Sunday, January 28, 2018

The Law Professor Bait-and-Switch Trick

I’m convinced that law professor misbehavior is driven by the group’s rather unhealthy obsession with rank and prestige.  More specifically, many law profs have never practiced law, and most of those who have practiced have done so for very short periods of time (1.4 years, according to one study) in very sanitized settings (e.g., writing briefs but never meeting a real-life client, let alone representing one in a business transaction or jury trial).  Without any law practice experience to draw upon, this leaves the law profs to judge each other by the U.S. News ranking of their law schools and of the law journals in which they publish.

Monday, January 22, 2018

"Convicting Avery" named among "best true crime books of 2017"

My third book, Convicting Avery: The Bizarre Laws and Broken System behind Making a Murderer (Prometheus Books) was just named to this short list of the best books in the genre.  Author and critic Joseph Farley writes: ". . . This book shows us exactly how it all happened . . . definitely among the best true crime books of 2017."  Other books on the list include Edgar Award finalists The Road to Jonestown, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.

Order Convicting Avery here to bone up on the legalities before Making a Murderer Season 2 is released.  And go here for more reviews of Convicting Avery and links to all three of my books.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

When does a “White Russian” become an “Anna Kournikova”?

It is well-known that academics have ruined legal education.  Law schools routinely hire professors who have never or barely practiced law, and who write about topics of no value to any practicing lawyer.  See here for an example.  (In so doing, the law profs perpetuate a false dichotomy between theory and practice, essentially claiming they are better at theory simply because they have never practiced.)  A better kept secret, however, is that law schools are increasingly hiring Ph.D.s in economics and similar disciplines who don’t even have a law degree, let alone any legal practice experience, let alone even a license to practice law.  See here and here for more details on this absolutely pathetic state of affairs in legal education.

Similarly, professors at the college level have ruined the study of philosophy.  Back in the day of Socrates and the Hellenistic schools of philosophy that followed in his footsteps, philosophy was focused on how to live a good life.  Today, however, academics have turned philosophy into pure semantics.  The Stoic philosopher Seneca saw this coming about 2,000 years ago, and explained it, in Letters from a Stoic, this way: