Dorf on Law

One of the most welcome initiatives in U.S. law schools over the last decade or so has been the creation of LRAPs, or Loan Repayment Assistance Programs, which subsidize (by delaying or reducing payments on student loans) recent law school graduates who work in an approved list of jobs. Those jobs are generally referred to as "public interest employment" and are, therefore, rather low paying -- especially by comparison to the positions in large law firms that so many law students seek. Many students who take the higher paying jobs will tell you that they feel boxed in, forced to take higher-paying jobs simply to pay off their student loans, even thought they'd really rather work in the public interest. Law schools responded with LRAP programs. Makes sense. Given that LRAPs cost the law schools money, the difficulty lies in deciding who is most deserving of the limited dollars available for these subsidies. Beyond the obvious starting point of limiting the pool of pot...

I urge those readers who think that the debate between textualism and purposivism in statutory interpretation is a bit on the dull/wonkish side to read my latest FindLaw column . It addresses the timeless issue---recently resolved by the Iowa Supreme Court---whether a peeping tom who masturbates outside a woman's window, but who is not seen by that woman, yet is seen (and by seen I mean "seen") by a police officer, has committed the crime of indecent exposure. The Iowa Supreme Court, in a defendant-friendly textualist opinion says he has not committed the offense as defined by the Iowa statute. A purposivist dissent accompanies the opinion. Is it only a matter of time before this case appears in casebooks for courses on Legislation and Statutory Interpretation? Posted by Mike Dorf

I am not one of the people who think that inexperience is the best reason to worry about the possibility of a Palin Presidency. As I noted in my earlier blog post on the subject, people who supported McCain on the ground that he has more of the relevant experience than Obama should be concerned about Palin, but that was primarily a point about other people's lack of consistency. Here I want to make a different point along the same dimension. The idea that Alaska's proximity to Russia demonstrates Palin's foreign policy bona fides is worse than preposterous. Its premise isn't even correct. The distance (as calculated here ) from Juneau, the capital of Alaska, to Moscow, the capital of Russia, is 4540.88 miles. Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, is over 100 miles closer to Moscow. Just imagine how the press, public, and Republicans would have reacted if supporters of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential bid had listed among his foreign polic...

[As I mentioned previously, I had drafted an entry on French democracy but did not post it because I thought it too long. I have decided ultimately to post it, but broken up into three parts. In the first part, I suggested that France could be seen as enjoying a particularly robust democracy, even in comparison with the US. In this second part, I want to posit two suggestions as to why such a state of affairs might have evolved in the way it did.] Why might French democracy be so vital in comparison with others? Here, I want to suggest two possible explanations: one more standard, the second more ‘eccentric’. The more standard explanation was suggested to me by Antoine Garapon , a former French judge and now a ‘public intellectual’ in France writing on issues of comparative judging. His explanation lies in the relatively low political impact of French courts, as compared to that of the United States. Basically, since French court rulings do not have precedential effect, the courts them...

{Note from Mike Dorf: Below is a guest post by Karima Bennoune, who is a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She is also a Professor of Law and the Arthur L. Dickson Scholar at the Rutgers Law School – Newark . The post below draws on Professor Bennoune's most recent article, Terror/Torture , published in the Berkeley Journal of International Law.} I am the daughter of a former prisoner of war and torture survivor. Similar to the experience of Senator John McCain, my late father spent about 4 and 1/2 years of his youth behind bars for involvement in one of the terrible conflicts of the second half of the 20 th Century. As a member of Algeria ’s independence movement, he knew the hardship of France ’s colonial jails from 1957 until independence in 1962. Anyone who has seen “The Battle of Algiers” knows the rest of his story. The torture of my father has colored my life in the way that it often does with the children of those who have known it....

The near-invisibility of President Bush at last week's Republican National Convention prompts in me the question whether we are better or worse off having the 22nd Amendment, which limits Presidents to two elected terms. In the narrowest sense, the roughly2/3 of Americans who are unhappy with President Bush can thank the 22nd Amendment for guaranteeing that he won't get a third term. But of course a very unpopular President would be unlikely to win a third term, and might therefore not even run for one, even absent the 22nd Amendment. That was essentially what Lyndon Johnson decided in 1968, even though he could have run again. Moreover, if Bush were eligible for a third term, and decided to seek one, then the Republican Party would have had to have had a public debate about whether to run on or away from his record. To my mind, that would have been much preferable to what the McCain-Palin ticket is actually doing: running to perpetuate most of the Bush policies but preten...

Per Article III of the Constitution, federal judges "hold their offices during good behaviour," a term generally taken to mean that they have life tenure. Might there be a difference? That issue is raised by the indictment of U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent for, among other things he is alleged to have done to an office worker, trying to force her to perform oral sex on him. Yet, it appears that despite the grand jury's finding of probable cause to indict, Judge Kent will continue to hear cases while his trial proceeds. Rep. Sheila Jackson, who, like Judge Kent, is from Texas, and serves on the House Judiciary Committee, has said: "We want to proceed on the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty." Presumably the action that Rep. Jackson and her colleagues are delaying is impeachment and removal. Remarkably, at least one federal judge, Walter Nixon, refused to resign his seat on the bench even AFTER having been convicted and sentenced to pris...

In a couple of hours the Cornell Law School will be hosting a lecture on "Cross-Strait Relations" by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, the Chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DDP) in Taiwan. Dr. Tsai's party takes a considerably more pro-independence line than the Chinese Communist Party favors, and so the lecture has prompted the Chinese government to protest. With a great many Chinese students in the university, and with memories of campus reactions to protests regarding Tibet still fresh, it promises to be an interesting afternoon (although hopefully not as interesting as the last time I blogged about a controversial foreign leader coming to my campus, nearly a year ago). International disputes over secession and territorial integrity are generally portrayed in the Western press through the lens of self-determination and democracy, and certainly where an imperial power annexes a territory to oppress or kill its people, or to steal its natural resources, that portrayal fits...

[I am a guest on the Concurring Opinions blog this month. The post below is a very slightly edited version of my post there yesterday. Throughout the month, I will cross-post here on my blog home, Dorf on Law, because I will be writing on subjects that are of interest to our regular readers as well.] There is a question that virtually every law professor has asked me since I migrated from being an economics professor to a law professor: What is different about economists and lawyers? The question, of course, invites generalities and over-simplifications -- an invitation that I do not decline when asked the question and will certainly not decline here. Admitting that there are a million exceptions to every rule, I do believe that there is one predictable type of error toward which legal training seems to push people, and there is a different error toward which economics training tends to push other people. To put the point slightly differently, lawyers and economists have very diffe...

And so it begins. With the Republicans turning on their favorite whipping boys (the press), those who remain agog over Sen. McCain's choice of running mate have begun to look at the vetters. Here's a typical story focusing on the legal vetting team. It says that during her interview with the McCain vetters, Gov. Palin disclosed her daughter's pregnancy. That suggests to me that the vetting was, if anything, too searching. Did the McCain vetters ask "are any of your children pregnant?" Presumably not. I assume Palin provided this information in response to a question like "is there anything else that could be embarassing we should know?" I was once asked such a question when I was applying for a job, and I immediately panicked. Surely there is information about everyone that, if widely disseminated, would be embarrassing, mostly because it's private. (I recovered my composure, answered no, and got the job, no scandal ever erupting.) Unfortun...