Amen, Tim Cook.
The previous CEO, Steve Jobs, wasn’t so anti-litigious.
“Google, you f–king ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft.”
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong.”
“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
In preparation for a talk Ilya is giving to aspiring law profs, he quotes from Chuck Yeager’s autobiography:
If you love the hell out of what you’re doing, you’re usually pretty good at it, and you end up making your own breaks….
I wasn’t a deep, sophisticated person, but I lived by a basic principle: I only did what I enjoyed.
Ilya opines:
Some professors will tell younger scholars that if you want to get ahead, you should write on “hot” subjects or those that are ideologically congenial to other academics and hiring committees. But, as Yeager recognized, most people do their best work when they focus on issues that actually interest them. Yeager became the greatest test pilot of his time in part because he loved flying jet fighters more than anything else in the world. If you want to be a top scholar, it helps to write about things you “love the hell out of.”
You don’t have to love your work as much Yeager did to be successful. But it’s generally better for your career to do good work on issues that you really care about than weaker work on issues that are more trendy or ideologically safer. And if you don’t get ahead as much as you would like, at least you will have spent your time doing something interesting, so it won’t be a total waste.
I couldn’t agree more with Ilya. In fact, it is because of Ilya–one of my main mentors in this academic game–that I approached the hiring process the way I did. Many professors (most of them really) told me that if I–a white male libertarian with a George Mason J.D.–wanted to get a job teaching, I would have to focus on a subject that is not subject to political constraints, and would be in high demand (such as tax, corporate law, trusts and estates, whatever). Classes that every school has a need for, and schools may not mind hiring me for.
Ilya gave me different advice. He told me to do what I love. He told me that in order for me to be a productive scholar, I would need to write about what I enjoy. He told me that it would be foolish to suppress what I believe for all those years (until tenure I suppose), because sooner or later you lose your identity. Not to mention writing in some area you don’t like is painful, and comes at the expense of keeping up to date in areas that interest you.
I am very, very glad I took Ilya’s advice.
Now, if only Somin would take my advice about his pathetic sport loyalties.
Michael Dorf postulates.
Hayekianism provides the most sophisticated source of anti-Keynesian thinking. Hayekians say that stimulus at most promotes an artificial boom, which then leads to a bigger bust, and so in the end the economy is less distorted–and the boom/bust swings are less severe–when the government does not attempt to manipulate matters through fiscal policy. The case for and the case against Hayekianism are more complicated, so I won’t go into them, and in any event, I’m not really interested in drawing economic conclusions here; I’m more interested in giving a causal explanation for the views that people appear to hold. I am sure that there are plenty of economists who choose between Keynes and Hayek based on their assessment of the theory and evidence
Some supply and demand from Paul Campos.
In other words, to the limited extent that making new graduates more practice-ready would enhance their future earning potential, it would to that same extent decrease the future earnings of older graduates. And if the increased cost of producing practice-ready lawyers turns out to be higher than the enhancement of earning potential such reforms produce that would actually make law degrees even worse investments for future graduates than they have been for recent ones. The problem, as these statistics illustrate, is that it appears essentially the same number of real legal jobs that existed 25 years ago are now being pursued by literally twice as many lawyers. Which of those lawyers get and keep those jobs is not nearly as important as the fact that the ratio between legal jobs and people with law degrees continues to get worse every year.
After the Court’s opinion in Salazar v. Buono, someone actually stole the cross that stood in the Mojave desert (which had been covered up). Now, the cross is going back up!
A veterans group can restore a memorial cross in the Mojave Desert under a court settlement that ends a decade-old legal battle, the National Park Service said Tuesday.
A federal judge approved the lawsuit settlement on Monday, permitting the park service to turn over a remote hilltop area known as Sunrise Rock to a Veteran of Foreign Wars post in Barstow and the Veterans Home of California-Barstow.
The park will give up the acre of land in exchange for five acres of donated property elsewhere in the 1.6 million acre preserve in Southern California.
The swap, which could be completed by the end of the year, will permit veterans to restore a cross to the site and end a controversy that became tangled in the thorny issues of patriotism and religion and made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003