Vincent G. Rinn Law Library

How Arkansas Chritmas Lights Made it to Disney World

The "Osborne Spectacle of Lights" will be lighting up the "Streets of America" area of Disney's Hollywood Studios from November 30, 2009 through January 3, 2010. Folks who have not visited Disney World in Florida, may not be aware of this holiday lights extravaganza and the law suits that lead to it being hosted at the Disney property.

In 1986, Mr.Jennings Osborne owner of the Arkansas Research Medical Testing Center, granted his daughter’s wish for Christmas lights on their house by placing a simple 1,000 lights on their home.But over the next eight years the display grew to 3.5 million Christmas lights! For about eight years the yearly display drew hundreds of visitors during the holiday season. Apparently, the spirit of Christmas finally wore thin for some of Mr. Osborne's neighbors.

In 1993 six of them filed a law suit in the Arkansas Pulaski County Court claiming that the visitors & the traffic congestion due to the lights, made them virtual prisoners in their own homes.The county court ordered an injunction against the display,limiting it to 15 days and directing that it be lighted only from 7 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. However, Mr. Osborne did put on the light outside of those guidelines and was in contempt of court.

Mr. Osborne filed a petition challenging his contempt-of-court conviction in part alleging that claiming the ruling infringes on his religious freedom. U.S. District Judge James M. Moody threw out his petition. The case moved to state Supreme Court which gave Mr. Osborne a 10-day suspended sentence and ordered him to pay a $500 fine for each of the three days the display was lit in 1994.

In a challenge filed in federal court, Osborne argued that he was denied his constitutional rights to due process and a trial by jury and not allowed to conduct discovery. Mr. Osborne attempted to have the case heard in the U.S. Supreme Court but Chief Justice Thomas threw the case out for lack of being “unique”.

Finally, "seeing the light", Mr. Osborne was open to having his amazing light display moved to another location. Fortuitously, a staff member of Walt Disney World heard about this and invited Mr. Osborne to have his display become a part of the Disney holiday celebration. He accepted and in 1995, "The Osborne Spectacle of  Dancing Lights" lit up Disney Hollywood Studios with 4 million lights.  It has become the third most popular Disney attraction.

This seems to be a perfect fairy tale ending to a contentious string of law suits that has preserved a dazling exhibition of light and sound that humbly began as a Christmas wish of a daughter to her dad. 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

Osborne Home,Little Rock with lights

Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights at Disney’s Hollywood Studios™video

The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights video

Lawyers, Law Schools and Beyond

An article in the December 14 National Law Journal, "Going to law school? Proceed with caution"  by Karen Sloan, takes a very hard look at the prospects for law students to actually find the kind of employment that they  expected when they started in law school. It is accompanied by a link to a student produced animated video called, "A Law School Carol", that uses the model of Dicken's Christmas Carol to tell its related story.

The creator of the video has a no-holds-barred commentary on how too many law students have or have been sold on, very unrealistic expectations about what their time in law school will bring. Both the article and the video make the point that the huge investment in time, effort and money may no longer lead to a comfortable upper middle class life after graduation. 

Law schools are criticized for presenting an overly rosy picture to prospective students. Accurate information regarding realistic expectations about the opportunities their law degrees may afford, is not always made available. Often, students themselves refuse to honestly assess their prospects in the deeply depressed market for their skills .

While there is probably some responsibility to be apportioned to the law schools, the economy and the students themselves, there may be much more fundamental changes occurring in the economic environment in which the US legal profession finds itself . In The book,"The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services", Richard Susskind,a distinguished legal academic and advisor to international law firms, describes what he sees as the transformation of the legal profession.

A review of his book from earlier this year states,that "The legal profession is on the brink of fundamental transformation, Susskind argues. The role of traditional lawyers in some legal fields will be eroded and in others eliminated. Driving the revolution are two forces: the relentless commoditization of legal services and the rapid development of new innovations and technologies, particularly computers, IT and software."

Susskind has observed changes in the British legal profession driven by these forces which he expects will be affecting the US market as well. As complex legal issues are broken down into constituent tasks, processes and activities, additional non-lawyer actors can be employed to carry them out at lower overall costs. More sophisticated technology both facilitates and accelerates this trend.

Susskind sees these forces as eventually eliminating the traditional role of the "trusted legal advisors" that has been the basis of the existing legal profession. He identifies four major new roles that he believes will replace this traditional model.

"Four new breeds of lawyers will displace traditional lawyers:
(1) enhanced practitioners, who will support the delivery of standardized, systemized and packaged legal services;
(2) legal knowledge engineers, who will become the dominant species of lawyer and organize the vast quantities of complex legal content and processes that will be needed to be analyzed, distilled and then embodied in standard working practice and computer systems;
(3) legal risk managers, who will develop a wide range of legal services with a focus on anticipating and pre-emptying legal problems and will reduce the reliance on in-house counsel; and
(4) legal hybrids, who are multi-disciplinary practitioners, schooled in more than one discipline, will be required to provide sophisticated legal advice that bridges specialties."

If Mr. suskind's predictions are accurate, the problems faced by  today's law students as identified in the NLJ article and the student video, have a much more profound and long term basis in  fundamental economic and social factors.

"Adapt or die" seems to be what Mr. Susskind is telling the legal profession. If that is true for lawyers, it's also true for law schools.

Law School Rankings - Strength In Numbers ?

With the current debut of the Super Lawyer magazine law school ratings, a report from the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), may provide the context for understanding the significance of such a new rating.

This month, law schools received a Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) report that is part of a series sent to the libraries of LSAC member schools.One of the reports has specific relevance to the question of rankings of law and business schools entitled, "Fear of Falling: The Effects of U.S. News & World Report Rankings on U.S. Law Schools", by Michael Sauder of University of Iowa and Wendy Espeland of Northwestern University.

While this report along with others, is being distributed now, the date on the title page is Oct. 2007. Also, much of the content of the report mirrors what the same authors put forward in their 2006 article in the Indiana Law journal, : "Strength in Numbers? The Advantages of Multiple Rankings".

The report concludes that the US News & World Report (USN) rankings of law schools have a pervasive effects on both the behavior of law school personnel and on prospective law students and other influential external constituencies.The majority of law school administrators thinks that the effects are negative. However, a minority see value for providing consumer guidance for prospective students and a public measure of school performance.

The report states, "...The vast majority of administrators we interviewed held negative views of rankings: Most believed that rankings were more harmful than beneficial to their particular schools as well as to legal education generally...." "It is important to note, however, that a minority of administrators believe that rankings have had a positive effect on legal education. These deans suggest that the rankings provide a less subjective measurement of law school reputation (which they believe should be desirable to administrators), that they hold schools accountable to their constituents for their performance, and that they encourage schools to identify and address weaknesses..."

The author's report and more so their law review article, provide a possible long term remedy to what are perceived as the more pernicious effects of the dominance of the USN rankings of law schools. Their insight and recommendations are informed by their accompanying research into the ranking situation among business schools. In these arena multiple ranking organizations ( Business Week, Wall Street Journal, USN, Financial Times) focus on different aspects of business schools. This means that their rankings often differ substantially from each other.These rankings also distinguish among schools with different missions or those that serve different populations.

In the 2006 law review article, the authors state :
"These competing rankings have not made business schools immune to the effects of rankings. Like law schools, business schools redistribute resources, change inter-organizational activity, and devise gaming strategies as a result of these external evaluations. What these multiple rankings have done, however, is minimize the impact of some of the key problems the rankings create by producing ambiguity about the precise standing of these schools. This ambiguity diminishes the impact of small changes, allows business schools to maintain a significant degree of reputational control, and undermines to some extent the validity of the rankings. In addition, business school administrators are considerably less concerned about the effects of rankings than their law school counterparts, most often characterizing these effects as having both positive and negative consequences for business education...."

"In short, these competing evaluations of business schools have created a more sophisticated “rankings consciousness” among their constituents, and this stands in stark contrast with legal education, where many administrators believe that external audiences take rankings at face value."

So perhaps the legal educational community including students should support efforts like those of the  Super Lawyers magazine, to develop  more diverse methods for assessing law schools in the future.

What? Another Ranking?

Law school rankings continue to receive a lot of attention from all the stakeholders and a new entrant is getting its share.

In a 2004 book review article,"What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics", (82 Texas Law Review 1483, 1485-1486 (2004)  Paul L. Caron and Rafael Gely, "...argued that changes in the economic conditions of higher education and the legal profession,combined with increasing demands for accountability and transparency, created the market demand for measuring organizational success which U.S. News met with its annual law school rankings..."

"...we argue that law school rankings manifest American society’s increasing demand for more and better information. Rankings are here to stay, so the professorate should continue the work that has begun to more accurately measure law school success." "...We advocate the comprehensive collection of data that individuals and organizations can weigh as they see fit in arriving at competing rankings systems."

It is not the academy that has recently come up with another ranking. But rather the publishers of the magazine SuperLawyers, have developed their own entry in the law school rankings arena. On November 17, they made the announcement on their blog :

"Today Super Lawyers announces the release of our first annual ranking of U.S. law schools. The 2010 Super Lawyers U.S. Law School Rankings is unique in that it ranks law schools based on the number of graduates who are selected for inclusion in Super Lawyers across the country. Only 5 percent of the lawyers in each state are selected to Super Lawyers lists (click here to see our selection process)." 

The publishers make the point that this ranking focuses on the quality of lawyers produced rather than just looking at the logistical and staff inputs at a law school. This could be a  source of comparative data to use along with the more traditional rankings.

See : DePaul University’s College of Law Recognized for Producing “Super Lawyers” In New Law School Ranking

Valuable Academic Supreme Court Database, Now more Accessible

The statistical database created by Professor Harold J. Spaith, J.D., professor of political science at Michigan State University, in the 1980s has been used for most systematic academic analyses of the Supreme Court and it's members. In it's original form it required fairly advanced statistical expertise to use. However, with additional funding from the National Science Foundation, a collaborative project among scholars at Northwestern University, Michigan State University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stony Brook University and Washington University, has designed a front-end to the database to allow lawyers, journalists and interested citizens to research cases and perform statistical summaries of the Supreme Court.

The tools at the website allow public users to explore "... 247 pieces of information for each case, roughly broken down into six categories: (1) identification variables (e.g., citations and docket numbers); (2) background variables (e.g., how the Court took jurisdiction, origin and source of the case, the reason the Court agreed to decide it); (3) chronological variables (e.g., the date of decision, term of Court, natural court); (4) substantive variables (e.g., legal provisions, issues, direction of decision); (5) outcome variables (e.g., disposition of the case, winning party, formal alteration of precedent, declaration of unconstitutionality); and (6) voting and opinion variables (e.g., how the individual justices voted, their opinions and inter-agreements).

At present the database includes cases from 1953 - 2008.Newer cases will be added and there are plans to expanded the database to include cases dating back to the first case heard by the Supreme Court in 1793. Downloads of raw data are also available for more sophisticated researchers, as well.

Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory, (CERL) serves as the technological home for the project and is responsible for maintaining and updating the project's Web-based infrastructure. Andrew D. Martin, Ph.D., professor of law and founding director of CERL, said that, when complete, the database will "open up the doors to all types of questions that we haven't been able to answer before."

Link to Supreme Court Database website

Link to online tutorial for using the database

 

Professor Bassiouni Quoted Regarding Goldstone Gaza Conflict Report

This past Friday The U.N. Human Rights Council voted  to endorse a Gaza war crimes report that calls on Israel and Hamas to carry out credible investigations into alleged abuses. If viable domestic investigations do not eventually take place, the U.N. Security Council could refer both matters to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible prosecutions. ( See : Resolution - Human Rights Council ,The human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian,Territory, including East Jerusalem .   Human Rights In Palestine And Other, Occupied Arab Territories, Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Executive Summary.)

"The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, led by Justice Richard Goldstone, was tasked by the Council “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

"The report of the Mission, presented to the Council’s twelfth session, concluded that, while the Israeli Government sought to portray its operations as a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self defense, the Israeli plan had been directed, at least in part, at the people of Gaza as a whole. The report also found that Palestinian armed groups had succeeded in causing terror within Israel’s civilian population through the launch of thousands of rockets and mortars into Israel since April 2001."

"It recommended that the Security Council require the Government of Israel to take all appropriate steps, within a period of three months, to launch appropriate investigations that were independent and in conformity with international standards; and with regard to the relevant Palestinian authorities, that it require the independent committee of experts to monitor and report on any domestic legal or other proceedings undertaken by the relevant authorities in the Gaza Strip."

( Source : Human Rights Council Endorses Recommendations, Of Fact-finding Mission  Led By Justice Goldstone  And  Calls  For Their Implementation ) 16 October 2009 )

In an AP story today,Professor Bassiouni of the DePaull University Law School and a driving forces behind the creation of the International Criminal Court, stated that"If it sends the report to the Security Council, to the Secretary-General and to the General Assembly, it is sending it not for general informational purposes but for action,". The author further describes Bassiouni's observation that, "Arab and African countries will likely point to any U.S. efforts to block referral to the international court as an example of double standards, since it was Western countries that referred Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court in March for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes".

( Source : UN rights council endorses Gaza war crimes report, By Frank Jordans )

It is very uncertain whether the national parties involved will undertake internal proceedings to investigate and possibly prosecute the war crimes alleged in the Goldstone Report. Even more uncertain, is whether these cases would ever be referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council, given some members of the Council would likely exercise their veto over such a decision.

Mr. Goldstone at a recent press conference, puts forward a slightly more hopeful expectation. "In the end, the mission had decided to give full recognition to the concept of complementarity. It had been recognized by the Rome Statute that the first choice in an incident was domestic investigation.  It was only where such domestic activity was not possible that the International Criminal Court could accept jurisdiction. While the mission was critical of both sides for having done far too little in that regard, it had concluded that, although there might be unwillingness, there was ability.   Israel was clearly able to hold open, transparent investigations.  In Gaza, courts and lawyers were operating, and if there was a will, investigations could be held."

(Source :  Press Conference On Report Of United Nations Fact-finding Mission On Gaza Conflict )

Remembering The Murdered & Missing Women of Juarez, Mexico

Professor Ottley Speaks on Post-Conflict Justice & Alien Torts Claims Act

Professor Tuerkheimer's Article Argues "Shaken Baby Syndrome" Based on Shaky Science

A congressionally mandated report to investigate forensic techniques and personnel, released in February 2009, unexpectedly questioned the presumption  of scientific validity for most of the traditional techniques used as evidence in the criminal courtroom. The report entitled "Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward", found that, "The simple reality is that the interpretation of  forensic evidence is not always based on scientific studies to determine its validity." "...there is a notable dearth of peer-reviewed, published studies establishing the scientific bases and validity of many forensic methods."

The treatment of this kind of evidence in the courts has not provided a check on the introduction of the results of such questionable techniques.As the report states, "Federal appellate courts have not with any consistency or clarity imposed standards ensuring the application of scientifically valid reasoning and reliable methodology in criminal cases involving Daubert questions."

The report examined and commented on a variety of forensic criminal techniques but not on the medically related forensic evaluation called "Shaken baby syndrome" (SBS). As reported in the article "A Shake to the System" by Radley Balko,  DePaul Professor Tuerkenheimer's recent law review article,"The Next Innocence Project: Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Criminal Courts", extends this critical re-evaluation to SBS as a medical diagnosis and criminal evidence.

The first part of the article looks at the changing medical opinion regarding SBS, stating  that "Despite its lingering presence in the popular imagination, the scientific underpinnings of SBS have crumbled over the past decade [FN 65] as the medical establishment has deliberately discarded a diagnosis defined by shaking."[FN 66] The second half of the article,examines several facets of SBS in the legal system from investigation to post-conviction.

In her conclusion she asks how well our legal system will deal with the apparent deficiencies and their impact on the question of the innocence of many convicted under the previous paradigm."To date, our system has failed. In place of adaptation, we have seen massive institutional inertia. Once the SBS prosecution paradigm became entrenched, the crime became reified. Deferential review standards and a quest for finality perpetuated the system‘s course. How expeditiously, and how deliberately, this course is righted will inform the meaning of justice"

DePaul "Rule of Law" Journal Launched by Students

DePaul law students with a particular interest in international law have created a new Online journal focused on the concept of “The Rule of Law”. It will be a student-run publication with faculty advisors from DePaul’s International Human Rights Law Institute ( IHRLI).

Just as “The Golden Rule” is sometimes facetiously defined as “He who has the gold, rules”. So too “The Rule of Law” can be a very different creature depending on who rules and claims authority of the law. From country to country and over time the idea of the rule of law can take on varying meanings for the participants.

According to the mission statement the new journal will work to “…define “rule of law,” propose new rule-of-law initiatives and critique existing ones, and discuss how rule of law can be established or strengthened in different nations and at different times.” So the journal will delve into the conceptual issues and also the pragmatic endeavors to establish a just rule of law.

The Journal will contain articles and what are called “Rule of Law Briefs”. Suggested topics for the articles include case studies of successful and unsuccessful rule of law initiatives, the role of human rights in reforming governmental institutions, proposed solutions to problems encountered in rule of law initiatives.

Rule of Law Briefs are short, fact-based, research-driven, student-written piece that cover a narrow rule of law topic, such as a particular rule-of-law building project, or a particular problem somewhere in the world.

The journal hopes to encourage broad participation from various constituencies and to become “…a freely-accessible resource for rule-of-law data and policy discussion...”