Novalawcity

Walk for the Animals 2011 on Saturday, March 5th!

Enjoy taking a walk with your pals --  with or without fur?  Then please join members of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund (SALDF) for tomorrow's Humane Society Walk for the Animals 2011.  The 1.25 mile walk starts tomorrow at 10:00 AM at Huizenga Plaza in downtown Fort Lauderdale (Southeast Corner of Las Olas and Andrews Avenue). 

Per SALDF President Jason Manocchio, participants will meet in the law school parking lot at 9:15 AM to carpool to the event location.  Dogs are welcome so please bring your favorite canine(s).  If you are unable to attend, please consider sponsoring a participant.

All proceeds will benefit the Humane Society of Broward County and help support the thousands of animals HSBC rescues every year.   Come eat, drink, and be merry while enjoying live performances by Sundanz and Pro Am dance studios as well as Purina's Incredible Dog Team.  Other attractions include live music, sponsor booths, and a free pancake breakfast courtesy of IHOP!

I know my girls will be especially interested in the last activity. ;)

  

 

Freedom of Information Law: Opportunity and Threat?

A New York Times article this last weekend described a novel use of freedom of information law. The new owners of CourseRank.com (a course information website for college students like ratemyprofessors.com), requested aggregate grade data by course and professor from some 533 colleges nationwide, including Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, and the University of Florida. (Nova Southeastern University is included on the website, but does not seem to include grade distributions, which makes sense since it is not subject to Florida open-government law.)

Lisa A. Phillips, the author of the New York Times story and a SUNY New Paltz journalism professor, has ethical qualms about the impact this will have on grade inflation. She quotes experts who say both that it will contribute to grade inflation, by directing students to classes and professors with “better” grade distributions, and discourage it, but revealing which professors grade too leniently.

But what I (and my most excellent colleague Becka Rich, who brought this to my attention) think is more interesting are the implications of this.

First, there are the ethical issues, some of which are raised above. Second, there is the conflict with FERPA. The second question Becka asked me was, “Could this happen in Florida?” We now know that the answer is “Yes.”

This type of open-records request can be used in public-policy research: see Richard J. Peltz, From the Ivory Tower to the Glass House: Access to “De-Identified” Public University Admission Records to Study Affirmative Action, 25 Harv. BlackLetter L.J. 181 (2009). It has also been used by mainstream journalists, as with a recent Chicago Tribune series on politically preferential admissions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (see all Chicago Tribume articles about the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

2010 Government Secrecy Report Card released

OpenTheGovernment.org has released its 2010 Secrecy Report Card.  View it at http://www.openthegovernment.org/otg/SecrecyRC_2010.pdf

This coalition of more than 70 consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, labor, journalists, and others focuses on pushing back governmental secrecy and promoting openness.  The coalition has released its secrecy reports every year since 2004. 

Your Law School's Ranking? Not as Important as You Think!

Law school success, as measured by grades, is more important for lawyers’ career success and satisfaction than the ranking of the law school they attended, according to a recent study reported by the ABA Journal’s blog.

The study was encouraging news for lower-tier law schools and their students. The ABA article said:

[T]he salary boost for achieving high grades more than makes up for the salary depreciation associated with attending a lower-ranked school. The study also found that lawyers who left law school with the lowest grades felt the least secure about their jobs.

The authors of the study, “The Secret of My Success: How Status, Prestige and School Performance Shape Legal Careers,” summarize how its findings contradict “conventional wisdom”:

The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school--as measured by law school grades--is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school "eliteness." Socioeconomic factors play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but little or no discernible role in shaping post-graduate careers. Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all-important, and since students who "trade-up" in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message. (p. 2)

Those of you who chose law schools to be closer to home, or because you wanted more practical preparation for practice (a demonstrated strength of NSU's), feel good about your choice! You're likely to be more satisfied with your law school, and over a lifetime, you may well do better.

The yet-to-be-published study is by Richard Sander (UCLA Law) and Jane Yakowitz (Brooklyn Law). It looked at beliefs about the effects of the ranking of the students’ law school, grades in law school, and societal position. It then reviewed the literature and statistics on the effects of these three variables on lawyer career success. It also compared the effects of the factors using a regression model.

“Passing the Hat”--An Investment?

Groups of people are coming together to accomplish goals as never before, often using the Web. But as traditional a funding practice as “passing the hat” is illegal, under Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules--if the recipient makes money and wants to pay their contributors back.

So, some Netizens are getting together and passing the hat to try to get the SEC to allow passing the hat as an investment, in a crowdsourced and crowdfunded (see below) effort, with Petition for Rulemaking File No. 4-605. (The SEC can change its own investment rules, under SEC Rule of Practice 192, 17 CFR §201.192 (2010).)

The Sustainable Economies Law Center, after a suggestion from BoingBoing blog contributor Paul Spinrad, has drafted and filed a petition to the SEC, asking the SEC to change its rules and allow crowdfunded venture-capital funding.

More details are available at this BoingBoing post, or at the SEC’s website, under Petitions for Rulemaking File No. 4-605. (Comments to this petition are available online.) This petition is open for public comment. The SEC takes comments into consideration in deciding how to change its rules; if this rule would help you, as a developer or investor, please weigh in at the How to Submit Comments page at the SEC website, or see Paul Spinrad’s original BoingBoing post for instructions on how to comment.

For more information about the SEC rules that govern this issue, see the petition, File No. 4-605.

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“Crowdsourcing” is a neologism, coined, according to Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/ ) by "Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe, from crowd + sourcing, by analogy with outsourcing." Wiktionary defines it (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crowdsourcing) as "delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without substantial monetary compensation."

“Crowdfunding” is such a “neo” neologism that Wiktionary doesn’t define it yet. By analogy from “crowdsourcing,” it refers to funding provided by a similar large, diffuse group.

Florida Supreme Court Joins Twitter

On the main page of the Florida Supreme Court's website, you will now notice a tiny turquoise icon indicating that the Florida Supreme Court is using Twitter as a communication platform.  The first tweet was released on April 5, 2010, with subsequent tweets offering links to briefs, opinions, filings, and court news.  You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the tweets or follow the Florida Supreme Court on twitter via @flcourts.

Hat tip to The Florida Bar News.

Streaming Video of U.S. House Floor Proceedings : HouseLive.gov

Live and archived streaming video of U.S. House proceedings are now available via HouseLive.gov. The searchable archives date back to the beginning of the 111th Congress. You can subscribe to live feeds in video, audio podcast and/or video podcast, or create your own custom RSS feed. A Special Events page features streaming video of joint sessions and meetings, such as the State of the Union address. Hat tip to the Sunlight Foundation's blog for highlighting this new resource.

Athletes' Likenesses, Amateurism, and the NCAA

Tomorrow is the final game of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament. A lawsuit was filed by former college and professional basketball player Ed O'Bannon, and other college basketball players, against the NCAA. The lawsuit is a class action, about the use of their likenesses by the video game company Electronic Arts, under a license from the NCAA--but without O'Bannon's or the other players' consent, and without them receiving royalties.

Southern California Public Radio has a good story on the O'Bannon--NCAA case, as does Sports Illustrated.

Public Knowledge's Copyright Reform Proposal

The group Public Knowledge, "a Washington DC based public interest group working to defend your rights in the emerging digital culture," (see http://www.publicknowledge.org/about) has made a bold (but not so new) proposal for the reform of copyright law.

According to their Web site (http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2906), their Copyright Reform Act, which has five sections, is proposing to strengthen fair use, reform the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), so that circumvention of anti-copying technology is explicitly legal for lawful purposes, update copyright law to better fit with how digital technology functions, reform the anti-takedown provisions of the DMCA, and make music licensing easier for users of that content.

Copyfighter Cory Doctorow has an essay on his Web site (http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=188055) that speaks to this issue. There is a rather secretive copyright treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), under development, and reform to the Copyright Act is especially important in view of this treaty. Cory's essay is a call to action about ACTA.

George Mason University Law School teaches a seminar in multinational IP, (also covering so-called "hard IP"--patents) which is located at: http://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/academics/schedule/2010/spring/HOUSEL_MultinationalIP-Syllabus.pdf. The PDF of the syllabus is full of links to materials and also references primary materials.

For some information from the other side of the intellectual property debate:

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has some information about intellectual property: http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/, with links to additional material.

WIPO also has a collection of international copyright laws, at http://www.wipo.int/clea/en/, the WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook, at http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/iprm/index.html, and an e-booklet, Understanding Copyright and Related Rights, at http://www.wipo.int/freepublications/en/intproperty/909/wipo_pub_909.html#intro.

Banned Books Week 2009

This week is Banned Books Week (BBW). Started in 1982, BBW draws attention to the problem of censorship and celebrates our freedom to read. Check out the BBW website, where you can find an annotated list of the 10 most frequently challenged books in 2008, see a map of reported challenges over the past 2 years, and discover BBW events in your area. 

For a more historical perspective on banned books, the American Library Association offers an annotated list of Banned and Challenged Classics. Here a a couple of examples from that list:

Ulysses, James Joyce

Burned in the U.S. (1918), Ireland (1922), Canada (1922), England (1923) and banned in England (1929). Source: 3, p. 66; 5, pp. 328-30; 10, Vol. III, pp. 411-12; 557-58, 645.

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Banned in Boston, MA (1930), Ireland (1953), Riverside, CA (1960). Burned in Nazi bonfires (1933).