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gregh's blog
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Final exams to take? One.
NCSL Supports The Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2007:
However, lacking the full policy and financial commitment of the federal government to ensure the success of the state-federal partnership needed to make REAL ID possible, NCSL now calls upon Congress to repeal REAL ID and reinstate the negotiated rule-making process. This approach will achieve our shared goals for security in a manner that respects states’ rights, privacy protections, and fiscal responsibility.
S.717, which I previously covered in its 2006 form, would bring back the negotiated rulemaking and return to the states the authority to preserve their own privacy regimes.
Keep your fingers crossed.
(Via Jim Harper.)
If you're a proponent of ubiquitous, open communication, it can be embarrassing to admit that you don't see much benefit in Twitter. However, it's not hard to note that most of the big Twitter advocates are people who sit around and blog all day. Who else can possibly devote the time to watching a stream of messages scrolling in some window or popping up or hitting your mobile phone all day long? I've already got personal email, school email, work email, blogs, discussion forums, and random web sites to read (not every web site I'm interested in provides me a feed to make tracking easier.)
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch is right on when he declares that Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise—And Twhirl Isn’t Helping. More correctly, I'd argue that Web 3.0 must be about reducing noise. Most people can't tolerate the noise level that exists with all of the blogs out there. (Go ask a "regular" user about what feed reader they use. Hehe.)
Here's where I think Erick really got to the crux of the matter:
But if you think it is hard enough to keep up with e-mails and instant messages, keeping up with the Web (even your little slice of it) is much worse. Putting Twhirl on your desktop and hearing the constant “ding” of new messages coming in will make you realize that this is IM on steroids. (You will quickly turned off the sound).
. . .
I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits.
Yes! Show me the information I want, not all the information that might be out there in my world. The current situation is like abusive discovery. "They want documents? Oh, we'll give them documents!" No, no. Relevant information that may lead to admissible evidence.
There may be useful nuggets that come across Twitter, but unless one is doing little more than sitting around looking to be the first to blog on a topic, I can't imagine there's enough useful when broadly following to make it worth the distraction. Until something changes, I'm going to be in Erick's camp.
On our class mailing list, a correspondent responded to the news of our decline in the rankings like this:
WTF. We have the 4th highest bar passage rate in California...
Bar passage rate doesn't really matter. In effect, all that matters is that your graduates are employed -- not that they can practice -- and that your name resonates with those answering surveys about 200 law schools spread throughout the country. (Wait and see. UC Irvine will have sky-high reputation rankings as soon as US News includes them, even though they will have little academic output and respondents will have little if any exposure to their grads.)
Bar passage rate is a minuscule part (2%) of the ranking index. What's more, the data that US News uses lags, so our numbers wouldn't be affected by last year's bar passage rate, which may have been anomalous, in any case. The largest component of the ranking index is the so-called "quality assessment," which is based on the surveys sent to law school deans, professors, judges, and practitioners. We don't do particularly well on that front, and that certainly impacts our ranking. I haven't seen the actual numbers, but I've read some reports that suggest our reputation score dropped, while Santa Clara's climbed, which explains why they jumped way up while we fell.
Unfortunately, the reputation numbers -- despite what US News claims -- appear to be readily swayed by marketing, the "law porn" that is sent out. After reputation, placement statistics come into play. We've had enough churn in the administrative side of the school that there are lots of things that can explain what happened, both in marketing and in collecting and reporting placement stats.
Fortunately, it doesn't really matter. Reputation informs the rankings in the short term, but the rankings are only going to inform reputation in the long term, as churn in the legal community from those obsessed by the rankings go into the world with their notions of who's good and who's bad. Whatever reputation we had yesterday is likely to be the reputation we'll have as we go off into the community. (Of course, it also makes it very difficult and expensive to increase reputation score.)
I don't know exactly. But it's clear -- it actually is very clear looking at the methodology -- that increasing bar passage rate isn't much help. Of the USF-competitive California schools, Santa Clara up, USD down but still T2, McGeorge up, and Pepperdine way up.
Leiter asks that bloggers not reveal actual rankings. Not hard to do when you're posting about a school that's unranked, as it fell back into T3.
See here.
There are many possible reasons for this to happen. When KU plunged several years ago, the fingers were pointed at the changing of the guard at career services; we've had similar changes at USF. However, it's really the reputation numbers that can be painful, and they're the most meaningful. After all, they reflect what drives employers to USF (or affect employers who post that, even with years of experience, you must come from a top-ranked law school.) And that just keeps cycling, as future reputation is driven both by those who enter the profession and the lingering shadows of past reputations.
Oh well.
Today marks 5 calendar years at my current employer. It's my longest stretch of single-employer employment yet.
I haven't heard anything, so I assume the party must be a surprise...
I don't really know what to say about this:
Time and Space to Meditate at the Law School
Beginning on Wednesday, March 12th, the TV Lounge in Zief Law Library will be
reserved at regular times for meditation for members of the Law School community.
There will be Guided Meditation Instruction and Discussion on Wednesdays from
12:30 pm – 1:15 pm. The instructors are Professor Rhonda Magee, Professor
Judi Cohen and Professor Tim Iglesias.
The room will be reserved for Private (unguided) Meditation on Mondays, Wednesdays
and Fridays from 8:00am – 9:00am and on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:00pm – 6:00pm.
All are welcome: beginners (even if you are just curious) and regular meditators.
Some meditation cushions will be available.
Sponsored by the Ad Hoc Committee on Contemplative Practices in Law.
Emphasis added to the name of the organization. I was visited by one of our recent bar takers a few months ago to ask if I'd seen the posters. I so wanted to blog about it, but words escaped me.
(To say the title properly, think of Seinfeld and "Those aren't buoys!")
And what am I doing to celebrate?
Well, it's coming up on 3 AM, and I haven't left the office yet.
I'm not sure if this a Chandler spring break or a Ross spring break.
There are so many corners on the Nürburgring, it's easy to lose track. It's not good to that at 180 MPH.
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