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Scalia scolds student for 'nasty, impolite question'
By Tony Mauro
Archived Article February 2009....
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Where others fear to tread, a 20-year-old college student from Tequesta, Fla., boldly stepped forward Tuesday to ask Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a question he did not like during a public appearance in West Palm Beach. "That's a nasty, impolite question," said Scalia, himself an expert on tough questioning, and he at first refused to answer it.
Justice Antonin Scalia
On Wednesday Legal Times tracked down student Sarah Jeck, the Florida Atlantic University honors college junior who incurred Scalia's wrath, and she seemed a little stunned, but not cowed, by his reaction. "He can dish it out, but he can't take it, I guess," she says. "I'm generally a very polite person. I'm really surprised the way it turned out. It was not a preposterous question."
So what did Sarah Jeck ask that caused the volatile justice to erupt? According to her own notes and a story in the Sun-Sentinel, Jeck asked whether the rationale for Scalia's well-known opposition to cameras in the Supreme Court was "vitiated" by the facts that the Court allows public visitors to view arguments and releases full argument transcripts to the public, and that justices go out on book tours.
It's that last part that probably grated, because Scalia could, at that precise moment, have been said to be on a book tour. He was speaking before the Palm Beach County Forum Club and Bar Association, while his book -- "Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges," co-authored by Bryan Garner -- was for sale at a table outside the hall.
Jeck, a political science major, is taking a judicial process class and is looking at the issue of cameras in the courts as her thesis topic. So when she learned Scalia was coming to town, it seemed like a reasonable question to her and her professor, Martin Sweet. By tradition, the club invites local university students to forum events and lets them ask questions. "We knew it was a little jab, but his response was unanticipated," she says.
After Scalia made his comment to Jeck, he took several written questions and then circled back to Jeck's query, according to a story in the Palm Beach Post. Scalia said he originally supported the idea of camera access in the courts, but came to oppose it because the inevitable "30-second takeouts" would not give a true picture of what is going on. "Why should I be a party to the miseducation of the American people?" According to Jeck, Scalia made no reference to his book tour as a possible contradiction to his views on public access to the Court.
We asked Jeck two more questions in our brief phone interview Wednesday morning. First, is she planning to go to law school? "Yes," she said without hesitation. And second, did she buy Scalia's book? Just as definitively, she said, "I'm a college student. I don't have $30."
Sweet, Jeck's professor and pre-law adviser, told us Wednesday he is "incredibly proud" of her questioning and demeanor. "It was certainly a pointed question, but not designed to be impolite or nasty," said Sweet, a Supreme Court scholar in his own right. "The point of learning is not to stroke somebody's ego."
From Rominger Legal.
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Wanted: law school deans. Lots of them.
By Julie Kay
Archived
Article February 2009......
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Even in this economy, there seems to still be a demand for one high-paying job — law school dean. At least 27 law schools throughout the country are searching for new deans — and many are having a tough time filling the position.
Law schools from Harvard to the University of Arizona to Case Western to the University of Miami have all embarked on dean searches, and some are finding somewhat slim pickings, with the same applicants recycled for many of the jobs.
That's because law school deanships, once highly sought after, are now high-stress jobs, thanks in part to the economy. With fundraising plummeting, donors in short supply and state budgets being slashed, law school deans are finding themselves up to their necks in stress. Many have quit in the past year to go back to teaching, which still pays fairly well and has far fewer headaches.
"Being a dean is less attractive than it used to be," said Thomas Ulen, a professor at the University of Illinois, College of Law. "An increasing percentage of the job — upwards of 80 to 90% — is devoted to fundraising. And with the economy in this state, that is not easy. And let's face it, being a law professor is one of the best jobs in the universe."
An 'austerity dean'
Tony Alfieri, head of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami School of Law and a tenured professor there, agrees. Alfieri has had feelers for deanships but is ambivalent about the prospect of being "an austerity dean."
"Many more contemporary deans are trying to strike a more appropriate work/life balance and are taking active roles in raising their children," he said. "Plus they have serious commitments to their own scholarship, to their writing and, for many, to existing public service commitments. Add to that the fact that these are turbulent times. An austerity deanship poses uncommon and especially high challenges. And it's doubly vexing for women."
What attracts deans is the opportunity to recruit top professors, to build new buildings, to start new, splashy programs. With donors in short supply for private schools and state budgets slashed for public schools, these prospects are currently dim.
"To build the impressive building, hire the impressive faculty and start an impressive program, you need money," said Bob Jarvis, a law school professor at Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center. "So you may say to yourself, 'Maybe this isn't the time to be a dean, maybe I should wait for another time.' Finding an acceptable dean candidate is very difficult anyway. Now, to find an acceptable dean candidate who actually wants the job is terribly difficult." |
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Association of American Law Schools' Susan Prager
Going old school
The old model for finding a dean was to look internally at one's best professors, according to Susan Prager, executive director and chief executive officer of the Association of American Law Schools. That was replaced in the past couple of decades by the model of hooking a dean or associate dean at a better law school, to give one's school cachet.
"You try to go up the pecking order," Jarvis said.
But in the past year or so, schools — either unsatisfied with the crop of candidates or unable to persuade top choices to take the jobs — appear to be reverting to the old model.
"Choosing someone from within is an old idea," said Prager, a former dean of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law. "I think it's healthy that more people are thinking of looking inside, particularly in tough times when there aren't as many attractive things about the job."
That's what happened at the University of Illinois. After hiring a search firm a year ago, the law school was unsatisfied with the pool of 200 candidates — or couldn't find many candidates who were willing to take the job. "There aren't that many people who want to be dean at a top 25 law school," said Ulen, co-chairman of the school's dean search committee. "We found it difficult to persuade the first-rate candidates to become interested in the job."
The search committee reorganized, printed up new advertising materials and launched into another search with the help of the search firm Greenwood/Asher & Associates of Florida, this time attracting 150 candidates. They were narrowed down to three finalists. Then, in an anticlimactic move, the university scrapped the whole thing and chose its own associate dean, Bruce Smith.
From Rominger Legal.
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HELP WANTED
A complete list of schools with open law dean positions
• University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law
• University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen
School of Law
• Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School
• Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
• Case Western Reserve Law School
• Duquesne University School of Law
• Elon University School of Law
• Florida International University College of Law
• Golden Gate University School of Law
• Harvard Law School
• University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law
• University of Miami School of Law
• University of Maryland School of Law
• University of Montana School of Law
• University of Nebraska College of Law
• University of New Mexico School of Law
• Northern Illinois University College of Law
• University of Notre Dame Law School
• Rutgers School of Law—Newark
• South Texas College of Law
• St. John's University School of Law
• Texas Tech University School of Law
• Tulane University Law School
• University of Washington School of Law
• University of Wyoming College of Law
• Whittier Law School
• College of William & Mary Marshall-Wythe
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