How Judicial Hostility Toward Environmental Claims and Intimidation Tactics by Lawyers Have Formed the Perfect Storm Against Environmental Clinics: What\u27s the Big Deal About Students and Chickens Anyway?

Since 1976, when the first environmental clinic was started at the University of Oregon’s law school, clinics have proliferated. Today, approximately one out of five law schools has an environmental clinic. With respect to clinics in general, the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers lists “nearly 1400 full-time faculty teaching clinical courses.” Yet far from being an uncontroverted part of the academic landscape, clinics—particularly environmental clinics—have endured political blowback from challenging the environmentally destructive behavior of major economic interests. The effectiveness of environmental clinics is no greater than established environmental organizations—perhaps less effective given the length of time it takes for law students guided by faculty to mount a legal challenge and the complexity and difficulty of the cases these clinics take on. Nonetheless, environmental clinics repeatedly find themselves the target of efforts to shut them down, restricted in the types of cases and/or clients they can take on, and limited by supervisory boards with the power of case approval. Why is this? What is it about law students working for credits and grades that powerful interests find so threatening that they spend their resources on eliminating clinics instead of confronting them in court? Is the attack on clinics part of a broader attack on public access to the courts for righting environmental wrongs? Do these attacks reflect something about the nature of the attacker and her victim? This article seeks to answer those questions, and concludes that clinics, like environmental organizations, function in an environment that is exceptionally hostile to the types of clients they represent and the cases they bring. This means that the claims environmental clinics file, like those filed by the national groups, will be met with a barrage of opposing filings based on a number of jurisdictional and other challenges enabled by the U.S. Supreme Court’s anti-public interest jurisprudence. Unlike the well-funded, publicly visible, and widely supported national organizations, environmental clinics are more vulnerable to less conspicuous attacks brought directly by the economic interests they challenge and their political supporters. Perhaps clinics unwittingly invite these attacks that in turn weaken their ability to function in this already hostile environment. The combination of the two can create a perfect storm for environmental clinics. Even more curious is the role that lawyers play in attacks on clinics and the bullying techniques they use to discourage clinic-initiated litigation. There is something about students that brings the bully out in those who face them across the table that goes beyond the usual reasons given for these attacks—namely, that environmental clinics empower people who are otherwise without power to confront those who disregard their interest, that they are successful, and that they have enormous staying power and endless student enthusiasm. This behavior, although part of the general incivility problem afflicting the legal profession, is something more, and has to do with the nature of today’s lawyers and the context in which they learned how to be lawyers and practice law. Although many articles have been written about attacks on environmental clinics, none has identified this second reason—the milieu in which lawyers are educated and trained—and placed it in the broader context of judicial hostility toward environmental claims brought against established economic interests. This article lays the groundwork for these conclusions by first briefly discussing the origins of clinics and clinical pedagogy in general. Then it describes the various attacks on the clinics, some consequences of those attacks, and how certain responses to those attacks run afoul of basic ethical precepts as well as notions of academic freedom. The third part of the article, after briefly listing some of the conventional reasons for these attacks, focuses on a less conventional one—namely, that they are fueled by the asocial behavior of lawyers who are in the vanguard of many of these attacks. It shows how such behavior is akin to that of a schoolyard bully who, in sensing a weaker opponent, acts out in ways that have been fodder for psychological literature. This part of the article also describes the various barriers the Court has erected that make it difficult for public interest litigants, particularly poorly funded and understaffed environmental clinics, to prosecute legal claims representing individuals who threaten the economic and political status quo. The article concludes that the more conventional explanation for the attacks against clinics are incomplete because they neither explain the persistence of the attacks nor show how the combination of intimidation and hostile judicial doctrine make it extremely difficult for environmental clinics to do their job

Digital Death: The Failures, Struggles and Discourses of the Social Media Spectacle

Celebrities have always capitalized upon various media to give voice and substance to their own mute causes. From Live Aid to PBS fundraisers, they have utilized their public personae to support the downtrodden, sick and underprivileged. However, in December of 2010, when Alicia Keys and over a dozen other celebrities banded together to raise money for World AIDS Day by eradicating their Twitter and other social media profiles, their much-hyped campaign to raise one million dollars fell short of its goal by nearly half. This paper explores the discourses surrounding the Digital Death Pseudo-Event, and the effects of the disjuncture between the real and digital self when the Celebrity Spectacle is moved from traditional media to the social sphere. Consumer awareness of that gulf ultimately precluded the Digital Death campaign\u27s ability to succeed, not only as a fundraiser, but also as a media spectacle. Ultimately, such revelations point to the inherent natures of social media to promote a certain type of celebrity spectacle that does not conform uniformly to the celebrity of traditional media

Revenge of Mullaney v. Wilbur: United States v. Booker and the Reassertion of Judicial Limits on Legislative Power to Define Crimes, The

This article offers a historically grounded account of the twists and turns in the Supreme Court\u27s sentencing jurisprudence from the end of World War II to the Court\u27s stunning rejection of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The doctrinal shifts that have roiled this area of the law can best be understood as the Court\u27s effort to respond to the changing political and social landscape of crime in America. In the mid 1970\u27s, legislative activity in the criminal law was largely focused on Model Penal Code influenced recodification. In that era, the Supreme Court took power from an ascendant judiciary and gave it to legislators who did not seem disposed to exercise their authority too broadly. By the late 1990\u27s the tide had shifted and the Court turned sentencing doctrine on its head to take power over criminal law from legislative bodies inclined to push the limits of their power and transfer it back to a newly cautious judiciary. This article explores how that shift in power was informed by changing social and political conditions and was accomplished through doctrines regulating the Sixth Amendment right to trial

The relation between language and theory of mind in development and evolution

Considering the close relation between language and theory of mind in development and their tight connection in social behavior, it is no big leap to claim that the two capacities have been related in evolution as well. But what is the exact relation between them? This paper attempts to clear a path toward an answer. I consider several possible relations between the two faculties, bring conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to bear on them, and end up arguing for a version of co-evolution. To model this co-evolution, we must distinguish between different stages or levels of language and theory of mind, which fueled each other’s evolution in a protracted escalation process

I Am Opposed to This Procedure : How Kafka\u27s In the Penal Colony Illuminates the Current Debate About Solitary Confinement and Oversight of American Prisons

This is the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka\u27s In the Penal Colony. The story brilliantly imagines a gruesome killing machine at the epicenter of a mythical prison\u27s operations. The torture caused by this apparatus comes to an end only after the “Traveler,” an outsider invited to the penal colony by the new leader of the prison, condemns it. In the unfolding of the tale, Kafka vividly portrays how, even with the best of intentions, the mental and physical well-being of inmates will be jeopardized when total control is given to people who run the prisons with no independent oversight. At the core of America\u27s vast prison system is the pervasive practice of solitary confinement, a practice that in many ways is analogous to the penal colony machine. Like the machine, it inflicts great psychological and often physical pain on people subjected to it. It, like the machine, is used to punish people for trivial offenses without due process. Like the machine, it is seen as essential to the operation of this closed prison system. Many of the new leaders of American prisons want to reform solitary confinement practices, but like the new Commandant in Kafka\u27s tale, without oversight, these leaders operate in the dark, unable to effectuate meaningful change by themselves. Kafka knew what he was talking about. The historic record, reviewed in this Article, demonstrates that Kafka had a notable legal career as an attorney at the Workers\u27 Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. In that job he worked on behalf of industrial workers to open closed worksites to oversight, thereby improving worker safety and preventing needless accidents. These experiences gave Kafka a realistic understanding of what can happen in closed, unregulated institutions such as prisons. Despite the relevance of In the Penal Colony, Kafka\u27s voice has not yet been heard in this debate. This Article is intended to fill that void and to reveal how Kafka\u27s profound insights, so artfully crafted in the powerfully beautiful prose of In the Penal Colony, help us understand why we must open prison doors to outside scrutiny and put an end to the gruesome practice that is solitary confinement

Coping with Stigma: Challenges & Opportunities

This paper discusses several strategies for preventing technological stigma from causing unwarranted bias in public decision making

Moduli spaces of sheaves on K3 surfaces and Galois representations

We consider two K3 surfaces defined over an arbitrary field, together with a smooth proper moduli space of stable sheaves on each. When the moduli spaces have the same dimension, we prove that if the \'etale cohomology groups (with Q_ell coefficients) of the two surfaces are isomorphic as Galois representations, then the same is true of the two moduli spaces. In particular, if the field of definition is finite and the K3 surfaces have equal zeta functions, then so do the moduli spaces, even when the moduli spaces are not birational.Comment: 16 pages. Improved proofs and exposition following referee's suggestion

Adopting stewardship contracting : lessons from four national forests

4 pagesCongress granted broad stewardship contracting authority to the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in the FY 2003 appropriations act to help these agencies accomplish restoration and hazardous fuels reduction and increase community benefit from these activities. During the first several years of the authority, the use of stewardship contracting was uneven, with some national forests making significant use of the authorities while others hardly used stewardship contracting at all. Although the stewardship contracting has become more wide spread in recent years, it is not clear why some national forests were early adopters and others were more hesitant to use the authorities. This study provides insight into the question of why the use of stewardship contracting was initially so variable.This briefing paper was made possible with funding from the USDA Forest Service, National Fire Plan, Ford Foundation, and University of Oregon