updated 6/24/11

In my remarks at the AALS workshop yesterday on the “Do’s and Don’ts of Blogging,” I didn’t get to shout out to all of the great feminist law profs who blog.  There are many that I know about, and probably lots more that I don’t know about.  Let’s try to crowd-source a list.  Here’s my start at a list of feminist law profs who blog (or also blog) elsewhere:

• Horace Anderson, Hip Hop Law
• Rachel Anderson, Rachel Anderson’s Law Blog
• Laura Appleman, The Faculty Lounge
• Ann Bartow, Madisonian.net
• Linda Beale, A Taxing Matter
• Sara Benson, Sexual Orientation and the Law Blog
• Barbara Black, Securities Law Prof
• Caitlin Borgmann, Reproductive Rights Prof
• Rebecca Bratspies, IntLawGrrls
• Pamela Bridgewater, Hip Hop Law
• Erin Buzuvis, Title IX Blog
• Naomi Cahn, IntLawGrrls
• David Cassuto, Animal Blawg
• Danielle Citron, Concurring Opinions
• David S. Cohen, The Faculty Lounge
• Christine Corcos, Media Law Prof
• Mary Dudziak, Legal History Blog
• Stephanie Farrior, IntLawGrrls
• Katherine Franke, Gender, Sexuality & Law Blog
• Suzanne Goldberg, Gender, Sexuality & Law Blog
• Jill Gross, ADR Prof Blog Indisputably
• Beth Hillman, IntLawGrrls
• Nan Hunter, Hunter of Justice
• Lolita Buckner Inniss, Ain’t I a Feminist Legal Scholar, Too?
• Renee Newman Knake, Legal Ethics Forum
• Kim Krawiec, The Faculty Lounge
• Sonia Lawrence, Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Blog
• Orly Lobel, Prawfsblawg
• Solangel Maldonado, Concurring Opinions
• Serena Mayeri, Legal History Blog
• Tracy McGaugh, Millenial Law Prof
• Colin Miller, Evidence Prof Blog
• Marie Newman, Out of the Jungle
• Ellen Podgor, White Collar Crime Prof Blog
• Nancy Polikoff, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage
• Lisa Pruitt, Legal Ruralism and IntLawGrrls
• Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Concurring Opinions and IntLawGrrls
• Nancy Rapoport, Nancy Rapoport’s Blogspot
• Ruthann Robson, Constitutional Law Prof
• Andrea Schneider, ADR Prof Blog Indisputably
• Julie Shapiro, Related Topics
• Rebecca Tushnet, Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log
• Kaimi Wenger, Concurring Opinions
• Patricia Williams, Madlawprofessor’s  Weblog
• Kamille Wolff, Hip Hop Law

The list is incomplete and I need your help filling it.  This is what I could put together off the top of my head because I either read those blogs regularly or have been in recent touch with the authors.   My brain is sometimes more seive-like than steel trap-like, though, so please email me and and all additions/corrections/clarifications/crowdsource info!

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Paul Caron & Bernard Black (here) and Brian Leiter (here) have laid out the arguments for and against using SSRN downloads as a measure of faculty scholarship.  I don’t have anything new to add, but I did prepare a list of U.S. News schools #23-100, by recent SSRN downloads. I followed the methodology used Brian Leiter here.

The category’s 20 most downloaded are below.  Full list after the jump. UPDATED 7/5/09:  For anyone who is interested, the data file is available  here in CSV format and  here as an Excel spreadsheet.

-Bridget Crawford

UPDATE: I’m happy to post data for schools outside the US News ##23-100. (The initial title of my post was incorrect.)

Texas Tech (Tier 3) 2,470. Top 3: Bryan Camp (1,060); Christopher Bruner (580); Gabriel Eckstein (240). % Accounted for by Top 3: 76.1%.

Chapman (Tier 3) 11880.  Top 3: Vernon Smith (1930), Francine Lipman (1640), and Jeremy Miller, retired (1000).  % Accounted for by Top 3: 38.5%

NEW (as of 7/4/09): University of Missouri at Kansas City (Tier 3). 7940.  Top 3: Levit (2510), Rostron (2050), Linder (1270).  % Accounted for by Top 3: 73.4%

Feminist Law Professors

Via Law.com:

Diane Amman, IntLawGrrls

Monica Bay, The Common Scold

Kathleen Bergin and Josie F. Brown, First Amendment Law Prof blog

Nicole Black, Sui Generis

Julie Fleming Brown, Life at the Bar

Mary Dudziak, Legal History Blog

Carolyn Elefant, My Shingle

Michelle Golden, Golden Practices

Denise Howell, Lawgarithms and Between Lawyers

Christine Hurt, The Conglomerate

Kimberly A. Kralowec, The UCL Practitioner

Suzanne Cartier Liebel, Build a Solo Practice

Joy London, practicesource.com

Diane Murley, Law Dawg Blawg

Sabrina Pacifici, beSpacific and LLRX

Ellen Podgor, White Collar Crime Prof Blog

Claire Potter, Tenured Radical

Victoria Pynchon, Settle It Now

Nina Yablok, Bizblawg

Nicole Black adds:

Some of us blog about substantive legal issues (New York Federal Criminal Practice, TalkLeft, Sui Generis, California Estate Planning blog, Pennsylvania Fiduciary Litigation, Indiana Law Blog).

Some of us blog about practice management (My Shingle, Build a Solo Practice, LLC, Legal Ease Blog).

Some of us blog about the practice of law (Legal Mystenigmary, Blond Justice, Deliberations, Civil Negotiation and Mediation).

Some of us blog about women and the law (Power of Attorney: Not Happy Hour At the Bar, Feminist Law Professors, Women in Law Daily).

Some of us blog about technology and the law (California BioTech Law Blog, Practicing Law in the 21st Century,Connie Crosby, The Law Firm Intranet).

Some of us blog about our lives, our families, and the world (The Common Scold, Ipse Dixit, Part-time Law Mom, Legal Antics, Merits of the Case, Bag and Baggage, ).

For a long list of women blawgers, head on over to BlogHer’s Law Blog list.   And, feel free to add your own woman-authored blawg in the comments to this post.

And here’s a slightly amended re-post of this list:

Intlawgrrls

Title IX Blog

Millennial Law Prof

Out of the Jungle

LibraryLaw Blog

clinicians with not enough to do

hunter of justice

Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage

First Amendment Law Prof Blog

Reproductive Rights Prof Blog

Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log

Legal Writing Prof Blog

Doing Justice

Susan Crawford blog

Nancy Rapoport’s Blogspot

HealthLawProf Blog

Media Law Prof Blog

Law and Magic Blog

Banking Law Prof Blog

Elder Law Prof Blog

BlenderLaw

A Taxing Matter

Related Topics

Wardlaw Blog

Related Topics

Feminist Law Professors

T’was tagged by the wonderful Nicole Black, and I’m going to cast a wide and weird net, so:

Historiann: “History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present”

3 Quarks Daily: Like a blog of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

The Society for Librarians* Who Say “Mofo”: The blog title pretty much says it all.

Suburban Bliss: Fresh, funny honest sounding autobiography that is a little less contrived seeming than some of the friendly “competitors” in its blogroll (which I mostly also like).

Fail Blog: Below is Friday Cat Blogging, Fail Blog style.

I tag: Bridget “Coolest Teacher of Tax Law in the Known Universe” Crawford, Francine Lipman, David Cohen, Danielle Holley-Walker, Tony Infanti, Sharon Sandeen, Kathleen Bergin, Josie Brown, Tracy McGaugh, Nancy Rapoport, Paul Secunda, Frank Pasquale, Dave Hoffman, Jim Chen, Minna Kotkin, Christine Hurt, Larry Solum, Erin Buzuvis, Nan Hunter, Julie Shapiro, Nancy Polikoff, Caitlin Borgmann, Caroline Bradley, Susan Crawford, Stephanie Farrior, Rebecca Bratspies, KC Sheehan, Susan Scafidi, Rebecca Tushnet, Devan Desai, Mike Madison, Brett Frischmann, Fred Yen, Greg Lastowka and Eric Fink.

–Ann Bartow

ETA: If I was trying to seem more feminine, I would have listed this blog, which I also enjoy, but not as much as cussing librarians.

Feminist Law Professors

We here at Feminist Law Professors don’t care about “size.” There isn’t a publicly accessible Site Meter here because we do not run commercial advertisements, and we try to offer some small measure of privacy protection to our readers. Publicly accessible Site Meters collect and reveal the IP addresses and other identifying information about readers to the public, and also facilitate extensive reader tracking, see e.g. this, which doesn’t really fit the values of this blog.

Of Paul Caron’s Law Prof Blog Rankings, Brian Leiter has noted: “Of the top five, four have almost nothing to do with law, and four are right-wing or far right-wing in their political orientation.” They are also heavily male dominated (but see the Legal History Blog, The Conglomerate, the Family Law Prof Blog, and Althouse). You won’t find some very good law prof blogs with predominantly women authors listed by Caron’s methodology, so allow me to highlight them here, in no particular order:

Intlawgrrls

Title IX Blog

Millennial Law Prof

Out of the Jungle

LibraryLaw Blog

clinicians with not enough to do

hunter of justice

Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage

First Amendment Law Prof Blog

Reproductive Rights Prof Blog

Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log

Legal Writing Prof Blog

Doing Justice

Susan Crawford blog

Nancy Rapoport’s Blogspot

HealthLawProf Blog

Media Law Prof Blog

Law and Magic Blog

Banking Law Prof Blog

Elder Law Prof Blog

BlenderLaw

A Taxing Matter

Related Topics

Feel free to leave any omissions in the comments.

–Ann Bartow

Feminist Law Professors

Via Nancy Rapoport at Money Law and Brian Leiter, consider this article at Inside Higher Ed about a new approach to rating law schools that will be published by The Green Bag, and rather unsubtly called The Deadwood Report. (NB: For any reader who does not work in a law school, “deadwood” is the term often used to describe unproductive faculty members). From the Inside Higher Ed article:

What exactly will the Deadwood Report measure? Law schools, the editors write,”generally hold themselves out as institutions led by faculties whose members are committed to teaching, scholarship, and service.”They argue that the best teachers tend to be active scholars and vice versa,”and all the best lawyers of every stripe engage in service for the public good…. Evidence of the law schools’ commitment to this view is reflected in the practically universal requirement of high achievement in all three areas for tenure. And so we should be able to say with some confidence that a good law school will have a faculty consisting of hard-working teacher-scholar-humanitarians,”the Green Bag editorial says.

“The Deadwood Report will simply test the accuracy of that picture,”the journal’s editors write.”Our focus will be on the most dully objective of measures: whether the work is being done : whether each law school faculty member is teaching courses, publishing scholarly works, and performing pro bono service.” (The journal plans to start with teaching and research, turning only eventually to service, and notes that it does not plan :”at least not yet”: to answer what it calls the”trickier and more entertaining subjective questions: whether the teaching is effective, whether the scholarship is sound, whether the service is in the public interest.”)

The Green Bag‘s method for answering those questions sounds like it will be painstaking. Its staff (editor Ross E. Davies and research assistants) plan to:

• Download a law school’s faculty Web pages, course catalogs, and publications lists.
• Compile the data, with an emphasis on recent scholarship and recent teaching (“A school whose faculty is heavy with people who used to be active might do well in a citation or reputation study, but it will do poorly in the Deadwood Report”).
• Analyze the data, using a still-to-be-finalized process of”sorting and weighting.”Basic principles:”We are interested in well-rounded, activie faculty members, and so we will give more weight to the moderately active teacher-writer than to the hyper-writer who neglects teaching or to the hyper-teacher who neglects writing.”Schools will also be rewarded for having well-rounded faculties, rather than a handful who are big-time scholars and a bunch of others who aren’t.
• Send each school’s dean his or her institution’s preliminary results for a chance to correct inaccuracies.
• Correct the errors and publish the results.

The journal’s editors offer some advice to law school deans, which offers additional evidence about their motives in joining the rankings game. Keep your Web sites up to date, since that is where all of the rankings’ information will come from.“This seems reasonable to us because your Web site is surely where most applicants and other inquisitive people go for information about your law school. If a school cannot be bothered to provide accurate information about the teaching, scholarship and service of its own faculty on its own Web site, it deserves to be haunted by any inaccuracies.”

“Puffery is double-edged,”the Green Bag warns. If a law school’s”faculty”page offers a long list of names, the journal’s editors will include and assess them all in the school’s”deadwood”numbers.”Inflated denominators will not be helpful to you,”the journal’s editorial says. “If you have employees who are employed to teach but not to write, or to write but not to teach,”or who once did one or both but no longer do, or who are on leave,”you might be well-served : and people visiting your Web site would certainly be better-informed : if you moved those folks off your list of”Faculty”and onto lists labeled, perhaps,”Instructors”and”Researchers”and”Emeriti”and”Administrators”and”On Leave.” (Visiting instructors will be treated differently.)

The full Green Bag description can be downloaded here.

If this initiative motivates law schools to clean up and demystify their websites, that alone would be an incredible service. I have often wondered what the deal was with some of the “faculty web pages” at U.S. law schools. Consider how impressively the Yale Law School’s faculty website, which is actually more informative than many law school websites, obfuscates the status of the folks teaching (or in some cases, NOT teaching) there. Who is tenured? Who is tenure track? Is everyone who is not listed as “on leave” teaching a full load? Or teaching a class at the law school at all? And see how long it takes you to figure out how many tenured women are currently on the YLS faculty. Not too many, huh? But the website design hides that fact pretty well.

Harvard Law School is one of the largest law schools in America. So does it have the one of the largest law school faculties? Well, 84 people are listed here, of which only 17 are women. Two of them I happen to know from firsthand, being their student experience, are among the finest lawprofs anywhere (that would be Lani Guinier and Elizabeth Warren), and I love the fact that HLS has a woman Dean, but sheesh, 17 out of 81 in 2008? And how many are “on leave” for the year or some portion thereof? In fairness, my own law school is being less than fully transparent when it lists 51 “full time” faculty members. Not everybody named is teaching a full four course load this year, or even regularly.

If law schools are motivated by this new approach to ratings to host more honest and informative websites, this may benefit women in several ways. First, it will make data collection easier, for the purposes of ascertaining how many tenure and tenure track women there are on a faculty. Second, it will draw attention to the high numbers of women in non-tenure track positions, relative to men. (See also). Third, if service is measured, there is a good possibility the data will demonstrate that female faculty members perform more service than males, and incentivize law schools to recognize and reward service more effectively.

–Ann Bartow

Feminist Law Professors

A customer complaint in Powerpoint form! Via Nancy Rapaport.

Feminist Law Professors

Feminist Law Prof David S. Cohen encouraged feminist bloggers to compile a list of headlines for the upcoming year (see David’s initial post here).  

So here are my four headlines for the upcoming year:

Headline I’m most fearful of seeing in 2008:   Gap Between Rich and Poor Widens.

Headline I most want to see in 2008: Global Poverty Eliminated.   (David didn’t say we had to be realistic.)

Headline I most expect to see in 2008: Estate Tax Repeal?   Fuhgeddaboudit!

Headline I least expect to see in 2008: Domestic Violence Drops to All-Time Low.

David modestly claims he doesn’t know how to start an internet meme, but he did!  

I tag Ann Bartow, Caitlin Borgmann, Christine Hurt, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Sudha Setty and Nancy Rapoport (and they’ll tag 5-6 people, and so on and so on).

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

While we’re on the topic of international news, Women’s eNews has a good article today about Women in Black, a group of Israeli women who have protested the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land for the last 20 years.   Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of their weekly Friday protests.

Their protests are important for highlighting that there are diverse opinions about the issue among Israelis as well as for showing that women can be active participants in the dispute, especially in an area of the world not known for challenging traditional notions of women’s roles.   From the article:

A sociology professor at Israeli’s Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva disagrees. Sara Helman says Women in Black blazed a trail by crossing national boundaries during the first Palestinian uprising and calling for an end to suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.

“You can live in Israel your daily life as an Israeli Jew perfectly and forget” about the occupation, she says. “What Women in Black did, they didn’t let the issue of occupation be ignored . . . They brought it to the fore. They brought it to public attention.”

A 1997 study that Helman co-authored with Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Tamar Rapoport found that Women in Black’s protest methods “embodied an open challenge to deeply ingrained notions of femininity in Israel” and offering an alternative interpretation of a woman’s place in Israeli politics and society.

Each woman, they found, created a new space that challenged and subverted the political, social and cultural categories that relegated women to marginality.

“They brought women’s bodies into the public sphere,” Helman says. “They stood there in the public sphere outside, quietly, silently with only signs that said ‘Stop the Occupation.’ The only means to protest was their bodies. That was also path breaking.”

Keep up the amazing work!

- David S. Cohen

Feminist Law Professors

The rules of the meme are here. And here is where I got tagged with it! I used to watch a lot of movies and I’ve seen some real stinkers, including everything in the Pokemon genre:

I have reason to believe I wouldn’t like the recently released Beowulf much, so I probably won’t see it, making it ineligible for meme purposes, so I’m going to go with Fatal Attraction for its creepiness and ridiculous sterotyping of women. I agree with Susan Faludi that it is a quintessential “Backlash” movie.

I tag Kathleen Bergin and Josie Brown, Caitlin Borgmann, Al Brophy, Erin Buzuvis, Bridget Crawford, Michael Froomkin, Jared Greer, Liz Losh, Nancy McClernan, KC Sheehan, and Dr. Violet Socks.

Feminist Law Professors