Senin, 17 Oktober 2011

Protests only make sense when they stand for something specific.

The current "occupy" protests remind me a lot of that great line in Network:  "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more!"  But I find myself increasingly frustrated by the tenor of the protests, and not just because some of them have an anti-Semitic tenor.  (Financial protests that blame the Jews?  Shocker.) 

Of course, we're frustrated about the current economic climate.  We have friends and neighbors who are suffering from unemployment or, if they have jobs, they're facing reduced benefits and the risk of layoffs.  We have friends and neighbors who have lost homes or who are at risk of losing their homes.  We have friends and neighbors who can't afford their prescription medicines.  We see the pain in their eyes.

But where are the specific solutions in those "occupy" protests?  The great protests of the past involved specifics:  desegregation, an end to discrimination, equal rights. 

One of my favorite movies (yep, written by Aaron Sorkin) has this line:  "We've got serious problems, and we need serious people."  Hanging out in a group without having some notion of what action that group wants to take (or whether any of the proposals make sense) isn't a serious solution to a serious problem.  I'm with David Brooks on this one:  oversimplying the problem as 99 vs. 1 gets us nowhere (here).

Story of (former) lawyer's chutzpah.

See here.  I couldn't make up behavior like this if I tried.

Selasa, 11 Oktober 2011

As if there weren't already a million reasons to read The Faculty Lounge.

Here's another one--Bernie Burk's going to blog there!

Shameless plug.

Each year, LexisNexis honors a select group of blogs that set the online standard for a given industry. I’ve just been told that this blog is one of the nominated candidates for the Top 25 Business Law Blogs of 2011, featured on the LexisNexis Corporate & Securities Community. (YAY!) If you're comfortable commenting about my blog (and there are TONS of great blogs on the site, so you could comment on a lot of 'em), then please click here.  Thanks! 

Sabtu, 01 Oktober 2011

Congrats to my buddy Jennifer Carr!

Jennifer's paper, Providing Effective Feedback, was recently listed on SSRN's Top Ten download list for Law Educator: Courses, Materials & Teaching eJournal.  Yay, Jennifer!