Interview No. 1

Today was my first clerkship interview. I woke up at three thirty in the morning to catch a cab for my six o'clock flight, watched Part I of the Decalogue, and then boarded the plane and slept the whole time. Then I cooled my heels in O'Hare for a couple of hours and watched Truly, Madly, Deeply. It made Alan Rickman really unlikable and thus I did not enjoy it. Then onto another plane - another two hours of sleep. Since I laid awake until 2 or so last night (nerves), these plane naps were vital. The hotel shuttle picked me up and brought me to the hotel, where I showered, changed, read soem Copyright, and then walked over to my interview.

I was early and spent a while chatting with the current clerks. Finally it was actually my scheduled time (have I mentioned that I was nervous? and that I get lost a lot and thus allow plenty of time to get from Point A to Point B? I was way early) and I had a nice talk with the judge. I hope he calls me back. He sounds like a dream to work for. I have a West Coast interview on Monday but nothing else so far. Fingers crossed. Afterwards the clerks took me out to dinner and to check out the "clerk ghetto" where they all live. It is actually a really nice pair of apartment complexes with all the amenities I was accustomed to associating with rental life before I moved to the Northeast, land of ancient housing stock. All in all, a good day. I am not looking forward to tomorrow's flight plan, though (three legs, not two, and arrival after midnight in Boston).

I refuse to chill out.

The proprietor of "HelpKerry.org" thinks I should "chill out" and reserve my anger for the war in Iraq, evil thieving Republicans, and other people who aren't on Greg's side of the political spectrum. A few points:

1. This is not "a few words." If the story in the Weekly Standard is true, then many words were lifted, even if only one phrase was taken in its entirety. That is sloppy, slovenly, unprofessional research. Even in the third grade, I remember being instructed to indicate quotations when taking notes on cards and cite to the page number.

2. Whether Tribe is a nice guy and friendly to students is beside the point. If someone commits an offense, they should not get off light because they are handsome, rich, or your good buddy. That is not justice. I am glad that he works so hard on so many pro bono cases. He should have worked a little harder on this book.

3. If Richard Perle stole $5 million dollars and Greg decided to be upset about it and post, I would not question him. I fail to see how the potential thievery of a sometime contributor to the Weekly Standard has any bearing on whether or not the specific allegations in the article on Tribe are true.

4. The argument that anger at relatively minor ethical infractions is misdirected because there are serious political issues to be concerned with at present is absurd and offensive. By this logic, outrage at small injustices must be rejected and standards of morality lapse; after all, what's a theft, an instance of plagiarism, cruelty to animals, or cheating on your wife compared to the overweening evil of the Bush administration? What laughable nonsense. This is not a warblog, or a politics blog. It is the personal blog of a Harvard Law student. I address issues that affect me and which are relevant to the scope of this site. If you want outrage about Bush, go elsewhere. Contrary to Greg's suggestion, there is plenty to be angry about right here.

When it rains, it pours

After a long day of Wills and Trusts reading, scrambling to get journal kinks worked out, and staring outside at the unceasing rain, some good news: a West Coast district judge wants me to fly out. Tomorrow is my first interview, but hopefully I can schedule the second one soon and perhaps even visit some friends while I'm there.

More excuses

Local coverage of the Tribe plagiarism scandal has revealed more pitiful excuses for unscholarly conduct.

From the Boston Globe:

In an interview with the Globe about Ogletree's book earlier this month, Tribe said people who "get on a high horse" about inadvertent plagiarism are "probably revealing more about their lack of self-knowledge than their high scholarly standards."

"I have a feeling that more than a few people who would not want to admit it have in the course of their careers accidentally found something in their own work -- a paragraph, a sentence, a line -- that they had intended to take down as a research note, but that ended up, not on the cutting room floor, but instead being sent by an assistant to a publisher," Tribe said.

This is so weak. More than a few others have been similarly careless, so we shouldn't criticize? I for one am very familar with high scholarly standards, considering every honor code and plagiarism policy I have ever had to comply with has been more rigorous than what's required of HLS professors. That an error is easy to make and difficult to detect should imply that we must be very vigilant to guard against it, not forgiving of those who commit it.

From the Boston Herald:

A supporter of Tribe, Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky said it wasn't plagiarism because the passages Tribe used inappropriately were historic statements of fact, rather than another author's ideas.

I am only beginning my copyright class, but even a couple of weeks have hammered in the idea/expression distinction. The issue is not just that Tribe wrote a book about the same facts as Abraham - it's that he used Abraham's unique expressions to describe those facts. I am not a fan of Duke Law professors in general, but Chemerinsky only drives that disdain home.

Deep breath, and an addendum

Welcome, Pejmanesque readers. I do wish to concur with Mr. Yousefzadeh on one point: the majority of professors do not subscribe to the questionable practices in which some HLS professors allegedly have engaged. I have worked as a research assistant here at Harvard Law and as an undergrad, and in both positions I was asked to perform conventional research tasks or was credited as a co-author if my contributions were substantial. I can also confirm that the delightful Will Baude is a scrupulously honest man who will, no doubt, produce prodigious quantities of high quality legal scholarship.

Crimson with rage at plagiarizing professors

I already posted once about the flurry of plagiarism scandals on the HLS faculty. Today's Crimson has an article covering the accusations and the aftermath. I don't mean this to be a real "Fisking" (hate the term), but the whole piece is chockablock with nonsense and questionable argument.

Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence H. Tribe ’62 apologized yesterday for not properly crediting another professor’s work in his popular 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court, one day after a conservative political magazine accused him of plagiarism.

Note that Tribe is not described as liberal, but the Weekly Standard is a "conservative political magazine."

Tribe, who was named one of Harvard’s 19 University Professors last June, defended Goodwin against plagiarism charges two years ago on the grounds that her work was “closely documented with something like 3,500 footnotes.”
Tribe’s 1985 book did not contain footnotes and endnotes—a decision he made as part of a “well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience.”

I'm not sure how endnotes (which do not interrupt the flow of the text in any significant way or take up space in the body of the work) make a book inaccessible. If Tribe had to dumb things down this much to make the book useful, maybe it isn't such a great and important scholarly work. (The Weekly Standard dissection makes it sound like a Cliff's Notes version of Abraham's book, in fact.)

. . . both Ogletree and Dershowitz jumped to defend their colleague from the charges leveled against him.
Ogletree, speaking to The Crimson yesterday, dismissed The Standard’s allegations against Tribe as “nonsense.”
“I think Larry [Tribe] may be overreacting,” Dershowitz said yesterday, when asked whether Tribe was right to apologize. “Abraham sat on this story for 20 years. If he had a gripe, he should have written to Larry 20 years ago.”

So let me get this straight. Even though there are passages lifted from another person's work, verbatim, the charges are nonsense? What would Ogletree need to indict, a video of Tribe throwing darts at Abraham's picture and cackling while a research assistant transcribed directly from Justices and Presidents to a manuscript of Tribe's book?

If a giant of constitutional law topples in a forest, does it make a sound? This is more than a gripe. This is potential scholarly dishonesty and theft. Abraham should have called Tribe out if he knew about this years ago. It was wrong then and it's wrong now.

“Tribe’s towering contributions to the field of constitutional law over four decades should not be overshadowed by this episode,” [Stanford Law School] dean, Kathleen M. Sullivan, wrote in an e-mail. Sullivan was Tribe’s colleague on the Harvard faculty from 1984 to 1993.

I bet an untenured professor wouldn't get this soft treatment from Sullivan. Maybe we need some kind of disciplinary guidelines to ensure equal justice in sentencing for similar plagiarism offenses.

Dershowitz said yesterday that The Standard’s charges against Tribe were politically motivated.
“Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,” Dershowitz said—a quotation he attributed to Soviet spymaster Lavrenti Beria. “Clearly someone was looking to pin something on the most prominent liberal constitutional scholar in the country.”

Pin something? How about take him to task for a wrongdoing he has since admitted? This is some weird mutation of the CBS-Memogate argument - while the evidence is true, the accusations are politically motivated and thus must be given no credit. Maybe if Tribe was more concerned about producing original scholarly works and less about using his position for political ends, he wouldn't have cranked out such a shoddy book.

But Dershowitz isn't in total denial:

Dershowitz called yesterday for stricter University guidelines on source citations and the use of research assistants so that scholars could avoid ideologically motivated charges of plagiarism in the future.

Stop me before I steal again!

However, while the undergraduate and law school standards for plagiarism are quite clear,

Dershowitz said guidelines in the legal profession are murkier.
He said that judges frequently rely on lawyers’ briefs and clerks’ memoranda in drafting opinions. This results in a “cultural difference” between sourcing in the legal profession and other academic disciplines, Dershowitz said.

Now I always considered law professors to to be part of academia, but apparently they are all frustrated judges and should be assessed by the standards of their desired occupation when writing. Funny, that. Does this mean that student work, such as law review notes and seminar papers, is closer to real academic writing than the output of our faculty?

White men can't teach

Tom Bell at Agoraphilia documents the impact of affirmative action policies for teaching positions in law on white male applicants. If you are such an applicant or aspire to be one (Will Baude, please answer the white courtesy phone), it's worth a look. Tom Bell and his wife, for better or worse, were persuasive advocates for HLS when I was choosing law schools. They also have a really adorable daughter, which anyone who knows me will recognize as a rare child-oriented compliment.

Professional responsibility

Yet another Harvard Law School professor is charged with plagiarism. This is the third big name HLS prof so accused in the last year (the previous cases regarded Dershowitz and Ogletree). Perhaps a lot of this would be eliminated if professors of law were held to the same standards as their students. From the Harvard Law School Catalog:

2. Preparation of Papers and Other Work-Plagiarism and Collaboration
All work submitted by a student for any academic or non-academic exercise is expected to be the student's own work. In the preparation of their work, students should always take great care to distinguish their own ideas and knowledge from information derived from sources. The term "sources" includes not only published or computer-accessed primary and secondary material, but also information and opinions gained directly from other people.
The responsibility for learning the proper forms of citation lies with the individual student. Quotations must be properly placed within quotation marks and must be fully cited. In addition, all paraphrased material must be completely acknowledged. Whenever ideas or facts are derived from a student's reading and research, the sources must be indicated.
The amount of collaboration with others that is permitted in the completion of work can vary, depending upon the policy set by the head of the course or the supervisor of a particular exercise. Students should assume that collaboration in the completion of work is prohibited, unless explicitly permitted, and students should acknowledge any collaboration and its extent in all submitted work.
Students who are in any doubt about the preparation of their work should consult the appropriate instructor, supervisor, or administrator before it is prepared or submitted.
Students who submit work that is not their own without clear attribution of all sources, even if inadvertently, will be subject to disciplinary action.

Of course, no significant disciplinary action appears to have been taken in any of these cases. But perhaps it's too much to ask of HLS; after all, if they refuse to punish students who brag about cheating, how can they slap a protesting professor on the wrist for such "errors?"

For those students who are preparing to begin work on a law journal: keep your eyes peeled and source your articles carefully. Since academia refuses to enforce any sort of norm that would require law professors to write their own articles and books, we have to take up the slack by making sure that the publications they do produce only steal ideas and expressions from their research assistants.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

I have a clerkship interview this week. Yay. I also received the next DVD from my Netflix queue, Truly, Madly, Deeply. My boyfriend says his rom-com loving mother likes it (con), but it has Alan Rickman (pro). That should keep me entertained for part of the plane flight.

At some point over the weekend, I mentioned this story by Harlan Ellison in conversation. Ellison may have faults as a person, but he's an engaging writer. What are your most important things in life?

Mixed bag

Good news: we had at least 40 people show up at our Open House, which was going head to head with Dean Kagan's reception at the Charles.
Bad news: I ordered pizza for 75.

GN: There was an email from a judge's chambers in my inbox when I got home. He's interested in my application!
BN: He couldn't find it, so I had to put one together to send today.

GN/BN: I got called on in Admin Law and gave a halfway decent (i.e. not obviously wrong) answer.

GN: I have a guest this weekend!
BN: I have a migraine.

Be there or be square

Such a day. Two loads of laundry before 10am, Admin Law, a flurry of journal-related emails, lunch with a friend from another Harvard grad school, back home to fold the aforementioned laundry and mop, and now it's time to buy beer for tonight's open house. A lot of you might think that's fun, but:

1. I hate beer.
2. I don't have a car, so I have to recruit journal people to drive me around. I could get it myself, but beer is heavy and I am small.
3. Because of #1, I don't know what kind of beer to buy, so whatever I get will be sort of random. There will, however, be Diet Coke in abundance, so if nobody likes the beer they'll have something else to drink with their pizza.

If you're reading this an on the journal, go to the open house! 1Ls need your reassurances that Bluebooking is fun.

First rule of horror movies: the pet always dies.

On the recommendation of 2 Blowhards and (IIRC) Tyler Cowen, I ordered Audition over my shiny new Netflix subscription. It started out like a cross between In the Company of Men and Ringu and just got weirder from there. I'm still not entirely sure of the origin of some of the scenes: were they dreams, possibilities, reality? The movie is well shot, with the camera maintaining a careful distance until the last act or so and many well composed images. However, the cuts were abrupt and sometimes made me guess as to whether time had passed. All in all, it was . . . interesting. I'm not sure if disturbing Japanese cinema is really my cup of tea, though. Onward to the Decalogue.

Mixed reviews for Native American Museum

The museum whose conservancy policies gave me such qualms over the summer gets a negative review from the New York Times. WaPo is predictably celebratory. Next time I'm in D.C. I will stop by, although that's difficult to do since they use the same timed ticketing as the Holocaust Museum, which discourages casual visits.

*twitch*

The files for Issue 3 (aka "Summer 2004") have arrived and are being reviewed before they get tweaked and go to the printer. I have a twitch under one eye, an incipient migraine, and an upset stomach, but that's to be expected, considering that managing editor is out on clerkship interviews and so I'll be doing this myself.

Trickle-down economics

Well, it seems like the most sought after people have already snapped up the most prestigious clerkships (the ones with judges who conformed to the moratorium requirements, that is). Since yesterday was the first official day of interviews, I am hoping that some of the judges who had interviews lined up later in the week with my classmates will now realize that their first choice has been taken by someone else and call their second choice, etc. Perhaps some of them will eventually get to me!

The best magazine advice

Belle Waring suggests that Will and other men who claim to prefer a makeup-free female face are actually deceived by skillful application of high quality products. Will has a keen eye - there's no tricking him. I do agree with Ms. Waring that many men could benefit from a light application of makeup, though. Often while carefully painting my face in the morning I reflected upon the injustice of my being expected to artfully conceal all imperfections while men could stride about and expect that theirs would not be held against them as strongly. At the time, the solution appeared to be the expansion of makeup to men; the expansion of masculine skin care lines over the last ten years or so made it seem that equality drew nigh. But the opposite end of the spectrum can be an equally satisfying equilibrium - and less burdensome for everyone involved.

Linkety Link

I finally got around to checking out some more of the new crop of HLS bloggers. This one is going on the blogroll. He's angry. I like that.

Homophobia defeated by show tunes

This story is awesome. If I could sing, I would have done this a couple of weeks ago on Boston Common, where a deranged preacher was interrupting our peaceful afternoon of reading on the grass.

Red in (tooth and ) claw

I don't get the appeal of long, polished fingernails. I always assumed that it was one of those things that women do for other women, like wearing fashionable shoes. Apparently there is some element of sex appeal, though, at least if Ms. Fowler's commenters are representative.

My nails are very weak and thin, so I keep them almost boyishly short; as long as there's enough nail to scratch itches and gain purchase on fine work, that's enough for me. Painting them always seemed nasty, since I like to nibble (but not bite or tear) my nails, and getting shreds of paint in your teeth is an unpleasant surprise. Toenails stay painted almost all the time, but that's because they are ugly and should be covered. I did have fake nails once, but even the mid-length ones I had were so cumbersome that I wasn't able to remove my contacts without putting out my own eye, so I drove around Houston the Sunday after senior prom looking for a salon that was open that would take them off. Ugh.

One a related note, I've been going almost entirely without makeup for the last several weeks. I have noticed several things:

-My skin is better. If I have a blemish, it gets a dab of concealer, but the rest of it gets to breathe and, evidently, likes it that way.
-I am acutely aware of how much makeup other women wear. I have a better sense of the artificiality of their appearance now that I have had a chance to see the difference between my old made-up face and its freshly scrubbed incarnation. I wore some lipstick yesterday and it looked corpse-like and weird. Similarly, the strangeness of other people drawing lines and painting bits of their faces has been highlighted. I wonder what other women would look like without their makeup.
-I am better at picking clothes. Not wearing makeup forces me to confront the fact that some tones and colors are just not flattering, instead of telling myself that with the proper shade of red lipstick a red hat wouldn't wash me out.

The Confusion

Professor Volokh is counting the days until Neal Stephenson's The System of the World comes out. I would be as excited, except last week was the first chance I had to read Book 2 of his Baroque Cycle, The Confusion. As preparation, I reread Quicksilver, which was nearly as good the second time as the first. The Confusion, though, was a letdown. So much was foreshadowed that I spent a significant amount of time simply waiting for major plot developments to emerge - the suspense was minimal. The more outlandish Jack's adventures became, the less connected I felt to his story, and the dozen or so in his motley crew of Vagabonds didn't do much more to seize my heart or attention. There was a criminal lack of Daniel Waterhouse. Eliza's story, which took up half of this volume, rattled along with little action, at least once her vengeance was preempted. And while the merely asserted ability of Miss Eliza to drive all heterosexual men wild with her beauty had grown tiresome, her transformation into a pockmarked mother of sickly and deformed offspring by a bland and tiresomely polite fellow (who suddenly reveals a sadistic streak in the last chapter - ?!?) left a nasty taste in my mouth.