This article reports on how law students use laptops, based on observations of 1072 laptop users (though there was considerable overlap among those users from one class to another) during 60 sessions of six law school courses. Some findings: More than half the upper-year students seen using laptops employed them for non-class purposes more than half the time, raising serious questions about how much they learned from class. By contrast, first-semester Civil Procedure students used laptops for non-class purposes far less: only 4% used laptops for non-class purposes more than half the time while 44% were never distracted by laptops. Students in exam courses were more likely to tune out when classmates asked and professors responded to questions and less likely to tune out when a rule was discussed or textual material read in class. For first-semester students, policy discussions generated the highest level of distraction while displaying a PowerPoint slide which was not later posted on the web elicited the lowest level. With some exceptions, what was happening in the class did not affect whether upper-year students tuned out or paid attention. The format used to convey information – lecture, calling on students, or class discussion – seemed to make little difference to the level of attention. Student attentiveness to the facts of cases is comparable to their overall attention levels.
The article speculates that student decisions on whether to pay attention are responses to the tension between incentives and temptation. While the temptation to tune out probably remains constant, ebbs and flows in incentives may cause students to resist or yield to that temptation. Because first-semester grades have more of an impact on job prospects, first-semester students have a greater incentive than upper-year students to attend to classes. Similarly, because students probably anticipate that rules are more likely to be tested on exams, students perceive that they have more of an incentive to pay attention when rules are discussed. Conversely, students may suspect that matters asked about by classmates are less likely to be tested on and so their grades are unlikely to be affected if they miss the question and answer, reducing the incentive to pay attention.

Because of methodological limits to the study, the article notes that its conclusions cannot be considered definitive, and so it urges others to conduct similar studies.

Professor Sovern’s article has attracted both popular media and academic interest.

Professor Sovern noted that “[t]his situation exists because laws do not specify what a privacy policy must contain — so companies that don’t compete on the basis of privacy are free to provide as little to consumers as they wish. A downside of self-regulation is that companies that don’t want to provide consumer protections can avoid doing so.”

Professor Sovern is a coordinator of the Consumer Law and Policy blog.

The most important story in American religion today is the rise of the “Nones,” the category of people who declare no religious affiliation. Approximately one-fifth of American adults are in this category, and their numbers have exploded in the past two decades. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Nones tend to be believers; very few of them say they are atheists or agnostics. They reject not belief but organized religion, and draw on a variety of traditions to create their own, a la carte, spiritualities. In this paper, I explore the rise of the Nones and the tensions it exposes in American law, particularly with regard to the definition of religion. To illustrate, I rely on a recent US appeals court case in which the plaintiff, “Psychic Sophie,” argued that the state had interfered with the exercise of her religion — which she defined, in typical None fashion, as “following her inner flow.”

More information is available here.

Mark Movsesian

When Congress passed CAFA, it considered an amendment to exclude actions filed by state attorneys general. But the Senate rejected the amendment. One senator cited concerns about plaintiffs’ lawyers using the exception as a loophole to persuade “a State attorney general to … lend the name of his or her office to a private class action.”

Still, any concerns the Supreme Court has over class action abuses will have to be balanced by its concerns over state sovereignty, said Adam Zimmerman, a professor at St. John’s University School of Law. If the Supreme Court rules that lawsuits filed by states can be removed to federal court, “it would threaten state sovereignty in a way Congress did not envision,” he said.

Please find the full text here: http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2013/05_-_May/Price-fixing_case_to_test_Supreme_Court_hostility_to_class_actions/

Adam Zimmerman

Here’s the relevant portion of the post:

In the wake of the 1929 crash, Ferdinand Pecora, who led the investigative Pecora Commission in the U.S. Senate, humiliated one banking titan after another with revelations of self-dealing and other shady behavior. Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, ended up being thrown into the slammer at Sing Sing for embezzlement. The ensuing outrage and revulsion led to the series of reforms that overhauled Wall Street’s practices in the 1930s.

More than a half-century later, prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani went after insider trading with similar zeal, even having some alleged perpetrators hauled off the trading floor in handcuffs. Some of the cases fell apart, but the public’s sense of a level playing field was restored.

However, as Michael Perino, author of a riveting biography of Pecora, The Hellhound of Wall Street, told me in a conversation last year, “It’s only when things get really bad that [the U.S. can] overcome the normal political forces that are at play and we can achieve significant reforms. At this point, it might take another crisis to do something.”

 

The link to the full blogpost is here: http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2013/05/28/there-aint-no-justice-on-wall-street/.

For video of the Chief Justice’s speech, click here.

For audio of the entire event, including Professor Barrett’s introduction (starting at counter reading 9:05), click here.

For the text of Professor Barrett’s remarks, click here.

Professor Barrett is Justice Jackson’s biographer, author of the very widely read Jackson List (click here for the archive, and for instructions on how to subscribe) and a member of the Jackson Center’s Board.

John Q. Barrett