Academia
(Another) Bad Day for Economists
One interesting project for future intellectual historians will be figuring out how economics became the queen of the social scientists when virtually none of their predictions have come true and so much of their empirical work is downright shoddy. Perhaps it will lie in the way ideology can take over the discipline because of data …
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CONTINUE READINGBagenstos on the Health Care Case: Critical Reading for Environmental Lawyers
Sam Bagenstos at Michigan Law School has long distinguished himself as one of the most thoughtful constitutional doctrinalists in the country (and maybe the best disability scholar as well). He is out with a new article in the Georgetown Law Journal concerning the Spending Clause implications of the health care case. Environmental lawyers and scholars should …
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CONTINUE READINGIn memoriam: Joe Feller, much more than a law professor
Today I learned the sad news that Joe Feller, Professor of Law at Arizona State University, has died after being hit by a car. Joe was a fine scholar (coincidentally, I was reading a terrific piece he wrote on The Adjudication that Ate Arizona Water Law when the news came in), but he was so …
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CONTINUE READINGA Unique Definition of “Interfaith”
Today in the mail appears an interesting program from the Wallage Stegner Center of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law: this coming Friday and Saturday, the Center will host “Religion, Faith, and the Environment” with lots of important guest speakers. Good on them. But then when I looked at the program, something …
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CONTINUE READINGGood environmental data matters for environmental litigation
If you aren’t reading Dave Owen’s blog posts over at Environmental Law Prof Blog, you should be. His most recent post is about a recent Endangered Species Act (ESA) case in Texas: Environmental plaintiffs sued, arguing that the state of Texas had allowed too many water withdrawals upstream from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, a critical breeding …
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CONTINUE READINGMy Harvard Business Review Piece on Bullet Trains and Fiscal Tradeoffs
John Lennon sang “Imagine”. In this new HBR piece, I “imagine” Philadelphia home price dynamics if an Amtrak Bullet Train reduced its time cost to Penn Station to 30 minutes. Using data from China’s experience, we document empirical evidence supporting this prediction.
CONTINUE READINGPracticing Environmental Law: The World of New Lawyers
The National Council of Bar Examiners has just finished a fascinating survey of what lawyers do in their first three years of practice. Some of the most interesting findings relate to environmental law. About five percent of new lawyers report that their practice areas are environment or natural resources. As of a couple of years …
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CONTINUE READINGComparing U.S. Universities’ Environmental Programs
When the U.S. News rankings came out, naturally I looked first at the rankings for environmental law. But then I got curious about the rankings for other environmental fields. I had very little idea, for example, about how ecology departments were ranked. Of course, we all know about the issues with U.S. News’s methodology. …
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CONTINUE READINGRemedial Education for Berkeley Law Faculty
Or at least for John Yoo, who argues: Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn’t the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are …
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CONTINUE READINGCongress Increases Climate Research Funding!
…even if they didn’t intend to. The Republican War on Science has morphed into a more general war on knowledge. As Dan has pointed out previously, the GOP has now declared war on social science funding, and particularly on political science. Last night, the Senate accepted the amendment of Senator Tom Coburn (R – Olduvai …
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