Le Questionnaire

Questions for the outgoing JLPP Editor-in-Chief Daniel Guzmán adapted by Sarah Hack from Marcel Proust, Inside the Actors Studio, and the Vanity Fair Magazine back page. What is your current state of mind? Anxious. What is your idea of perfect happiness? Waking up in the morning and thinking that I can’t wait to get to work. What is your greatest fear about the future of law & legal writing online? That some will use the medium as an excuse to reduce the excellence we demand in legal writing, with respect to argumentation, analysis, and form.  Also, that some will mistakenly presume that our discipline is less rigorous as a result of its transmission through the internet. What is your favorite blog? This one.  Seriously, because I know what goes into it.  With respect to other legal blogs, I really don’t follow many of them because I find them fundamentally uninteresting, except perhaps Dorf on Law. (http://www.dorfonlaw.org/) Which historical or living lawyer/judge/legal academic/legal person do you most admire? Historical: Justice Thurgood Marshal; he was a trailblazer.  Living: Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  She’s also a trailblazer, and I met her once, and she’s very kind and always willing to give of her time. [read more]

The Price is Wrong

The price is wrong! Bob Barker, you know it! The price—the dollars and cents we pay when we buy animal products—is really wrong.  Meat, eggs, milk, cheese, and all other sorts of animal foods that so many Americans buy so regularly are, in general, shockingly less expensive than market trends would predict. The sorcery of factory farming, fueled by agribusiness subsidies, churns out astonishingly cheap meat.  In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes: “In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500%; new cars climbed more than 1,400 %; but the price of milk is up only 350%, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled.  Taking inflation in account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history.” So animal protein costs less today than at any time in history, but eating animal protein costs more today than at any time in history.  The price Americans pay for eating animal protein—in terms of personal health, public health, environmental and ecological health, the health and safety of factory farm workers, and our moral health—is more expensive than ever. As to [read more]

Law and Blog: An Unhappy Marriage (In its own way)

Law and Blog meet. Law and Blog meet online, of course. So as you might expect, they are coy and are not particularly forthcoming with the details of their courtship. But once together, their relationship builds quickly — they share snark, irreverence and a proclivity for communicating and organizing bite-sized pieces of life. Time passes, and Law and Blog find that their pairing has filled a deep expressional void. Law can finally cast off its Bluebook shackles and emote the way it deserves. And Blog cherishes the credence, utility and stability that Law provides. Then one day, Law and Blog become bLawg. The same love ditty that begat one bLawg, begat many. Law professors in particular, but practitioners, law students and interested others flock to the medium. From Above the Law to Dorf on Law —bLawgs are the antidote to and evidence of what is a true malady. Some of us crave escape from the strictures of formal legal writing. The incumbent board of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy inherited a, well, a barely blog. It is a space carved out of the Internet terrain that has become our project to activate. “Kill it!” one of my [read more]