Serve Obama, and the world's ills will be healed.

"I pledge to be a servant to our president . . . ."

Here’s a scary video I found posted on Volokh today this morning.

Here’s a spoof somebody wrote up on it.

The spoof wraps up emphasizing the message conveyed by the video:

TOGETHER WE CAN
TOGETHER WE CAN OBEY
DIVIDED WE ARE INSIGNIFICANT
BUT TOGETHER WE CAN BE A MOLECULE
ON OUR PRESIDENT'S CHEEKBONE
FADING AND MELTING AND SHRINKING
INTO THE ONE UNIVERSAL GLORY OF HIM
OBEY
OBEY
OBEY

I think this is funny.

How many editors of the Harvard Law Review does it take to administer the Pesidential oath properly?

http://volokh.com/posts/1232487862.shtml

Will Budget Cuts Cause Law School Reform?

Unsurprisingly, our economic woes have hit law school budgets.
http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202427496279

I posted a while ago about how California education cuts were resulting in preferences being given to artists, musicians, and the like: http://jairedhall.blogspot.com/2008/11/special-people.html

Hard times don't always get us on the right track. They spur us into action, and sometimes this action is for the worse. However, my hope is that economic hard times in the law schools gets them on a track to be more efficient and practical in their approach to training lawyers.

The article about law school cuts doesn't make the situation sound too dire. I think it'll take something far worse to result in the type of reform that I think would be helpful. I have spoken with some of my law school friends about this in the past: law school wastes students' time and intellectual energy. Not everyone is a Richard Posner with an amazing intellect and the ability to write ten articles and five books every year (ok, so he's not quite that prolific). Most of us (surprise surprise) are not going to clerk, become judges, or become law school professors. No, most of us are going to become practicing lawyers out in the real world solving our client's problems.

In my opinion, the current law school system is extremely inefficient at producing good practicing lawyers. First off, law schools don't provide all the tools that they certainly could provide. Second, the tools that they do provide, they provide in such an inefficient and time consuming manner that it's just ridiculous. And Third, once you get done learning to "think like a lawyer" for three years, the only hurdle dividing you from becoming a practicing attorney is the bar exam. There is a decent amount of "thinking like a lawyer" that you have to do for the bar exam, but mostly, it's all about decent writing skills, careful reading skills, and a ton of memorization of legal principles.

Skip undergrad and lawschool; instead, do bar prep for two years, and I'm willing to bet that most intelligent people would pass the bar.

What law school's should be a two year addendum to undergrad (at most), or, better yet, part of a 4 to 5 year undergraduate degree program. Additionally, law school should be much more practically oriented. Cut out many of the classes and replace them internships and clerkships with lawfirms.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the academic side of law, the philosophy, whys and wherefores, and all that stuff, then get a higher degree, like a masters or Ph.D. Sure, I agree that you should get a decent bit of this in your initial law degree, but it can be presented by reading, analyzing, and writing about scholarly books on the topic rather than the constant discussion of case law.

As you see, these thoughts are very raw. The point is, I think law schools should be reformed. I doubt the current budget cuts will cause this reformation, but maybe in conjunction with other factors, reform could happen.

:-)

I now interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to provide everyone with a brief reminder: yes, our government is still stupid.

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090115/NEWS02/301159967/0/FRONTPAGE

The Best Interest of the Child

Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, has recently posted this article expressing concern about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [CRC]. The fear is that the CRC would permit judges, and possibly even a committee of internationals sitting in Geneva, to probe into every area of the parent-child relationship and make determinations based on the "best interest of the child."

The U.S. has yet to ratify this over a decade old treaty, but there is fear that under the new heavily Democrat Senate, it could be ratified in the near future.

If the treaty really allows the feared state (and even worse, international) intrusion into parent-child relationships, then it is not merely home schoolers who should worry, but every parent who, whether for religious or other reasons, believes that she has inherent authority to direct the moral, physical, emotional, and educational upbringing of her children.

As with so many other topics I have discussed in this blog, the issue comes down to one of authority. Who has authority over children--the state or parents? And if the state--is it the state governments or the federal government? If the Senate ratifies the CRC, it will have the force of a federal statute, and constitutionally, federal statutes are supreme over state laws.

But the CRC should never be imposed as law in the United States both because in an absolute sense, it surpasses the inherent authority granted to the state and in a legal sense, it is unconstitutional. The Constitution does not give the federal government authority to regulate the parent child relationship. This is why we have state laws governing divorce, child custody, child abuse, etc., rather than federal laws. However, as we know, the Supreme Court has allowed the Federal government to overstep its constitutional bounds in countless ways. It is possible that our current Supreme Court would rule the CRC unconstitutional based on the fact that the Constitution does not grant this authority to the Federal government, but there is a real risk that it would not.

And the risk that it would not leads me again to suggest that it might be a good thing that the Supreme Court upholds what it calls Substantive Due Process rights (which aren't in the Constitution at all). One of these rights is the right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children. This right has proved impotent in many situations (such as when parents seek a constitutional right to opt their children out of certain classes in public schools), but it has been used effectively, even as recently as 2000, to prevent a judge from granting a grandparent custody rights against the wishes of a fit parent. See Troxel v. Granville.

It appears, then, that based on substantive due process rights, the Supreme Court still states that, as a constitutional matter, a fit parent can override a judge's determination of the best interests of a child. The fear of the CRC is that a judg'es determination of the best interest of a child could and would override various decisions, such as relating to education and religion, of fit parents.

As long as the Supreme Court holds this view, the CRC would hopefully lose all or much of its sting.

[next post to discuss the concept of the Best Interest of the Child, the interesting situation of divorce, and various issues of authority relevant to these cases.]

Such sluggishness.

Or would that be proroguement? No, not strictly speaking, I suppose.

I wish I had more interesting things to write about. The past several weeks has been devoid of inspirational thoughts on my part. I haven't been writing any fiction. I haven't been log posting. Indeed, I haven't even been reading all that much.

One of my Christmas gifts was a book about dragons. I did read that. It was a fun book to read, although I felt the author degenerated into downright triteness at times. I am still slogging through most of the books I told you I was reading last time I discussed this issue.

I made a pretty decent purchase today. For $13 dollars, I got a full set from 1970 of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a two volume biography of John Adams, and a book about Francis Bacon. We already have a 1996 Colier's Encylopedia which we bought used from the Regent University Library. I'm not sure if we need two encyclopedia sets; however, I like having the more recent Collier's set, and I really like Brittanica. I think it is more complete and in depth than, say, Collier's or World Book.