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At The Faculty Lounge, Bridge Crawford has a great post about using Twitter in the Classroom. I first blogged about my plans to use social networking in the classroom last term, and I have been experimenting with something similar this term.
I teach a Federal Courts seminar at the Penn State Law School. I have seven students in my classroom in State College, PA, and two students in the Carlisle, PA campus (Penn State has two campuses, campi?). I keep a live chat (using the school’s content management system) open during the class, and encourage all students to type questions, comments, and other ideas into the chat. I have found it to be quite effective, and the students really like it.
Frequently, when a student is engaged in a lengthy answer, rather than raising their hands, other students will simply enter their question or comment into the queue, so to speak. If it fits into the discussion, I will refer to the question. If not, I will ignore it. Additionally, students can alert me to an idea of insight that perhaps I didn’t see. This enables the class discussion to follow more closely what the students want to discuss.< I also use it to explore bonus topics, so to speak. For example, we were talking about the 7th Amendment right to a jury trial. I typed a question into the chat, and asked what other rights in the Bill of Rights have not been incorporated. I saw the students googling ferociously, and eventually they came up with the right answer. All the while, the class discussion continued. Some may view this as distracting the students. I view this as a way to keep the students engaged, and even learn more then they set out to learn. I think this approach really fits well into my class setting, which has two different locations. Additionally, it helps quiet students who may not feel comfortable raising their hand participate. Finally, it makes the limited class-time we have so much more efficient. I would highly recommend it to other teachers. On a broader pedagogical note, many teachers have banned laptops and the use of technology in the classroom. I could not disagree more with this approach. Certainly, students without laptops will not be distracted, and will make eye contact with the professor. They may even participate more. But are they learning better? People learned differently today then years ago. My generation (I am only 2 years out of law school) learns in a fast-paced, multi-tasking world, with lots of intellectual stimulation. If I am able to supplement a traditional law school Socratic dialog with an interactive chat room, and the students can learn well from this, then I feel accomplished as an educator. Invariably students will find other ways to chat, even if laptops are banned (iPhones and Blackberries under the desk are hard to police). Denying students access to the very tools which enable them to learn--ostensibly because the professor prefers to have a class's undivided attention--seems shortsighted. I will continue blogging about my experiences with this new technology.

No, this is not a Borat story. From Jurist:

Kazakhstan’s Constitutional Council [official website, in Kazakh] on Monday rejected a proposed referendum that would have extended the presidency of Nursultan Nazarbayev [official website, in Kazakh; BBC profile] until 2020. According to the council, the proposal, which entailed cancellation of elections [BBC report] scheduled for 2012 and 2017, was inconsistent with the constitution [RFE/RL report]. In an address to citizens on Monday after the council’s decision was announced, Nazarbayev said that in lieu of the referendum, which he said would divide society, he is now advocating for snap elections [RFE/RL report, in Kazakh]. Nazarbayev has already expressed his intention to run for president again, and last week said he wants to lead the country as long as his health permits [RIA Novosti report

Richard Hasen has a new article on SSRN titled Anticipatory Overrulings, Invitations, Time Bombs, and Inadvertence: How Supreme Court Justices Move the Law. Here is the abstract:

This is a short Essay prepared for a panel on the Roberts Court as an Overruling Court for an Emory Law Journal conference.

Without doubt, the Supreme Court’s most prominent decision so far under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts has been Citizens United v. FEC. The Court has been subject to heavy criticism for this case. A Barry Friedman has pointed out in a recent Georgetown Law Journal article, the Supreme Court does not always move the law in such a prominent fashion. It also engages in “stealth overruling. when it “fail[s] to extend a precedent to the conclusion mandated by its rationale” or it “reduc[es] a precedent to nothing.”

I leave to others the question whether the Roberts Court empirically engages in more (stealth) overruling than earlier groups of Supreme Court justices did, and even if the Roberts Court does so, whether a higher overruling rate is grounds for condemnation. Instead, the more modest aim of this brief Essay is to catalog additional tools that Supreme Court Justices can use beyond express and stealth overruling to move the law. I also explain why Justices might choose to use one, rather than another, of these tools to move the law.

In particular, I analyze four additional tools. Anticipatory overruling occurs when the Court does not overrule precedent but indicates its intention to do so in a future case. Invitations exist when one or more Justices (1) invite litigants to argue for the overruling of precedent in future cases or (2) invite Congress to overrule Supreme Court statutory precedent. Time bombs exist when Justices include within a case subtle dicta or analysis not necessary to decide it with an eye toward influencing how the Court will decide a future case. Inadvertence occurs when the Court changes the law without consciously attempting to do so, through attempts to restate existing law in line with the writing Justice’s values.

These tools demonstrate how Justices with a long time horizon and patience sometimes can move the law both subtly (sometimes even unconsciously) and forcefully. Part I describes these four tools, using illustrations from Roberts Court cases primarily in the election law and remedies arenas. Part II briefly compares the costs and benefits of these tools to each other and to express and stealth overruling, and notes that the tools function to send signals to different audiences: lower courts, Congress, the public, and other members of the Court.

This piece builds a little on Barry Friedman’s Stealth Overruling, which I commented on here.

Hasen’s article fits nicely into the Roberts-changing-the-law meme. I’m sure all of the items Hasen identifies are accurate. I just question whether these are new phenomenons,or are, in fact, tools of common law judges since time immemorial.  I’ll have to do a JLR search for articles written during the Warren Court about Time Bombs. I can’t imagine the bombs that Brennan threw.

Update: Rick Hasen replies to my post here:

Josh Blackman also asks whether these are new phenomena or tools of common law judges from time immemorial. In fact, in the paper I make it clear that these are not new phenomena, and I give examples of pre-Roberts Court uses of the same tools. Indeed, the term “time bombs” comes from the recent Brennan biography, and comes from a complaint that Justices Powell and O’Connor shared about how Justice Brennan wrote some of his opinions.

Very interesting, and I appreciate the clarification. I have not yet had a chance to read Hasen’s paper, but it is near the top of my list.

Almost three years ago in Omniveillance, I wrote about a cite-wide semantic web.

Google has already begun its form of a semantic web in the city of Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.133 The city has provided Google with detailed municipal information about their fire services, buildings, property lines, utilities, permit information, zoning history, garbage collection schedule, and even the location of cemetery plots.134 In turn, Google incorporated all of this information into its Google Earth geospatial imaging system, and now allows residents to instantly see when the home garbage delivery will occur, how their property is zoned, and even where the closest fire truck is.135 Google also allows a user to type in any address and read stories about news events occurring in that locale,136 as well as view photos, videos, real estate listings, and other content associated with that geographic area.137 This aggregation of information that closely touches everyone’s lives is a first step towards a semantic web.138

It seems that the City of Paris has taken the first step towards a city-wide semantic web. Engagdet reports:

ParisData has launched, home to the “open data policy of the City of Paris.” Here you’ll find reams and reams of bits and bytes from the city’s various municipal organizations, all released in the “spirit of transparency and open innovation.” All is licensed ODbL, which is free to share and adapt so long as it stays open and stays attributed. What sort of data is there? Not an awful lot at this point, if we’re honest, a few random lists of names and some other files, all quite naturally in French. But, we did find an interesting map listing locations of public parks and sidewalks, which René-Luc D’Hont used to create the mash-up above.

Curious to see how quickly this mashup grows, and what types of information it will store.

I have blogged at some length about the high-cost and low-returns of entering the legal profession. Aspiring attorneys need to take on massive amounts of student debt in hopes that maybe, they can obtain a high paying job, when in reality they are likely to work long grueling hours in a position that doesn’t pay that much more than they would have earned without a J.D. But what about doctors? Is it worth it. This article says no:

Physicians spend about 40,000 hours training and over $300,000 on their education, yet the amount of money they earn per hour is only a few dollars more than a high school teacher.  Physicians spend over a decade of potential earning, saving and investing time training and taking on more debt, debt that isn’t tax deductible.  When they finish training and finally have an income – they are taxed heavily and must repay their debt with what remains.   The cost of tuition, the length of training and the U.S. tax code places physicians into a deceptive financial situation.

$300,000 of non-dischargeable debt. 8-15 years of additional training. What is the opportunity cost for this profession? At least with Law School, three years and we’re done.

The physician lifestyle is not a great one.

Yes, taking care of patients is rewarding.  However, when physicians are unfairly reimbursed for their services they feel exploited.  This feeling of exploitation or being taken advantage of is what bothers physicians the most.  Physicians spend 40,000 hours training after high school and take out over a quarter million dollars in loans all so that when they are done they can work 60 hours per week, be paid less than they were expected, give about 40% of their income to the government in taxes and pay 25% of their net income to their student loan lender.  They feel exploited because after all that they have sacrificed they are enslaved to the highly regulated healthcare industry, which unfairly pays them.

I suppose my general advice to attorneys–don’t do it for the money, applies equally to med students. Do it because you want to help people, not for the bucks.

H/T Militza.