial or unsavoury’. ‘Blandness and depoliticization‘, said Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions, in a great post that weaves together net neutrality, freedom of speech and economics. Susan Crawford explains why it matters.

Take up a new sport

In the hockey world, pre-season has just finished, but the owners of the New York Rangers just bodychecked the National Hockey League. Or, to be more precised, filed suit in a dispute over control of the Rangers’ website, reported by the SportsBiz blog.

Run for election

Eric Turkewitz, the New York Personal Injury Lawyer, previews a case coming up soon in the Supreme Court, where the system of elections to judicial offices in New York State is being challenged. Just keep an eye on the rules: Overlawyered and What About Clients both report on the fuss over Texas Senate candidate Mikal Watts and his seemingly iffy tactics in relation to contributions to judicial candidates..

Work on your Facebook profile

Kevin O’Keefe (from the provocatively-titled Real Lawyers Have Blogs) weighs in on law firms and social networking.

Dress appropriately

Geeklawyer in England has a fun little tale about his fomer co-blogger Ruthie and her pre-trial nightmares.

Read something new

Martin Weller (the Ed Techie) set up a distributed conversation on ‘the future of content’, and the legal issues are expertly handled by Ray Corrigan at B2fxxx. And I can’t help but mention the New Zealand law-by-wiki project.

Dig out your old lecture notes

Last week, I was at the GikII workshop (say it ‘geeky’, or any way you want to) in London. I summarised all the presentations here. The presentation and questions by Fernando Barrio is picked up by Virtually Blind: is Second Life a patent-free zone? Apparently so, says the small print. Not so fast, says the rest of the world. Jordan Hatcher did one better and found his slides on tattoos and copyright law picked up by BoingBoing (more from Jordan’s own blog here. Hans Peter Lehofer at Content and Carrier kindly refers to my own net neutrality presentation in a lovely post (including Shakespeare) on net neutrality in Europe.

Find out what’s going on in your neck of the woods

Fiona de Londras at the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights in Cork has started a new blog on, well, criminal justice and human rights! This post on secret detention is a good taster of what’s to come. Indeed, Darius Whelan’s post at Irish Law Updates highlights a busy year ahead at University College Cork. A short hop away, Lilian Edwards is gearing up for the launch of ILAWS at the University of Southampton.

(Especially for postgrads): watch out for your supervisor!

Finally, my supervisor Eoin O’Dell, who blogs at cearta.ie, has returned from a summer blogging break, with a post about a controversial Irish libel case and what it means for Irish defamation law and for bloggers.. So I had better get back to work!

Thanks for reading this week’s Blawg Review. Daithí Mac Síthigh (da-hee mac shee-hig) is my name, and I’m writing a PhD on new media regulation (and doing a bit of teaching, a bit of research, and various other things) at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin. Lex Ferenda is my blog, eighteen months old and acting as a PhD sandpit, a soapbox, a testbed and so much more. I’d love to have you as a regular reader, and would welcome any comments.

Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.