I went down to NYU law school today to visit my friend Joseph Weiler—you are all coming to the Eramus Lecture he’s delivering on March 7th, aren’t you?
Anyway, while I was there I saw posters for a lecture this afternoon by Eugene Volokh on the structure of slippery-slope arguments. And I was caught up in a mill—or a scrum, maybe? anyway, a swirling crowd—of students and visitors and New York policeman.
Eugene Volokh rates this kind of action? Turns out that the mayor was on campus for another event, which was, so I was told, the cause of all the fracas. Or rumpus. But meanwhile, the posters for Volokh’s talk read, as I remember: “Founder of The Volokh Conspiracy blog and Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at UCLA.”
I wonder how the Schwartz family feels about that. Indeed, I wonder how UCLA law school feels. For that matter, I wonder how I feel. Since when has even a blog as interesting as the The Volokh Conspiracy trumped, for a law-school audience, a chair at a major law school and all the speaker’s academic publications?
A fascinating change in the culture of things.
February 22nd, 2010 | 9:30 pm
To liken my law school, which was not NYU or UCLA, to first-century Athens would be to pay it an undeservedly high complement. Still, almost every person who approaches a lectern at a law school such as NYU holds a chair or professorship at a major law school and has multiple academic publications to his credit. A blog, especially one whose content appeals both to jurists and to people not specially trained in the civil law, is “some new thing.”
You do not indicate you attended Prof. Volokh’s talk, so I won’t ask you if he wore his frog cufflinks.
February 23rd, 2010 | 9:39 am
[...] Blogging and fame. [...]
February 23rd, 2010 | 9:39 am
[...] Blogging and fame. [...]
February 23rd, 2010 | 10:59 am
[...] points us in the direction of Joseph Bottum’s First Things blog post yesterday: [W]hile I was [at NYU Law School] I saw posters for a lecture this afternoon [...]
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:13 am
The blog really cannot trump the chair, although they may share some subject matter they are too far removed from each other in form and function. I find it more a matter of tone. Had Mr. Volokh recently authored a work of pop fiction it too would have been mentioned first. The chair does not seem in any way diminished in the present formulation, but reverse the order and the blog sounds small and rather silly.
It’s not his CV, you can have a strong finish.
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:16 am
When you’re a brilliant scholar who has collected other brilliant scholars to regularly communicate to the law school masses–instead of forcing them to wait for an article or two a year–you build up some celebrity…
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:22 am
Law students are familiar with blogs, and especially the Volokh blog. Very few of them are familiar with the hierarchies of academia, such as “chairs.”
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:23 am
I don’t know how the Schwartz family would feel but I took first-year Torts from Gary Schwartz at UCLA. Interesting guy with an open, inquiring mind. Humble in the best sense of the word. I suspect he would have been amused, at least.
Confession: teachers like Gary are wasted on 1-Ls. (If the 1-Ls are like I was, anyway).
@philiphodgen
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:27 am
But it didn’t trump anything. You just said the Mayor was on campus. Apparently the Mayor trumped something.
Get your story straight.
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:33 am
I don’t know about the Schwartz family, but I’d bet that most donors prefer public intellectuals to private ones.
Let’s look at it another way. Would you ask the analogous question about Paul Krugman and his NYT gig?
Yes, the Volokh Conspiracy may have fewer readers than the NYT, but VC a much better source of information about legal issues….
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:46 am
My comment on althouse
Gives new meaning to “Publish or Perish”!
The guys on Volokh, Glenn R, & you (suck up) do the legal profession a better service than Law Reviews (I was on mine) or the ABA Journal. And especially the always loony Leftist “law reporters” for the MSM (The Greenhouse effect).
And their writings are not just random outbursts written in Walter Winchell staccato, dots & dashes style.
And, non-lawyer commenters on your blog have given me great insights & even when I disagree with them have forced me to concentrate my mind & think through more rigorously & more broadly matters which lawyers would restrict to “the law”, which, as they, the lawyers, would have it, can only be interpreted by our priestly caste.
And Volokh & blogs like yours have removed matters like the Yoo/Bybee (Boo Hiss) not-torture memos from the Inside Baseball approach, resulting in a reversal of what was to be a disgraceful, disgusting, banana-republic-punish-the-former-leaders kangaroo court, leading to their disbarment & the eventual trial of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld.
And let’s hear it for blogs like TaxProf Law Blog
For Joe B: the purpose of Volokh Blog, is not just a dry presentation for specialized lawyers, but for a scholarly look at matters legal for intelligent persons like him with no particular legal background or skills. A great art. Without them & the lawyer authors who write for First Things, Nat Rev, Commentary, etc., we’re left with a non-practicing lawyer Linda G who will tell us that a SCOTUS Justice saying that she feels that Affirmative Action should go on for, say, 25 years more, represents a great intellectual Constitutional approach.
First Things is a great publication. It contains more commonsense than most law review articles, etc. which I’ve read. I miss The Rev Neuhaus every day. Joe Bottum is a great writer and thinker. He is also a snob here.
And, I’m sorry to inform you, I turn to its Gateway Pundit & The Anchoress blogs as often as I do yours.☺
February 23rd, 2010 | 11:54 am
As an interested layman and a non-student who has been reading Volokh Conspiracy for ten years, I naturally care more about the blog than about a school to which I have utterly zero ties.
February 23rd, 2010 | 12:12 pm
UCLA should be and I imagine is thrilled about The Volokh Conspiracy, just as UTenn should be and I imagine is thrilled about Instapundit. Such achievements should be held in higher esteem than the vanity charitable designation of the professorship. At my school, Faber College, where I am dean emeritus, we applaud legal blogs, such as my own “The Double Secret Probation Blog”.
February 23rd, 2010 | 1:40 pm
“Get your story straight.”
Read better. The point is that ON THE FLYER the blog is listed before the position.
Snark–or condescension–only works if you’re paying attention to what you’re snarking.
February 23rd, 2010 | 2:53 pm
Yes, but can you trust what you read there? That’s highly questionable since they’ve disabled fact-checking with their habit of deleting comments and banning users (like me recently, someone who’d been commenting there since 2002). If someone at their site makes a false claim about some obscure subject about which you know nothing, how do you know that a comment pointing out how they’re wrong hasn’t been deleted? You’re going to need to fact-check every single statement they make their because you can’t trust them not to have deleted comments pointing out how they got something wrong.
In my case, my thoughtcrime was taking O. Kerr to task for deleting an earlier comment, and I did that on two of their meta-discussions about commenting policies. IOW: I was banned for discussing their commenting policies on threads about their commenting policies. Eventually I’ll get around to posting about that, stay tuned.
February 23rd, 2010 | 3:20 pm
As someone who went to the talk at NYU, I can personally attest that since I go to lectures by distinguished members of the faculty of a top-tier law school on a daily basis, highlighting Prof. Volokh’s UCLA chair would not be an effective way to drum up interest among the law school community.
February 23rd, 2010 | 5:42 pm
So, Patrick, did he wear his frog cufflinks?
I think ThomasD best expresses what about the context makes the wording of the poster appropriate: I imagine this was a relatively informal, extra-curricular talk for interested students, faculty, and guests. Patrick, JD, and speedwell also reference this. The event was meant to have broad appeal, and therefore the posters highlighted that aspect of Prof. Volokh’s accomplishments which, I imagine, is best known or appeals to the broadest audience. If Prof. Volokh were giving the commencement address, or if he were the keynote speaker at a faculty symposium, different wording would be appropriate, but so would different content for his talk. The audience, at least its frame of mind, would also be different.
Joseph Bottum knows all this, of course: Different “credentials” in different contexts. My family took delight in the list of titles behind Benedict XVI’s name in the just-released print issue. But I seem to recall when the magazine originally ran the quoted pieces by him and John Paul the Great, the by-line just said, “…is pope of the Roman Catholic Church.”
February 23rd, 2010 | 6:06 pm
I didn’t notice his cufflinks (he had a jacket on), but it wouldn’t surprise me! He did seem a little sad when it took three guesses for us to identify the source of his Madison quote.
February 23rd, 2010 | 7:29 pm
The frog cufflinks were part of his slippery slope talk when he gave it in San Francisco. He brought up the parable that you can’t boil a live frog in hot water; it’ll jump out. You have to put the frog in a cold pot and slowly turn up the heat. If I remember correctly, he didn’t think this was a valid argument against changing laws, as citizens aren’t frogs, with no ability to monitor or change their legal environments.
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