Friday, July 30, 2021

Submission angsting is back for Fall 2021!

Knightly broadcasts the news!
Many thanks to Phil Lord for setting up a new angsting thread, HERE, for the Fall 2021 law review article submission cycle!  

As I previously wrote about, here, Prawfs Blawg terminated its much beloved angsting thread due to, I suspect, American law prof hypersensitivity.  I frankly don't know how some of those people function in everyday life, but I do understand why they took shelter in the bubble of the legal academy.  And for many of them, the mere existence of the angsting thread made the academy an "unsafe space."  (Break out the bubbles and Play Doh.)  

But that's all behind us, as Canadian Phil Lord has stepped up to the plate to drive one out of the metaphorical park, much like the Toronto Blue Jays laying lumber to the Boston Red Sox.  So we're back in biz!

And to the law review editors, let's go!  Make an offer to publish my article, Disorderly Conduct: An Investigation Into Police and Prosecutor Practices.

Monday, July 19, 2021

The end of the Legal Watchdog (emails)


Although Knightly and I are both getting older and tire far more easily, we're not done writing blog posts quite yet.  But our email alerts will soon be finito!  If you currently receive an email announcing new posts, I am told that as of August the system will no longer support that feature.  So please bookmark The Dog and check back for new posts periodically.   

In the meantime, if you listen to podcasts, Knightly recommends The Trials of Frank Carson.  What happens when a defense lawyer beats up on the central California police, prosecutors, and judges for more than two decades?  The district attorney's office charges the defense lawyer with murder!

Finally, watch for my new law review article, Disorderly Conduct: An Investigation into Police and Prosecutor Practices.  What's this one about?  Well, in academia, law professors have started complaining that the disorderly conduct statute is being abused by racist police, i.e., the police are "surveilling communities of color for signs of disorder" and using the statute as a means of "social control against people of color."  To some law professors, everything is about race, so I decided to test this claim by analyzing a sample of real life Kenosha County disorderly conduct cases.  In the article, I not only look for police abuse of the statute, but also for prosecutorial abuse.  The results might surprise you.  Stay tuned to The Dog for a pre-publication draft of the article once a journal accepts it for publication.

Thursday, July 8, 2021

Law Review Submission Angsting Thread -- Fall 2021


For law geeks like me, late January and early July are among the best times of the year.  These dates mark the beginning of each the two law review article submission cycles.  (For outsiders who are interested in how this bizarre process works, see my article on the subject.)  This Fall cycle I'm submitting my 37th law review article to the journals for publication.  It's titled "Disorderly Conduct: An Investigation into Police and Prosecutor Practices."

In recent years I've found that half the fun of submitting and publishing many of my first 36 articles has been following the "Prawf's Blawg angsting thread" throughout the submission cycle.  It's basically a blog post and comment thread where law professors, wannabe law professors, and even a few actual practicing lawyer-authors (like me) post a wide range of questions, comments, and news about the article submission and publishing process.  Debates and arguments have even broken out from time to time.  (To see what it looks like, you can find last submission cycle's blog post and comment thread here.)