FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

The Threat of Open Access

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is the creation of a group of physicians and scientists who believe that scientific and medical research (much of which is publicly funded) should be freely available to the public.  They publish several free online journals.  According to an article in Nature, the for-profit publishers have begun to see the open-access movement as a serious threat, and they have hired a public relations firm to develop a campaign against PloS and the PubMed service provided by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.

Posted by Robin Gault

Short Introductions

Philosophy of Law: A Very Short Introduction
by Raymond Wacks

This lively and accessible introduction to the social, moral, and cultural foundations of law takes a broad scope-- spanning philosophy, law, politics, and economics, and discussing a range of topics including women's rights, racism, the environment, and recent international issues such as the war in Iraq and the treatment of terror suspects.

To browse the whole lot of Very Short Introductions published by Oxford University Press, point your mouse cursor here.

Some stores provide convenient series subject packaging; I wonder if The Brain Box works.

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Key Role of Law Student - Faculty Interaction

"Engaging Legal Education: Moving Beyond the Status Quo," the 2006 report on the Law School Survey of Student Engagement is available on the LSSSE website.  Among the report's findings: student-faculty interaction (including discussing ideas outside of class and getting prompt feedback) appears to be the most important factor in students' development of a sense of professional ethics and in their self-reported gains in analytical ability.

Posted by Robin Gault

Client-Centered Legal Education

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has issued a report urging law schools to revise the curriculum to place more emphasis on working with clients and on social and ethical issues, according to an article in the January 19 Chronicle of Higher Education, here.  The article mentions new initiatives in clinical training being offered at Stanford and Vanderbilt.  A summary of the Carnegie Foundation report, one of a series on professional education, is available in PDF on their website.

Posted by Robin Gault

The Power, Possibilities, and Pitfalls for Law Professor Blogs

An interesting article, Scholarship in Action: The Power, Possibilities, and Pitfalls for Law Professor Blogs by Douglas A Berman has been posted to SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

At the heart of the debate over law blogs as legal scholarship are bigger and more important (and perhaps scarier) questions about legal scholarship and the activities of law professors. First, the blog-as-scholarship debate raises fundamental questions about what exactly legal scholarship is and why legal scholarship should be considered an essential part of a law professor's vocation. And the key follow-up question is whether blogging should be part of that vocation. In this paper, I set out a few initial observations about the evolution and value of legal scholarship, and then share some thoughts on the power, possibilities, and pitfalls of law professors blogging to explain why I hope blogging will become an accepted part of a law professor's vocation.

The paper can be downloaded from here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

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Code: Version 2.0

Lawrence Lessig has updated his "minor classic" Code: Version 2.0. Here's a description from Amazon.com.

The "alarming and impassioned"* book on how the Internet is redefining constitutional law, now reissued as the first popular book revised online by its readers (*New York Times)

There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated-that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code, first published in 2000, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no "nature." It only has code-the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom-as the original architecture of the Net did-or a place of oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberpsace is becoming a highly regulable space, where behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space. But that's not inevitable either. We can-we must-choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The Kosher Phone

Is a kosher phone possible? Almost it would seem, that is, until a rather large company allegedly slipped up, or "went behind the rabbis' back and switched the texting functions back on."

The Kosher Phone defined: "A so-called 'plain vanilla' voice phone that would preclude the very possibility of going online, and the attendant temptations." (Daily Intel) 

The demand for a phone with disabled Internet access, no SIM card, and no SMS text service arises from concerns about how we communicate with each other nowadays.

Certain types of interactions among people, for example, have historically reserved for the most intimate or, in other cases, most debased of social contexts. Today such intercourse is now casually or anonymously initiated and maintained in the form of 'virtual' relationships that can have profound effects on family, social and spiritual life in the 'real' world. (Fact #16, lawsuit)

The combination of the Internet and ubiquitous high-speed mobile communications has, in turn, not only magnified the impact of each of them, but is causing a shift in cultural mores no more modest than the introduction of the automobile into American life approximately a century ago." (Fact #17, lawsuit)

Posted by Toni Urquhart