Those horrible law school outlines.

Recently I noticed that there is a collection of student-written, downloadable course outlines on my law school's website. It is a section of the website used by the Student Bar Association, but it is clearly a subsection of the law school's website, with the law school's banner at the top, just like the official pages that contain faculty bios, course descriptions, information about admissions, and so forth. I was quite surprised to find this as part of our website and really irked to see my own name as a hot link that led to some unknown student's effort at summarizing my class. No one has ever asked me if I accepted that use of my name or what I thought of outlines purporting to represent my classes appearing on the law school's website. Reading over some of these outlines, I can see how misleading they are. In fact, I can see material in these outlines that is the source of some of the most puzzlingly incoherent things I've read in some of the worst exams (a good reason to give closed-book exams).

I do understand the one good reason for making the outlines available: to prevent students from feeling bad that other students have access to outlines that they are unable to see. Here's a story one of my colleagues tells:

In my heart I hate the idea [of outlines on the website], but I recall when I was in Law School, the Law Review kept a library of past outlines from law review staff and editors. They were given ONLY to other law review folks and tightly guarded. There was an internal penalty from the Editor-in-Chief if there was any thought that you even allowed, say your roommate, to even glance at one. These outlines were much lusted after by other student because they were LAW REVIEW outlines.

I always believed in my own outlines and never used anyone else's, but I was aware that other students really thought they would benefit from them.

The Journal of [Not Law Review], of which I was an Articles Editor, shared an internal office door with the Law Review. We had a key because we shared certain equipment with them. One night a rascally friend and I went into their offices late at night, took the entire library, carried it down to an all-night copying store and copied every one of them. The next morning we opened a stand in the student atrium selling copies for the price of duplication.

All the usual drama ensued, but in the end, Law Review sneakingly felt a little dirty for behaving in such an elitist way (this was [name of Law School], remember) and grouchingly backed off. The Editor-in-Chief never spoke a word to me again until we graduated.

It's interesting, I never felt the slightest moral qualm about doing it; in fact, we were so elated we had to keep quieting each other's giggles in case we should be detected at 3 am. Today, I feel a little more dubious about it, but I guess that's why it is good most of us go to school, where foolish boldness is sometimes important, when we are young and not middle-aged.

The elitism issue is interesting, but access to some student-donated outlines on the website is no assurance that there are not better outlines hoarded by elite sub-groups. Isn't there a temptation to donate inferior outlines to waste the time of or deliberately mislead other students, who are your competitors on an exam and whose poor grades will improve your position on the curve? I'm not saying I think any of our fine students would give in to that temptation, but shouldn't you worry an awful lot about the quality of the outlines that are made generally available? Even when the outlines are good, they aren't anywhere nearly as good as your own genuine preparation would be, they are likely to be out-of-date, and you will have to waste time working on checking their accuracy.

Law students: the formula for preparing for a law school exam is simple. Read the cases carefully. Write a short summary in your own words after you've read the case. If you can't do that, reread the case until you can. Go to class, and use the class to reinforce your confidence that you are summarizing the cases well on your own and to deepen your understanding of how courts decide cases and what arguments count as good legal arguments. After class, reread your case notes and your class notes and write a summary, as short as possible, combining the two. When the exam nears, reread those after-class summaries and compress them into the shortest form you can: this will be an outline that is very meaningful to you, but not to someone who has not gone through those steps. Right before the exam, reread your outline until you know that you know everything in it. That's it! Don't retrace these steps. Don't waste time with anyone else's outline or study guide. Don't waste time being envious of study material someone else has developed. There is never anything better than the material you develop yourself.

The key line in my colleague's story is: "I always believed in my own outlines." If you don't already believe in your own outlines, you are hurting yourself by not preparing in a way that will build up your confidence in your own capabilities. You're going to need that confidence later.

Three State Street windows

and a sticker found on a nearby dumpster. The first two windows are Ragstock, a second-hand clothing store, which is always redoing its windows with homemade art. The third window is Badger Liquor, previously photographed here.

Should Ray Bradbury be mad at Michael Moore?

Moore's film title "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a play on the Bradbury title "Fahreheit 451," and Bradbury is demanding an apology. (Why all the stress on apologies these days? It wasn't so long ago that people got steamed at apologies on the ground that they implied that just saying you're sorry is enough.) The Straits Times reports:

Bradbury, who hadn't seen the movie, said he called Moore's company six months ago to protest and was promised Moore would call back.

He finally got that call last Saturday, Bradbury said, adding Moore told him he was "embarrassed."

Joanne Doroshow, a spokesman for Fahrenheit 9/11, said the film's makers have the "utmost respect for Ray Bradbury."

Six months to return a phone call to a person you have the utmost respect for? All I can say is it's too bad an indie film crew wasn't following Bradbury around all that time while he was trying to get in touch with Moore. It might have made a funny documentary that could have been called "Michael and Me."

But to answer my own question, Ray Bradbury should be mad, and not just about the long wait time for the phone call. Moore's title will pop into people's heads when they see Bradbury's title. And Moore's documentary is very strong stuff, designed to elate Bush-haters and be completely unwatchable for people who aren't already quite opposed to Bush. From what I've heard from my son, who saw the film the other day in New York, the film is a disjointed montage of clips that doesn't even make an attempt at providing coherent information. It is just: images to hate Bush by. Why should Bradbury want his great classic book linked to that? If "utmost respect" were really felt for Bradbury, his title would not have been used without his permission.

I'd like to hear Moore or Moore's spokesperson attempt to say something credible about why the claim of "utmost respect" isn't a blatant lie. And I'd like an obnoxious interviewer to hold a microphone in his face and ask the question, then follow him around re-asking the question, and film the whole set of encounters, and edit the film into a montage that makes Moore look as bad as possible, then spend as much time as possible trying to get Moore to watch that film and film those efforts to reach Moore. If you don't end up with enough material for the film "Michael and Me," just edit in various news clips that will make it seem like he's responsible for ... Oh, I can't even write it. It's all too mean and unfair to make a movie Michael Moore-style.

UPDATE: I credited the Straits Times website, but it is an AP article, which you can also see here. The article seems like it will be drawing a lot of commentary (Metafilter is discussing it). I note how quickly the discussion focuses on the question whether Bradbury has a legal right to force Moore to change the title and want to emphasize that I'm not talking about legal rights here. People have a strange way of assuming that if there is a legal right in the general area, then as long as you don't violate the legal right, you don't deserve criticism.

A joke I eventually got.

In an endorsement of my "why blog" post from yesterday, Jeremy makes a joke based on my name that, as he recognized when he made it, is hard for a Mac user like me to get. I did eventually get it, but it got me wondering why the Apple people decided to call the key "option" instead of "alt." Is there something unfriendly sounding about "alt"? I can understand wanting to replace "control" with a nice little outline of an apple. (Note to Gwyneth Paltrow: Control could be a nickname for the baby.) Maybe once Apple started renaming computer keys they kept renaming things, trying to make Mac-using feel like a warm, enveloping environment. My favorite Apple ouster of an unfriendly term is the rejection of the verb "boot" to refer to turning on your computer.

And a cheer of joy goes up!

Cliff made the cut! A few hours ago, it looked as though Cliff would end up one stroke away from making the cut. But the way it fell out--I'm not really sure what went on in those last 2 hours of play--they drew the cut at +5 and not the predicted +4, so Cliff Kresge will be playing the final two rounds of the U.S. Open. Yay!

UPDATE: And Cliff--he's my nephew, folks--ends up close to the bottom of the pack. Too bad! There's always next week.

Why blog?

Ambivalent Imbroglio emailed me, asking why, as a lawprof, I've taken up blogging. He's a law student interested in what motivates lawprofs to blog. I suppose the fact that I'm blogging an answer to email (which he suggested) rather than responding by email is the first hint of the answer to the why blog question.

I started blogging back in January, shortly before the Spring 2004 semester began, and after a period of being extremely busy with a series of scholarly writing commitments. There I was, neatening up my office one leisurely day in January:

I was in the midst of cleaning out my office, having just covered the floor with books and papers. I paused the direct streaming "Fresh Air" I was listening to and checked my email, which included a colleague's description of her reasons for starting a blog. I had just emailed her about my admiration for her and my own timidity: "I'll have to think about getting up the nerve to do this sort of thing. It seems if you're going to do it, you need to become somewhat chatty and revealing, which is a strange thing to do to the entire world." Then it seemed altogether too lame not to go ahead and start the blog.

That's the second post ever to appear on the blog. The first post was explaining the name choice, which I soon abandoned, for reasons I posted about back in January. The colleague referred to in that post is Nina Camic, whose link appears in the blogroll over there in the sidebar. She had been influenced by Jeremy Freese (also in the blogroll), who is in the Sociology department, and who is blogging today about how sociology profs don't blog as much as lawprofs (or participate in email list discussions). My colleague across the hall, Gordon Smith, was also already blogging, but I never regarded his blogging as a reason why I should blog. He had a particular blog-niche, his specialty of entrepreneurship, and he was using his blog in a particular way that didn't make me think there is a place for me. I suppose I was waiting for years for someone to say to me "You should blog." Maybe it seemed that because others had done it first, it would be unoriginal of me to do it too.

I had been reading blogs quite a lot, especially since the 9/11 attacks. Living in Madison and reading the New York Times every day, I really felt hungry for different perspectives at this point. It meant a lot at that time to read Instapundit and the people he was linking to. I found myself exchanging email with my two sons (both college students at the time) with links and comments, which ended up seeming very much like blogging, but with an extremely limited audience.

Though I was behind the curve about blogging, I was ahead of the curve about email lists. My FedCourts email list was, I believe, the first of the lawprof discussion lists, and CivPro followed soon after that. I think that was 1995 that I started those lists, which I still maintain today. I also started a faculty discussion list in the Law School here around that time, back at a point when I had to keep explaining to people what it meant to activate your email and when one person in the Law School begged me not to start such a list on the theory that it unfairly discriminated against people who didn't want to use email. All of those email lists and others (especially Conlawprof, which Eugene Volokh maintains) have been an outlet for discussing law and law school topics, but they have also been unsatisfying for several reasons. The law school email list has never unleashed the kind of vibrant discussion I was hoping for. Many people balk at putting things into writing for one reason or another, and the threads would die off way too early. You can't do all the talking on those things, so I found myself stifling most of the things I might have said. I was disappointed, for example, that after the 2000 election everyone wasn't excited about talking about the details from day to day. I forwarded email from the Conlawprof and the FedCourts lists to the Wisconsin faculty list, but stopped when I heard the first too-much-email complaint. If you're the most talkative person on an email list, a lot of people on that list will see you as something akin to a spammer. And there was never much range to the topics discussed. You couldn't really chat about American Idol or the contents of your junk drawer. Email lists are also unsatisfying because everyone who receives what you write also receives email from people who jump on what you've written, and many times these people write intemperately, making personal attacks or getting weirdly outraged. Often they just misread what you've written. Every time you check your email, you feel a certain anxiety about what people are saying about you on the list, and responding can become a chore.

So when Nina gave me the slightest personal invitation into blogging, I accepted. I really had been wanting to do it for a long time. Once you start, you discover from day-to-day why you are blogging and what your subject matter is. You have a record of what you're interested in and can go back and learn a lot about yourself. I surveyed my interests after the after the first 10 days--I actually counted the first 100 names dropped, to get a picture of what had caught my eye. I haven't formally surveyed myself since then, but generally I'm interested in seeing what I'm interested in. So many thoughts run through your head every day as you observe the world around you and read or have conversations or remember things from long ago. The blog form is a wonderful thing, because it creates a habit of writing every day, allows you to write about anything, and transforms everyday passive experiences like web-reading, print-reading, and TV- and movie-watching into an active process of writing. Once you know people are reading you, you feel even more activated to keep writing. You can see how many people are reading you, who is linking to you, what words people have Googled before coming to your blog--that's all quite amusing and energizing.

As to the law part of all of this: I like to have a place to opine immediately about various things about law and law school. I especially like being in a position to write about new Supreme Court cases within an hour or so after they are issued. When the Newdow case came out this week, I found that really exciting, and wrote the equivalent of 7 pages on the case that day (even though it was otherwise a busy teaching day, the first day of my summer Conlaw class, and I had several hours of exam-grading that had to be done). If it weren't for the blog, I would not have read the case so intensely, so quickly. I would have scanned it and perhaps planned to write about it in the next month or so, but the blog created a great momentum and made it quite satisfying to try to figure things out on the first day and to put out some written analysis that people could link to.

I also like having the opportunity to convey some of the feeling of what it is like to be at the University of Wisconsin Law School, which is a special place, and in Madison, Wisconsin, which is also pretty special. Maybe I can influence some law school applicants to consider coming here rather than somewhere else or just make some people who want to come here anyway have something of a feeling (a good one, I hope) for the place that they will be going. Maybe some alumni and other former residents will enjoy checking in here to reminisce about good old Madison. There are also some issues about teaching law that I like to be able to air my opinions about, and the blog is a great place to do it. For example, very soon I'm going to blog about the downloadable class outlines that are available on the Law School's website.

Finally, after the first 2 months of blogging I figured out how to post images here, and that led me to buy a digital camera. The process of walking around in Madison and elsewhere with an eye out for things photographable is extremely rewarding in itself. Being able to put the pictures where a lot of people can see them has been probably the best part of blogging for me. I went to art school a long time ago, and I know what it is like to produce a lot of images that are not seen. So the ease of reaching out with the pictures through the blog is a miraculous pleasure.

Let me just end this long post by saying, the blog is a great format because of its day-to-day entry structure, the ease of reaching out to the whole world, and the power of the link. But it's just a format, the way a magazine or a slot of television time is a format. You can put anything you want into it. I know that some lawprof bloggers are trying to be very strictly focused on legal topics and others blend law with some other things, especially political news and analysis. I haven't set out in advance to have any particular set of things on this blog. I get up in the morning and know I will blog about something even though I have no idea what it is yet. But I'm interested in finding out what it is and gratified to see that other people are too.

Atwood Avenue, Madison.

On the East Side of Madison, not all of the buildings are beautiful:









But beauty is everywhere. Turn your head just to the left of that last sight and see this:




Down the block, there is the Jamaican Arts & Crafts Shop, where the sign will proudly show the colors of the Jamaican flag, even though yellow doesn't show up well and makes "crafts" look like "rats":



You can get a latte at Café Zoma (where I am right now, with WiFi). It looks like this inside:



Or you can sit out in bacK:



Have some cake, too:



Maybe Sugar Shack, the used records store across the street will be open. The sign in the window sets the opening time at 12, but adds, "Sometime soon I'll be changing the opening time to 11, or maybe even 10:30, but for now I probably won't be here til noon." Even if it's closed, the windows offer up an entertaining nostalgia experience. Note the thoughtful placement of the AC/DC box set at the feet of the AC/DC T-shirt-wearing Butthead:



The Platters, the Beatles, the Monkees--grouped together because of the "the"? Because of the smiles? Because of a musical affinity?



Let's put Nixon next to Clinton, perhaps only to show how long the old phoney money novelty business has been milking the same joke:



And here are Elvis and Ludwig (Beethoven's head is cracked, possibly from rolling over):




You can contemplate the significance of an inverted Star Trek mug poised in front of a reel-to-reel:



Remember the guy in college who stuffed his dorm bed full of dirty clothes and then put this album cover on the pillow, so it looked from a distance like there was an insane guy in his bed? That ranks very high on my list of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. Here's the sublime cover opened up with the trees across the street reflected in the window:

Blog description phrase recently fulfilled.

Recently, I rewrote my blog description (which you see over there in the sidebar). I was trying to be accurate, among other things, and I came up with this:

Politics and the aversion to politics, law and law school, high and low culture, and the way things look from Madison, Wisconsin.

Looking back over the last two posts, I'd just like to say that that's what I meant by the third clause.

Brancusi at the Guggenheim.

The Guggenheim Museum has now opened its exhibition of 35 sculptures of Constantin Brancusi. I went to the museum two weeks ago when I was in New York for a few days, and the lower part of the Wisconsin architect's spiral ramp was closed to visitors. So I got a discount on the admission price--$10 instead of $15--and went in to see a big show of photographs of all different sorts, linked only by their interest in the subject of hands. I also got to peek over the barriers and see the Brancusi sculptures being tucked into the grand niches of the lower spiral. I couldn't take photographs of this, but photography is permitted in the central circle of the ground floor, where they had just painted the platform for "Miracle (Seal I)" and were speed-drying the wet paint with big fans. The NYT, in its article today, particularly loves the way the old seal looks in what I see is officially called the "rotunda" and generally loves the way the way Brancusi fits into the Wisconsin architect's brilliant space:

The first signal of the perfect fit is one of the most endearing of the museum's 11 Brancusis: the white marble "Miracle (Seal I)" centered on the floor of the rotunda. At ground level, this semi-abstract rendition of an alert seal on its broad, circular limestone base conveys discreet jubilation, like a circus with the sound turned off. As you wind upward, the work also suggests an unusually full-bodied sundial or ritual marker, the still point of a sacred site. (Just in time for the summer solstice.)

Here's my photograph:

Am I going to watch the Joe Schmo Show?

I watched the first season of the show and I've watched the first episode, but I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to stick with it. The main thing I don't like is that it is a parody of the dating shows, particularly The Bachelor/-ette, and I've never watched those [Bachelor/-ette], so I'm not going to get the references. For example, on the first show, the two characters (actors) who are supposed to pick the love of their lives are told to eliminate three contestants each, judging them entirely on first impression. There are about fourteen contestants at this point, all but two of whom are actors pretending to be real contestants. The two main actors give all six of the black balls--symbols of elimination--to contestants who are members of minority groups. Then they had to do a voice over to explain why that is supposed to be hilarious and that the problem is the way minority contestants are eliminated early on other shows. But that can only amuse you if you've been irked or outraged by noticing this on the other shows. It's like watching a political satire based on public figures you don't know anything about.

The main thing I know about dating shows is that the people are boring. They keep meeting and having nothing to say to each other (except "I felt a connection" or possibly "a real connection"). I have watched a few of the shows: Boy Meets Boy, Joe Millionaire, and Cupid. Only Cupid was interesting (although overall an immense waste of time), because it was structured like American Idol and the American people got to vote for the candidate they wanted to keep seeing. That became truly hilarious because there was a character the woman looking for love could not tolerate, and the American people--one mischievous segment of it, at least--decided they wanted to see more painful dates. I'm not worried that Joe Schmo will be boring, though, because the actors are likely to talk a lot and make a lot of trouble for the two sincere contestants. I'm just afraid it won't be fun to watch a send-up of shows I haven't seen. But I hate the genre, so maybe I'll enjoy the satire--if it's mean enough.

The main reason I think I might like it is that it will be interesting to have two "Joe Schmos" rather than one, especially since one is a woman. So: Joe and Jo ... really: TIm and Ingrid. And the cool thing about Ingrid is she's always threatening to catch on. She's always talking to the actors and putting them on the spot. She started questioning everyone in the first five minutes, which caused one of the actors who was only supposed to stand there for a minute and get blackballed to slip up and mention her agent. Ingrid observed that several of the actors seemed rehearsed (which they were) and said it was like "The Truman Show." Yet the guy, Tim, is just hanging out, much like Matt, the season 1 Joe Schmo. Tim, like Matt, is pretty much mesmerized by the pretty women and enjoying the fun. He's just not noticing. Behind the scenes, we see the producers freaking out and saying "Get him outta there" when Ingrid starts taking about "The Truman Show." Yet Tim notices nothing. His mind, as opposed to his body, is just not engaged enough to pick up any clues. He's believing what he wants to believe.

(Somehow, I think this contrast is related to the discussion over at Volokh Conspiracy and Andrew Sullivan (pointed out by Instapundit) about why woman and gay men tend to put more effort into their physical appearance than do heterosexual men. I'd say: the effort seems to really pay off. Tim and Ingrid were both put into a setting where they are surrounded by completely attractive would-be partners, and Ingrid kept being perceptive and suspicious about the hidden motivations, but Tim was just loving what he saw. One can say that someone pursuing Ingrid would need to pay attention to appearance but also to a lot of other things, while someone pursuing Tim could put virtually 100% of her effort into outward appearance with the aim of causing a mental shutdown that would make all nonphysical deficiencies unimportant.)

Anyway, it may be quite fun to follow the Tim/Ingrid distinction.

Two things I learned from the official Joe Schmo blog (discovered via Throwing Things, which will be blogging the Joe Schmo Show): the falcon that swooped in with the plot twist message was named Montecore because that was the name of the tiger that attacked Roy (of Siegfried and Roy), the character Ambrosia is based on Omarosa (of The Apprentice).

So, then, am I going to watch it? Is Prof. Yin going to watch? No word yet.

I wanted a room with a view.

My summer class has been meeting in one of the classrooms that looks into the atrium. It's a bit underventilated, but I've just scored a change of venue. Beginning Monday, I'll be here, looking out onto Bascom Mall. Ah!

Our local Big Brother.

(Big Badger.) This sign is posted all over campus:

A problem with automatic doors.

(Via Metafilter.)

Three signs from Main Street.

Here are three signs from Main Street in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin. This one is, I think, a beautiful example of a folk-art style sign. I especially love the irregular lettering (which neatly sits on a ruled edge).



This is a very typical example of Wisconsin humor:



This is a close-up of part of a painted window that reads "Cottage Charm."

Here's the leaderboard....

... for the U.S. Open. I'm rooting for my nephew, Cliff Kresge, who starts at 8:30 eastern time.

Here's a cool front-page article in the NYT about the fancy RVs some golfers live in on the road. Like the Osbournes, some golfers just bring their whole family along with them as they tour. The PGA Tour provides day care for the kids, and, according to the article, is looking to provide "home schooling," as there are 467 kids who travel along with the Tour. It's kind of a glamourous lifestyle, traveling around in a $500,000 RV. But though you may have "granite floors, plasma televisions, lamp-shaded wall sconces and retractable bay windows and awnings," it's packed into 500 square feet of space. And what if the golfer has had a bad round and needs to get it together for the next day and the kids are tired of everything revolving around dad's mental state?

UPDATE: Cliff has finished Round 1. The good news is: he's tied with Tiger Woods. The bad news is: that's only 61st place (right now--not everyone's finished). Tomorrow will be important.

FURTHER UPDATE: At this point--Friday at 7:42 CDT--the 2 over par finish is at 42nd place, as some players are still trying to finish the first round and others are beginning the second round. So I'll never be able to get the place number right for the first round, taken alone. Cliff starts at 1:30. Good luck!

Power outtage.

What if there were a power outtage in the middle of the night, and you had to prepare to teach an 8 am class, and you'd set two alarm clocks (well, an alarm clock and an alarm TV), but both of the alarm clocks were connected to power cords and had no backup battery?

Let's just say it's a good thing I tend to wake up naturally and take a look at a watch. On Monday, I came home from work at about 7 pm, fell asleep, woke up and looked at my watch, saw it was 7:40, and seriously thought it was Tuesday morning and class was in 20 minutes. For a few seconds, I quickly gathered my thoughts about how to make it in in time and be ready to teach for 2 hours when I hadn't looked at the notes or the material since the beginning of the previous semester. I was quite ready to take it all in stride when it occurred to me that, though it was still light out, it was 7:40 pm.