Light Blogging This Week; Reading Recommendations

This week I will be on vacation at Lake Tahoe, so there might be some light blogging during the days to come. During my vacation and in the month or so I have until work begins, I hope to catch up on some reading I have been meaning to do. Here are some of the articles I want to read before I get back into a regular work schedule:

The California Bar Exam Begins Today!

Blogging will be light over the next few days since I will be taking the exam:





Good luck to everybody taking the bar exam in California and elsewhere!

I Didn't Realize that UCLA had an Admiralty Law Professor

At the Faculty Lounge, Michelle Meyer posts about Long Knives, a new legal thriller by Charles Rosenberg. This book is a sequel to Rosenberg's earlier book, Death on a High Floor, and moves the protagonist of the earlier work from a large law firm to a tenure-track faculty position at UCLA School of Law.

Meyer includes an excerpt from the book's prologue. From that excerpt:

Five years [ago], I had decided, let’s face it, on a whim, that I was done with Big Law. And so, aided by a bit of luck and the dwindling memory of my fifteen minutes of fame from saving Robert Tarza’s butt from San Quentin, I left my law firm, Marbury Marfan, and transformed myself—poof!—into a tenure-track law professor at UCLA. I still worked hard, but I no longer spent my nights preparing for trial or my days battling the jerks, most of them of the male persuasion, who seemed to appear like clockwork on the other side of my cases. 

 . . .

Teaching and writing about civil procedure, with eight long trials under my belt, was a natural for me. Teaching admiralty law had come as a surprise; I’d never even been on a sailboat prior to arriving at UCLA. But fate twists your life in funny ways. The week before classes started for my first year of teaching, Charles Karno, who looked the picture of health and had been teaching the admiralty course for more than twenty years, dropped dead of a heart attack while running a half marathon. The dean had prevailed on me to teach it. “You can learn it along with the students,” he said.

I have never gotten into reading legal fiction, but I will admit that the main character's occupation as a professor at UCLA Law makes Long Knives tempting. But I doubt I will end up reading it, since I would probably need to read Death on a High Floor first, and because I would be tormented by inaccuracies (for example, a search of UCLA Law's curriculum indicates that there are no classes on maritime or admiralty law).

Does the Rise of "Malarkey" Account for the Decline in "Balderdash" and "Tomfoolery?"

These are the questions that I ponder when I want to take a break from the law. My initial inquiry on Google ngrams suggests an affirmative answer to this question:



(I apologize for the overlap of the chart with the text on the right side of the page -- this seems to be an issue that Blogspot has not resolved at this time)

That search was not "case-insensitive" -- and a case-insensitive search gave me different results -- although my initial theory seems plausible:


A close look at the graphs, however, reveal that the decline in balderdash and tomfoolery seems to begin before any substantial rise in malarkey. It should also go without saying that I am aware that this type of search does not involve considerations of statistical significance and there may be crucial variables I am missing.

While trying to refine my investigation, I considered another common (though more vulgar) synonym that these charts do not include. While I will not mention that term here, beyond noting that it is commonly abbreviated as "B.S.," a link to an ngram comparison of that term with balderdash, tomfoolery, and malarkey is available here. While BS is now a far more commonly-used term than the others, the explosion in its use did not occur until around 1960 -- which was after the mid 1930s and onward decline in tomfoolery and balderdash. But a closer investigation of BS reveals that it was slightly more common than malarkey in malarkey's early years -- so a combination of BS and malarkey could have contributed to the decline of tomfoolery and balderdash.

As a disclaimer: if any readers think that the preceding discussion and charts have yielded a credible answer to the question I have posed, I would advise those readers to take a statistics class. But if readers think that this theory is one worth pursuing, I would advise them to do so. A Google Scholar search of all three terms malarkey balderdash tomfoolery together yielded only five results -- indicating that my thesis is rather novel.

Follow Up: "Dreck" is another variable that tracks malarkey's trend and which may be part of the explanation for the decline in tomfoolery and balderdash.

Administrative Note on This Blog's URL and Post Displays

My Twitter feed has been lighting up about Gmail being down, and it looks like Google's problems might extend to its Blogger platform (from which this blog operates). About half the time that I type either "smithblawg.blogspot.com" or "www.smithblawg.blogspot.com" in my browser, I get an error message. The rest of the time, I make it through to the blog.

But what is particularly strange is that while smithblawg.blogspot.com leads me to an up-to-date display of the blog, typing www.smithblawg.blogspot.com leads to an older display of my blog, beginning with my January 16 post about the Second Amendment and 3-D-printed firearms. I will keep checking to see if this issue ever resolves, and update this post if it does.

UPDATE

Soon after posting this, I found that the URLs www.smithblawg.blogspot.com and smithblawg.blogspot.com both led to an up-to-date display of my blog, so it looks like the problem may have been resolved.

Big Changes in the Blawgosphere

Howard Bashman notes that the Blog of Legal Times is moving to the National Law Journal and will now be behind a paywall. Until I obtain solid, post-law school employment, it is very unlikely that I will be visiting that blog any time soon. On a happier note, Bashman re-iterates in that same post that the Wall Street Journal Law Blog has dropped their paywall entirely.

Due to a recent computer reboot coupled with the failure of Google Chrome on my laptop, I have been rebuilding my own list of law blogs to look over each day. I thought that further computer troubles were to blame when I visited volokh.com and was confronted with the Washington Post website, but soon learned that the Volokh Conspiracy and Washington Post have begun a joint venture where the Post will now host the Volokh Conspiracy. Eugene Volokh notes that the blog will be outside of the Post's limited paywall for the next six months, but after that period, non-.gov and .edu users will be limited to ten free views per month. Volokh also addresses the issue of editorial control over the blog:

We will also retain full editorial control over what we write. And this full editorial control will be made easy by the facts that we have (1) day jobs, (2) continued ownership of our trademark and the volokh.com domain, and (3) plenty of happy experience blogging on our own, should the need arise to return to that.

I have little doubt over the Conspirators' ability to maintain editorial control, but I will probably end up subscribing to the Washington Post. The six-month period of free access will end immediately before the bar exam which will be good news for my distraction-free studies, but bad news for my wallet.

Bryan Garner's Impressive Book Collection

The Legal History Blog announces an upcoming event at Yale Law School:

Bryan A. Garner, the world's leading legal lexicographer, will give a talk on Monday, December 9, about the exhibit of association copies from his private book collection, which is currently on display in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The announcement then mentions that Garner "has amassed a private collection of 36,000 books."

The exhibit, Built by Association: Books Once Owned by Notable Judges and Lawyers, includes books inscribed by John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Clarence Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer in American history. Other notable figures include Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Benjamin Cardozo, and Lindley Murray, a lawyer best known as "the father of English grammar." Three of the authors taught at Yale Law School: Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Judge Jerome Frank, and the iconoclastic Professor Fred Rodell.

I already admired Garner for providing invaluable and approachable writing and usage advice through diverse media, including books, law review articles, short articles, and Twitter.  It looks like I now have another good reason to continue holding this opinion.

Using Drones to Smuggle Drugs

After summarizing an unsuccessful drug-smuggling attempt in Georgia, the BBC reports on how drones are now being used to smuggle drugs into prisons:

Remote-controlled flying devices are becoming the tool of choice for those determined to smuggle in contraband, Stephane Lemaire, president of Quebec's correctional officers' union, tod the Ottawa Sun. 

"Usually the drones are carrying small packages of drugs or other illicit substances," he said. 

"Now that drones are relatively cheap to buy, they've become the best way to smuggle drugs inside," he added.

Nonmilitary drones are not all bad, however, as they "are increasingly being used in civilian life to make small deliveries, from pizzas to vital medicines."

Nita Farahany is Joining the Volokh Conspiracy

...which means that the blog will no longer be "famous."

On a side note, a quick check of her bio indicates that her research is incredibly interesting (see especially this) and I expect that her contributions will be especially appealing for the philosophically inclined.

Horwitz on Hypothetical "Deals for Wheels" Conundrum

On this blog I will normally aim to shy away from simply posting links to things that I find elsewhere, but I found this post by Paul Horwitz at PrawfsBlog to be too interesting to resist.