Antoine Sharpe, The Atheist

I picked up a trade paperback called Antoine Sharpe, The Atheist: Incarnate the other day for two reasons: it had a cool sounding title and it was in the bargain bin because of "corner damage". I was extremely impressed by this book and I hope the creators do more soon (one gathers from the introduction that they have major deadline problems). The lead character is "slightly autistic" and has amazing powers of deduction and problem solving; he's also a cold-hearted skeptic and occasional investigator into "occult" mysteries. I know the book sounds a bit like the X-Files, and in a way it is--but it's got a nice edge that that show always lacked, a really creative creepy storyline, and a great ending. In fact, the story told in the TPB would make a great pilot episode or standalone movie.

Psycho Beach Party

Rogers recently sent me Psycho Beach Party, a movie I knew nothing about and added to the list solely because I was curious to see Nicholas Brendon (a.k.a. Alexander Lavelle Harris) in a non-Buffy role. I expected a dumb, cheapie comedy but I was pleasantly surprised that this dumb, cheapie comedy was actually funny a respectable portion of the time. Brendon's "beach stud" character is accompanied by Thomas Gibson (Greg of Dharma fame) and the excellent Lauren Ambrose in the lead role as wannabe surfer/possible crazed psycho killer.

The Heller Second Amendment Case

Most of the legal blogs I regularly read have posted extensively on the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Heller that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to own firearms, subject to certain undefined limitations. I don't have particularly strong opinions on the case itself, one way or the other, but I do want to briefly mention a couple of points.

First, many are celebrating both the majority's and the dissent's frequent citation and discussion of scholarship. Like most legal scholars, I love to see legal scholarship invoked as it gives me the hope that what legal scholars produce has a real role to play in shaping the law. However, it's not clear to me that in a 5-4 decision like Heller, where the Court is predictably split on conservative/liberal lines, whether the scholarship actually influenced the decision or is merely used to help explain a previously reached conclusion about how the case should be decided. A Canadian lawprof named Allan Hutchinson has also warned, rightly in my opinion, of law professors who write only with an eye to being cited by the courts, as if a count of citations was necessarily validation of the quality of one's work. Cynically manipulating one's writing in order to make it judicially palatable can be demeaning to true scholarship.

Second, Heller is another good example of the dangers that surround lawyers (advocates by nature) attempting to answer questions of historical or empirical fact. Judges and scholars are easily tempted to zealously embrace their position whole-heartedly and, in doing so, to argue that the opposing position is completely wrong and almost frivolous, when often the evidence is contradictory and the facts ambiguous. Such one-sidedness is laudable for a lawyer zealously representing a client but quite problematic in judging, where the goal is (or should be) an objective analysis of the relative merits of various positions. In other words, deciding that Position A is best doesn't always require treating advocates of Position B with thinly-veiled contempt. However, that's been the norm between majority and dissenting opinions in far too many recent Supreme Court opinions.

My Teaching Year (Part II)

One of the weird things about academic jobs is the time lag involved. You interview in October, get an offer in November or early December, and then sit on your heels for a good eight months until you start teaching the following August. I tried to use the time as wisely as possible by reading scholarship about legal writing, looking at lesson plans from other teachers, going to a conference, etc., but like with most things there's a limit to how much you can learn about something without actually doing it, which means you really have to learn on the job while in the meantime desperately hoping you meet the minimum expectations of students, the administration, and other faculty.

Between accepting the job and starting teaching, there were both fun and stressful moments which I won't go into much detail about: finding a beautiful apartment overlooking the river in Windsor; having my boss at CCLA call me the wrong name at my going away toast; my sig-other losing out on a great job in Detroit because they wouldn't sponsor her for a visa; and the Worst Moving Experience in the History of Mankind. But I digress . . .

One thing I had only the fuzziest impressions of as a law student, but that was very important to learn for my particular teaching position, was the great dichotomy between regular "doctrinal" law professors (those teaching torts, constitutional law, etc.) and "legal writing" professors. In short, although things are starting to improve, legal writing profs at most law schools make far less money, are ineligible for tenure, and (at some schools) can't even vote at faculty meetings. On the other hand, legal writing profs are usually not required to produce scholarship because the positions are designed with former practitioners in mind.

Now the great irony of my becoming a legal writing professor is that I'm primarily a legal scholar and have never "practiced law" in the traditional sense: I've never taken a bar exam, clerked at a law firm, articled, or represented a client in any context other than in a law school clinic setting. Legal research and writing are my strong suits--after all, that's what scholarship requires--but it's fair to say I had a very different background than all of the other legal writing profs at Detroit Mercy and most other law schools.

In my next post, I'll talk about my actual teaching experiences.

The Blue Angel

For a while now I've been a subscriber to Rogers Video Direct, which is basically Netflix Canada. In addition to tv shows and movies I missed in the theaters, I've added a long (400+) list of movie titles culled from my steady glancing through a DVD guide book. The length of the list means it's often a year or longer before a movie I put on the list actually shows up in the mailbox, which means I often have no idea what the heck it is I'm about to watch when I put a DVD into the player.

Today's selection turned out to be an excellent movie: The Blue Angel, a 1930s Marlene Dietrich movie. Her first starring role, and my first time watching a Dietrich movie, The Blue Angel is about a high school English teacher who falls in love with a burlesque dancer. The first hour or so of the film is high comedy with schoolboy pranks, fistfights, and a lot of running around. Without spoiling the plot (I'm not sure what the rules are on spoiling fairly famous 78 year old movies!), the last third is incredibly tragic and plays off beautifully from the earlier comedic material.

The movie is tame by today's standards, but you can still see glimpses of what made the movie the subject of censorship in the 30s. In one scene for example, the teacher and Dietrich are sitting at a table when the teacher knocks over a bunch of matches; he crawls under the table to pick them up and Dietrich says "Be careful under there, or you might get ran over."

My Teaching Year (Part I)

I spent the 2006-2007 school year as an Assistant Professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law. My main responsibility was a section of a special legal research and writing course for students in the joint American-Canadian J.D./LL.B. program, while during the summer I taught a class on American constitutional law.

I currently have a little over a year to decide whether I want to go back to teaching right after I finish my Ph.D. In this short series of blog posts I want to talk a little bit about my experiences as a law prof, and some of the rewards and disappointments I encountered.

It started, like a lot of jobs, with an ad in the newspaper. I was at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association at the time and desperately looking to make an exit, but had never seriously considered going into law teaching after hearing that it basically required finishing at the very top of your class from an Ivy league school and an appellate clerkship. Still, the ad in Lawyer's Weekly seemed like it was written just for me, as I didn't know many people with American and Canadian law degrees, a solid record of scholarship, and an interest in teaching.

It's worth mentioning that this is an extremely unusual way to enter legal academia in the United States--the "normal" route is through a kind of intense "job fair" at an American Association of Law Schools conference, held once a year in the Fall.

Anyway, I sent in my resume with a carefully crafted cover letter, expecting to hear nothing back. I immediately received an encouraging response from the chair of the search committee and was asked to take part in a phone interview. I did some hasty research on legal research and writing education which paid off considerably in the interview. I was surprised to be posed with a hypothetical about Lawrence v. Texas (a U.S. gay rights case) which came out after I had graduated law school and was working in Canada; fortunately I had skimmed the opinion and must have had some sort of coherent response to the question because they asked me to come to campus for another interview.

My first thoughts about the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law were: this is a high school! The building looked nothing like any law school I had ever been in before; it was not situated within the context of a larger campus. Instead, it simply occupied a three-story building in downtown Detroit, with wide hallways around a central gymnasium, standard high-school like classrooms with old-fashioned blackboards, etc.

Like most people, interviewing makes me nervous--but this time it was different. I really enjoyed myself during the job talk and interviews, and left feeling like I had done everything I could to get the job.

In a couple of weeks, I had the offer. I took a night to think it over--a faculty position at any law school, even a "fourth-tier" school like Detroit Mercy, is an enviable job for most lawyers and would allow me to leave CCLA with a sense of honor. On the other hand, trading Toronto for Detroit/Windsor looked to be a step down, I wouldn't be making much more money (at least at the beginning) than I did at CCLA, and I had a sig-other to think about.

You already know the choice I made, of course, and in a subsequent post I'll talk more about my actual teaching experiences.

Emma Frost, the White Queen

Recently I've been reading Emma Frost, the short-lived series about the high school years of X-Men villain/ally The White Queen. The series only lasted 18 issues but is collected in three pocket-sized volumes.

The series is surprisingly interesting because there are no slugfests, super heroes, or skintight costumes. Instead, there's a high school girl slowly realizing she has psychic abilities while trying to deal with her manipulative, domineering father, her scheming older sister, and her boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks. The characterization of each is extremely well-done and helps shed some light on how Emma Frost could go from the girl on the left to the woman on the right. On the other hand, one can also see why the comic got cancelled rather quickly; the collected volume and some issue covers (on the left) are marketed as "teen drama/romance" while some issue covers (on the right) make it seem like the comic is about the traditional full-fledged, super-powered White Queen. In other words, each potential audience was probably turned off by something about the book. Marketing aside, the comic is worth seeking out and the cheap collected editions are a good way to go about it.