[Cross-posted to the Technology & Marketing Law Blog]

As part of the recent St. Louis University Law Journal's issue on Teaching Intellectual Property Law, I published a short article entitled "Teaching Cyberlaw." The abstract:

"Over the past dozen years, Cyberlaw courses have become a staple of the law school curriculum. This Essay, part of a Spring 2008 St. Louis University Law Journal issue on Teaching Intellectual Property Law, explores methodological and pedagogical issues raised by these courses."

This article, based on my experiences teaching Cyberlaw for the past 13 years, organizes my thoughts about the pedagogy of teaching Cyberlaw, including course titling, doctrinal coverage, teaching materials and more. I think the article will be particularly interesting to folks teaching the course for the first time, but I expect veteran Cyberlaw professors will find a few interesting tidbits as well. I was given a limited word count cap, so I didn't intend to make this article exhaustive. Instead, I view it as a tentative and limited effort to help kick off a community discussion about how we teach the course.

On that front, I am scheduled to be the Chair of the AALS Law & Computers Section in 2009, which principally means that I will help organize the Law & Computers session at the AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans in January 2010. (Hard to believe, but it's less than 18 months away!). One idea I've been considering is to have a panel discussion about Teaching Cyberlaw issues at that session. Comments/thoughts?

When i did my research for my Teaching Cyberlaw article, I didn't find any other law review-style articles that addressed Cyberlaw pedagogy at any length. Then, just as my article was going to press (and therefore after I could make any changes), a topical article emerged: Patrick Quirk, Curriculum Themes: Teaching Global Cyberlaw, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, March 2008. Quirk uses the article to enumerate 10 topical "themes" that are likely to be omnipresent in Cyberlaw courses both today and in the future:

"Where are we? (Jurisdiction),
Who are we? (Transacting via networks),
Who pays us? (E-money and funds transfer),
Who protects us? (Spreading and transferring transactional risk),
Who funds us? (The other type of computer ‘security’),
Who taxes us? (Who doesn’t?),
Who bugs me? (Network crimes and misdemeanors),
Who came before me? (Historical analogies for technology regulation),
Who watches (over) us? (Ubiquitous privacy issues),
The pervasive problems of intellectual property."

I definitely organize my course differently, but vetting different organizational approaches is part of the pedagogical fun.

David Lander, Are Adjuncts a Benefit or a Detriment?, 33 U. Dayton L. Rev. 285 (2008). This article looks at the pros and cons of staffing a course with an adjunct vs. full-time faculty and some ways to get the most out of a corp of adjunct faculty. From the conclusion:

One of the key reasons that law schools use adjuncts is to save money and other resources. Yet, to make the use of adjuncts truly beneficial requires resources, including money, energy, and creativity, to construct and monitor an effective and integrated adjunct program.

Recently, I have proliferated the online venues where I am publishing content. This blog post enumerates all of the various places I hang out online:

Technology & Marketing Law Blog. This is my main ongoing publication outlet. I try to post there about 15-20 times a month.

Goldman's Observations. Since you're here, you already know about this one! I post here when I have something to say that doesn't fit into the Technology & Marketing Law Blog. Typically, that's around 8-10 times a month.

Personal Website. I use this for archival storage and navigation-driven retrieval. Often, when I post something online there, I will blog about its availability. There's no other easy way to find out when new content is added there.

Epinions.com. I don't write new product reviews often. When I do, I will often double-post them here or at least post a link to the new review. I also occasionally post to TripAdvisor--same deal about cross-posting.

SSRN. SSRN always has the "canonical" and "final" version of my academic articles. I will always blog about a new SSRN posting.

InformIT. I occasionally publish articles there. Sometimes they are reposted to the blog.

Twitter. I've launched a Twitter account but I still don't know what to do with it.

Facebook and LinkedIn. If we're not already friends, send me an invitation (but see my friending policy below). Like Twitter, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with these sites. I probably still have accounts at Friendster and Orkut, but I haven't been to either site in ages.

My slinky store. I used Zlio to put together a slinky store. It's not been successful, but part of the problem is that Zlio doesn't carry enough slinky items to make a unique store.

YouTube. I launched a YouTube channel to post my Alaska videos. My wife's YouTube channel is a better source of videos of the kids.

Picture Sites. I've posted pictures both to Kodak Gallery and Flickr (co-opting my wife's Yahoo account).

Chat. I use AOL's IM (which very few people seem to use any more--email me if you want my IM screen name) and Gmail's Chat.

Others. I'm sure I have other digital hangouts, but if they didn't make this list, I'm probably not investing very much in them.

My Friending Policy

I'm pretty liberal about accepting friend invitations at Facebook and LinkedIn. However, there are two main reasons why I might decline or ignore a friend invitation:

1) If we have never met face-to-face, I may not accept your invitation. I've made a lot of friends through my online activities, and FTF isn't a prerequisite to friendship in my book. However, over my 3.5 years of blogging, I've found that eventually I cross paths with my virtual friends in physical space for some reason or another. I do have some Facebook and LinkedIn friends who I've never met, but that's a pretty small group.

2) If I don't recognize your name, then I probably won't accept your invitation. This doesn't mean that we won't become friends in the future, but we'll probably have to get to know each other first before I am ready to close the loop on a social networking site.

Just like my blogroll, I occasionally purge my friends list.

I'm pleased to share the good news of my tenure and promotion to associate professor. Some frequently asked questions:

1) You weren't nervous about the tenure vote, were you? [This question has been posed in a variety of forms, all with an implicit skepticism about a negative outcome.] Being recently hired as a lateral assistant professor, I had some reason to believe the faculty would generally support my tenure application, and I felt good about my application on paper. However, tenure is a major decision by a faculty, and faculty politics can be complicated--especially in an environment where I was a relative newcomer. So personally, I never assumed tenure was a foregone conclusion.

2) What role did blogging play? I don't have a precise answer to this question. In preparing my materials, I treated blogging as a "plus factor." In other words, I felt like my application should stand on its own merits even if blogging was completely stripped out of the application. As a result, my hope was that blogging would enhance the application but not act as a substitute for some other obvious deficiency.

3) How are you going to celebrate? To celebrate both tenure and my recent milestone birthday, next month I'm going on a 2 week guided river rafting trip down the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I'll blog more about that trip over the summer!

Arthur Best, Student Evaluations of Law Teaching Work Well: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, Southwestern University Law Review, 2008

Another article on the deficiencies of student evaluation forms. A couple of takeaway points:

* "data from student evaluation of teaching forms should be used to identify exceptional cases and not to make relatively small distinctions among instructors"

* "precise numerical comparisons between instructors or between different courses taught by a single instructor may often be statistically flawed"

The abstract:

Academics in the fields of psychology and education generally describe student evaluations of teaching as reliable and useful. On the other hand, law professors often criticize them as unreliable and impaired by students' biases. This Article considers resolving these discrepant views by paying close attention to the various purposes for which student evaluations of teaching are used. For some uses, such as guidance for students in course selection, shortcomings of the evaluations would be of slight consequence. For promotion or tenure decisions, despite law professors' skepticism, schools should use the data to identify outlier instructors. Basing conclusions only on large numerical differences among faculty should protect faculty members from unfair consequences caused by students' biases, since the effects of biases (if present) are likely to be relatively small. It is also consistent with the modern consensus among educational researchers.

The Article also reports findings from analysis of a large number of law school evaluation of teaching forms. Virtually all of them use phraseology that ignores the collaborative nature of teaching and learning. They focus attention on the professor, with the unintended consequence of portraying students as passive participants in their education. The Article recommends revising questionnaires to have a balance between terminology that ignores students' roles and terminology that reflects them. With regard to other attributes, there are large variations among different law schools questionnaires. The Article documents those differences and identifies some that may be problematic.

If you are interested in the topic of law professor lateraling, you've probably already seen Paul Secunda's series at Concurring Opinions. That series is worth checking out to see all of the comments. However, for your convenience, Paul has glued the series into a single PDF that includes some of the choicest comments in the footnotes. I believe that Paul's article is the most comprehensive discussion on the very mysterious topic of lateraling, so many thanks to Paul for trying to lift the veil. And congratulations to him on his successful move to a school dear to my heart!

Rebecca Tushnet has posted Sight, Sound and Meaning: Teaching Intellectual Property with Audiovisual Materials, an article on the use of teaching props for intellectual property courses. Of course Rebecca also manages the Georgetown Intellectual Property Teaching Resources database, a fantastic resource that helps our entire community easily find appropriate audiovisual teaching props. Many kudos to Rebecca for undertaking that selfless task.

The article gives some great examples of how she uses props in her class. I wish we had a better way of sharing these kinds of tips with each other. I have probably come up with some interesting props, and I often learn about other interesting ideas when the topic comes up. Maybe we can have an AALS session on teaching props at some point.

The abstract:

This short article addresses my experience using audiovisual materials from the Georgetown Intellectual Property Teaching Resources database. I use audiovisual materials extensively in class to allow students to see the subject matter of the cases rather than just reading verbal descriptions and enable them to apply the principles they read about to new, concrete examples. Many students in IP courses have special interests in music, film, or the visual arts, and the database allows me - and other teachers - to present materials that engage them. I have found that students are more willing to speak up in class when they can see or hear for themselves and can point to specific aspects of the underlying materials. I also briefly address the copyright question: should teachers worry about using digital materials in class? Fortunately, the available statutory exceptions are supportive of in-class teaching. Using images and sounds to illustrate litigated cases and hypotheticals is pedagogically valuable and legally justified.

Over at LexBlog, I had a two-part interview about blogging and the role of blogs in legal scholarship. See parts 1 and 2.

In February 2006, I spoke about teaching contract drafting at a symposium at Brooklyn Law School. Nearly 2 years later, I have finally posted the associated essay, entitled "Integrating Contract Drafting Skills and Doctrine." It's brief (6 pages) and breezy, but I hope you find it useful if you teach contract drafting or are looking to incorporate more transactional material into your doctrinal courses. The abstract:

This Essay is based on my remarks at the "Teaching Writing and Teaching Doctrine: A Symbiotic Relationship?" conference at Brooklyn Law School, February 2006. The Essay discusses the benefits and challenges of integrating the teaching of contract drafting skills and doctrine. The Essay then discusses some ways I have accomplished this integration.

Back in April 2006, a first-rate group of law professor bloggers (and a few other bloggers) gathered for the Bloggership conference to discuss how blogs affected legal scholarship and our lives as law professors. My recap from the event. I thought the experience of meeting other bloggers face-to-face to discuss blog-related issues was so terrific that it inspired me to initiate a local variation, the Bay Area Blawger gatherings.

At the event, a number of the speakers discussed the disintermediation of law reviews by new electronic publishing tools such as SSRN, as well as the difficulty of dead trees publications to compete with the blogosphere's speed at disseminating commentary and digesting events. As if to reinforce the points, the Washington University Law Review has now published the collection of papers from the Bloggership conference, about a year-and-a-half after the event was held and the early drafts of the papers were published via SSRN. Paul Caron has helpfully posted a comprehensive index to the papers as published in the Washington University Law Review as well as links to a variety of other goodies related to the event. My paper on Co-Blogging, in its final published form, is here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article on six professors who are using Second Life as a pedagogical tool. However, the article also contains a sidebar with some caveats about Second Life's downsides, ranging from technical glitches to bandwidth impacts to red light districts.

On Monday, we held a panel discussion on campus entitled "Blogging, Scholarship and the Bench and Bar." Panelists included Paul Butler, Cindy Cohn, Judge Michael Hawkins, Larry Solum and myself, and the conversation was led by Nancy Rogers and Leigh Jones (a reporter at the National Law Journal). Larry Solum's brief recap. The conversation covered a number of topics, but the main threads were (1) how can blogs help lawyers and judges do their work?, and (2) how does blogging fit into the activities of law professors? We have posted the video online; see here (this video should be accessible for 30 days).

Before the event, I was given a few questions that I might be asked. The notes I prepared in anticipation of the panel:
_______

"How much time should a professor spend on blogging? When is it too much?"

• Assuming that a professor chooses to blog…
• Minimum amount of time: enough to ensure that the posts enhance the professor’s reputation.
- This means extra time to clean up first draft writing and, more importantly, doing verification/fact investigation to ensure accuracy
- For example, I don’t blog on a case/statute unless I’ve read the original source material. No way that I would rely on news reports or other bloggers’ characterizations
- Very uncool for bloggers to spread misinformation
- I also do a precedent check to ensure my comments are adding new incremental material rather than rehashing.
- So I rarely post in less than 1 hour; I have spent 10+ hours on some posts
• Maximum amount of time: such that blogging doesn’t interfere with professor’s other duties
- From my perspective, blogging doesn’t displace obligation to produce legal scholarship
- So if blogging is preventing me from contributing to scholarly discourse through more traditional format, then I’m spending too much time on it.
_______

"How can someone tell the difference between a good blog and a bad blog? How can the reader know if what's on a blog is accurate and truthful?"

• I try to avoid snap judgments about blogs I’m encountering for the first time
- I look at topical focus, length of time blogging, how regularly the blog is updated and if the posts look like they are adding new incremental material to the discussion.
- I also check external measures of popularity, like Technorati’s link count or Google PageRank
- When I find a topically relevant blog that looks like it has credibility and is being regularly maintained, I often add the blog to my RSS subscription list and “watch it” to see if I get new incremental and useful material from it. This also means that I regularly drop blogs from my RSS list.
• At the moment, I do not subscribe to any pseudonymous blogs.
- This is a matter of personal taste.
- For me, knowing the author’s identity is crucial to assessing the author’s credibility. I’ve also found that pseudonymous blogs tend to flame out quicker
- In many ways, my blog subscription list mirrors my social network—I tend to read blogs of people I’ve met offline and have developed trust in their expertise
_______

"What suggestions do you have regarding the format of law review articles that are drawn from your blogging experience?"

• Blogs offer quick publication, the ability to easily review cited sources, and often the ability of readers to interact with the author and other readers.
- Law reviews are already experimenting with similar offerings through online complements.
- However, law reviews are still trying to manage the community aspect. I’ve seen many journals with no comments; and others overrun by comment spammers and trolls—neither of which reflect well on the journal or make authors very happy
• The blogosphere’s quick publication cycles mean that new cases and statutes are digested very quickly.
- As a result, I think law reviews should categorically get out of the business of publishing case notes or recent updates unless they operate at blog speed.
- Otherwise, a law review has almost no chance of making any useful substantive contribution to the dialogue 12-18 months after a new case/statute when the blogs have already vetted the issue 12-18 hours after it occurred
• Law reviews also need to learn that publishing articles without additional marketing isn’t that useful for the journals or the authors.
- Therefore, each publication should be an event that sparks dialogue, which may require journals to more actively market new releases.
- Some journals have made limited progress on this front, but law reviews have a lot to learn from blogs about how to engage in bona fide conversations.
_______

"Law school gossip -- who has an offer from what law school, for example -- travels quickly on blogs. Has this been a positive or negative development on balance?"

• Blogs help form new communities that couldn’t exist in physical space
- For someone who doesn’t have physical access to information about law schools or law firms, blogs provide much needed access to very useful information
• However, “gossip blogs” can lead to unfortunate socialization
- Obsessing about every detail can lead to lots of efforts to improve relative positioning and make people feel like someone is always getting a better deal
- This can lead people to feel like they should be worrying about these details even if they otherwise wouldn’t care
- This is unfortunate, but it’s also the inevitable consequence of information democratization
• Blogs have also captured gossip that normally was ephemeral, but now this gossip is preserved forever and published to the world. Unfortunately, some of this gossip has had a greater detrimental effect than its off-line equivalent.
- Some of this gossip isn’t good, but it is inevitable, and I hope (over time) people will learn to better wield the power of publication
_______

I was also on deck to discuss gender disparities among bloggers--a topic I'm happy to defer to others. Cf. Dahlia Lithwick, who wrote that on the subject of the dearth of women opinion writers, men “are terrified to opine on the debate because the inquiry is so fraught with the possibility of career-terminating levels of politically correct blowback—à la Larry Summers—that they deem it better to hold their tongues and wait for the storm to pass.” In that vein, fortunately for me, this topic didn't arise in the panel discussion.

Margaret A. Schilt, Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?, Legal Times, August 31, 2007. This is a good recap article on the state of law professor blogging.

On a separate matter, check out the Legal Scholarship Blog. This is a promising new website with news of various upcoming conferences and some nifty links about scholarship and teaching.

Gary Rivlin in the NYT has a terrific article entitled "In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich." The article discusses how a few million dollars of net worth doesn't go as far as they used to, especially in the Silicon Valley where there are tens of thousands of millionaires and perhaps you're not really rich (at least, compared to your peers) until you hit 9 figure net worth. It says:

Silicon Valley offers an unusual twist on keeping up with the Joneses. The venture capitalist two doors down might own a Cessna Citation X private jet. The father of your 8-year-old’s best friend, who has not worked for two years, drives a bright yellow Ferrari.

This is no joke. At my wife's former company, which had created hundreds of millionaire-employees, the talk at company parties often involved each person's personal jet. Those of us who didn't own private jets were awkwardly unable to participate in the conversation.

A side consequence of this competition, and the inflated housing prices, is that there are comparatively few single income families where we live. In turn, it's hard to arrange playdates during the middle of the week, and "mommy-and-me" classes frequently are more like "nanny-and-me" classes.

My wife and I expressly discussed these issues before we decided to move back to the Silicon Valley. Not only were we planning to live on a single salary in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, but it's an academic salary at that, effectively ensuring that we would never be able to keep pace with our neighbors. This doesn't bother me in the least--it's a choice my wife and I made knowingly and for the right reasons--but I'm dreading the day when my kids start asking questions about why their classmates are doing things that we simply can't afford to do. Then again, like the birds-and-bees discussion (another conversation I dread), it will present a powerful opportunity to teach our kids some essential life lessons.

National Law Journal: "More job hopping at schools." This year, there was a lot of faculty movement at highly ranked law schools--a circumstance this article attributes to (1) Harvard's decision to bring in new blood and reduce faculty-student ratios, and (2) Columbia's vow to increase its faculty 50% (over 3 years) to reduce faculty-student ratios. Collectively, these decisions led to a domino effect which is likely to percolate for several years as top-ranked schools raid lower-ranked schools and as professors play musical chairs among the top-ranked schools. Some implications:

* reduced faculty-student ratios are terrific for both students and faculty, but they don't come for free. At many schools, this necessarily means increased tuition for students. With tuition well over $35k/year at some schools, how high can tuition go?

* the article suggests that faculty decisions to move aren't always financially motivated, but at many schools, lateral movements by professors (or, at least the threat to do so) is a principal way for professors to reset their salaries to prevailing market standards. In turn, as law professor salaries escalate due to this market-resetting, students likely will pay the bills for this as well.

* as the article points out, some students are disappointed when they select a school to study with a particular professor who then moves on. Note to prospective law students: life is uncertain, so deciding between schools based on the identity of specific professors has an unmitigatable risk of disappointment.

Students regularly ask me to supervise a paper of theirs. This blog post discusses my suggestions and requirements if you want me to supervise your paper.

1) At your earliest convenience, read Prof. Eugene Volokh's book, Academic Legal Writing [an Amazon Affiliate link]. Copies are available in the library, the bookstore and online. This is a terrific book that (among other things) efficiently explains how to select a paper topic (and how NOT to do so). This book will save you a lot of time in the paper-writing process, so the earlier you read it, the better off you will be.

2) In my opinion, selecting a paper topic is the most critical stage in the paper-writing process. A paper with a poor topic still will be a poor paper, no matter how well-written or researched it is. In contrast, if the topic is stellar, a paper can be a star paper even if it is only competently executed. So there is little point in marrying a poor paper topic, as it will simply mean that you are investing a lot of hard work in a paper with little or no upside.

Unfortunately, it is hard to find a worthwhile paper topic. Then again, I may be more demanding about paper topics than other professors. I routinely reject paper topics that (a) are case notes, (b) are already well-covered by the existing literature (or are going to be imminently flooded by papers in queue), (c) relate to a current event (such as pending legislation or a current dust-up) that likely will be forgotten in 12-18 months or has a high risk of mooting by subsequent developments, or (d) seek to recap the existing state of the law rather than advancing the dialogue. There are no shortcuts to picking a good topic, so I expect that generally you will do a fair amount of upfront work evaluating potential topics (including doing careful precedent checks to assess the originality of your proposed topic), and it's probable that I will reject several of your topic proposals before we find a mutually acceptable topic.

3) After we agree upon a paper topic, I will ask you to provide me your preferred schedule of deliverables with your own self-selected deadlines. I am not good about proactively cracking the whip on you; instead, I prefer that you let me know how you like to work, and then I can enforce your self-selected deadlines if you prefer. However, if you are the kind of writer that needs a professor to constantly hound you on deadlines and deliverables, I may not be the best choice.

You can pick any delivery schedule you want, but if you delay your work until the end of the semester, you run a serious risk of having me raise major structural concerns about the paper with little time for corrective measures.

4) I think it's very hard (if not impossible) to write a publishable paper in a single semester from a "cold start." However, I will be happy to work with you even after the semester if you want to make your paper publishable or if you want to submit it to the writing competitions. On that front, you might educate yourself about possible writing competitions using my mom's book, How to Pay for Your Law Degree (copies are in the library).

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on research by Anthony G. Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Some tidbits from his research:

* "At best, student ratings provide a weak measure of instructional quality"
* "70 percent of the variance in departments' average course-evaluation scores could be explained by differences in students' grades. In departments where professors' grading was more rigorous, students' evaluation scores were lower"
* "The most reasonable use of student evaluations, Mr. Greenwald said, is to identify instructors at the extreme ends of the spectrum"

Some previous posts on the topic of student evaluations of professors:

* Law Professor Tampers with Student Evaluations
* Merritt on Teaching Evaluations
* One professor's testimony of how she inflated grades to improve her tenure candidacy
* Sexy professors are better professors (?)
* Are You Hot or Not?, Academic Style
* Tenured Canadian Professor Fired for Posting Comments to RateMyProfessor.com

On Monday, SCU had a "thank you" lunch for professors and administrators who had media exposure this year. The formal program included three speakers: Ed Clendaniel, San Jose Mercury News opinion page writer; Dana Nachman, NBC 11 special projects producer; and myself.

Ed spoke about getting op-ed pieces published in a newspaper. He said that the Mercury News gets about 20,000 op-ed submissions a year for less than 1,000 publication spots--a <5% publication rate. His suggestions for improving the odds:
* "don't bore me"
* the editors can't do very much editing of pieces, so the articles should match the newspaper's style--relevant topic, evoke an emotional response (be compelling, express an opinion), have an insight
* be conversational and use anecdotes
* 650 word limit means 650 words!

Personally, I found the whole idea of op-eds a little anachronistic. I've written a few op-eds in my day, but my blog has effectively usurped that writing role for me. My blog may not have as big an audience as a major newspaper, but I get instant access to the conversation and complete control of my words. In the past, there used to be enhanced validation/credibility by getting an op-ed into a major paper, but I just don't feel that's too important (at least for me) any more.

Dana spoke about interviewing with TV reporters. She explained that a typical news story gets about 75 seconds of airtime, so most interviewers get 5-20 seconds of that. Unlike Ed, she said that TV reporters *don't like* anecdotes because they usually take too long and can't be aired. TV reporters also hate it when interviewees say "As I said before..." in the middle of a thought, because that thought can't be aired. To avoid this, TV reporters generally don't like chit-chatting about the story before the camera is rolling. She said that after the interviews, most reporters transcribe the interview, circle the useful soundbites and use the rest as background material for the story. She said that if an interviewee really wants to convey a particular message, the interviewee should just keep repeating it (but don't say "As I said before!").

I spoke about how blogs have helped increase my exposure to reporters in at least three ways:

1) Reporters routinely use search engines to find sources, so my blog acts as a "magnet" for attracting those reporters. In some cases, reporters will quote the blog directly without even speaking with me. Further, my blog lends some internal credibility to my authority as a source.

2) Blog readers act as a type of distributed referral network, regularly referring reporters to me.

3) Reporters may become subscribers to my blog, in which case they may regularly report on stories I write about and quote my blog/contact me for more quotes.

I also noted that, by participating in the blogosphere, I could get access to websites such as Slashdot and Digg where the visibility of being linked may rival or exceed the exposure from being quoted in the mainstream media Given the choice between a quote in the NY Times or a link from Slashdot, I'd likely take the Slashdot link!

I did sound a few cautionary notes about blogging for professors. It's time-consuming; not everyone has a blogging personality; and there are a variety of risks (legal, reputational, and ruffled feathers).

For a couple of years now, the search term "law professor salary" or "law professor salaries" consistently has been one of the top 10 search terms used to find my blogs. It seems to be a topic of significant interest! See my earlier post: What kind of pay can a law professor expect? (March 2005)

Fortunately, we have some new data to obsess over. SALT has published its 2006-07 survey of law professor salaries. This gives a rough sense of the going rates for various law professors, although I must confess that I don't find the numbers fully credible. For example, Gonzaga's listing appears to contain an obvious error when the assistant professor median is $119k but the full professor median is only $82k. I'm sure this is reversed. Also, less than half of the schools responded, giving us an incomplete view of the field. Finally, I'm sure that most of the schools' numbers don't include summer research stipends, administrative stipends, retirement plan contributions and other financial incentives offered to professors, so I'm guessing the dichotomy between schools is even greater than indicated. (Those additional compensation factors may be included in the ambiguous "fringe benefits" category--I wasn't sure what that column represented). Brian Leiter gives some good guidance for interpreting law professor salary data generally.

For some more reliable data, see Virgina's law professor salaries, the SFGate report on UC law professor salaries and Paul Caron's data comparing salaries at the UC schools and Virginia. As you can see, at the high end, some professors are making some eye-popping numbers.

In any case, taking the SALT data as given, note the big spread for assistant professors, ranging from a median of $70,000 at NC Central to a median of $143,000 at Michigan--a spread of more than 2X. The spread appears even larger at the full professor level. Ignoring the Gonzaga outlier, the median range is from $83,000 at DC Law School (a brutally low number) to $241,000 at Harvard--almost 3X!

The data also indicates the relatively slow progression of law professor salaries. At most schools, the full professor median is less than 50% more than assistant professor median, showing that salary increases are very low from year-to-year. (Harvard is one of the rare exceptions to this, where the ratio is about 2X). I've complained before that law professor salaries often grow at a rate lower than inflation, and I think this data provides some support for that. On the other hand, looking at my post from 2005, I see some positive growth in the numbers--at some schools in 2004, the median range for assistant professors used to dip below $60,000.

Finally, this data reinforces how to think about the financial implications of becoming a law professor. This is not a career path for those who want to get fabulously rich, and many of us make less than our students who take first year associate jobs at the big NY firms (now paying $160,000). However, most of us also make enough money to live a comfortable if conservative lifestyle. And we as law professors are generally better off than our academic peers.

HT: Andrew Perlman at Legal Ethics Forum

From InsideHigherEd: "This much is undisputed: One evening three years ago, a then-professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Law tampered with anonymous student evaluations that rate teaching effectiveness. Kenneth Kress admits to replacing three unfavorable student-completed questionnaires with his own versions and altering two others to improve his rating."

Cardozo Law School held an event entitled "Trends in Federal Judicial Citations and Law Review Articles" where 7 appellate judges and several law professors discussed the general decline in court citations to law review articles. The New York Lawyer writeup (free registration required). Some of the article rehashes some well-trodden ground, but a few interesting tidbits emerged. Most importantly--the judicial crowd has made it relatively clear that they aren't able to do much with policy-oriented law review articles, which makes sense, but legislators can act on our arguments.

So, as at least one judge points out, we as law review article authors should make our arguments to legislators. Of course, this requires more than mere publication; some evangelization would be required to affect legislators' thinking. I have been thinking a lot about how to do this effectively; perhaps some day we can organize an AALS panel on that topic.

UPDATE: This topic has sparked a lot of discussion. See:
* Adam Liptak NYT Article
* WSJ Law Blog recapping the discussion.
* Dan Solove: "the worthwhile articles are becoming needles in an ever-growing haystack"
* Orin Kerr: "my sense is that a lot of law review scholarship is not terribly serious about engaging with the law"
* Eugene Volokh: "we shouldn't, it seems to me, insist that all or even most legal scholarship be aimed at judges, or see certain genres' lack of desire to influence judges as a sign of those genres' inherent flaws"
* Mike Madison: we should write to plug into some community, even if it's beyond the legal community.

This last week was Spring Break. Where did my Spring Break go? Three words: FACULTY ACTIVITY REPORT.

I've previously blogged on problems with student evaluations of teaching. First, I've expressed concern about the anonymous nature of the feedback, which means that the evaluators have reduced accountability for what they say. Second, there's evidence that superficial things like the professor's attractiveness affects the evaluations.

Deborah Merritt of Ohio State University College of Law provides much-needed structure to these critiques in her excellent article, Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching, which reviews the extensive social science on teaching evaluations and how people judge other people to explain the significant deficiencies with the typical written evaluation of teaching. In a nutshell, she explains why written evaluations fail to accurately measure the quality of the professor's instruction, making them susceptible to bias and other unwanted forces. Her solution is to elicit student feedback in a guided discussion, a much more time-consuming method of collecting feedback but one that avoids the defects of the written evaluation.

The abstract:

Student evaluations of teaching are a common fixture at American law schools, but they harbor surprising biases. Extensive psychology research demonstrates that these assessments respond overwhelmingly to a professor's appearance and nonverbal behavior; ratings based on just thirty seconds of silent videotape correlate strongly with end-of-semester evaluations. The nonverbal behaviors that influence teaching evaluations are rooted in physiology, culture, and habit, allowing characteristics like race and gender to affect evaluations. The current process of gathering evaluations, moreover, allows social stereotypes to filter students' perceptions, increasing risks of bias. These distortions are inevitable products of the intuitive, “system one” cognitive processes that the present process taps. The cure for these biases requires schools to design new student evaluation systems, such as ones based on facilitated group discussion, that enable more reflective, deliberative judgments. This article draws upon research in cognitive decision making, both to present the compelling case for reforming the current system of evaluating classroom performance and to illuminate the cognitive processes that underlie many facets of the legal system.

With Halloween coming up, I've been thinking--what are professors' favorite Halloween-themed cases? My vote is Stambovsky v. Ackley, the famous NY "haunted house" case. See my post from a year ago on the case. Let me know what's your favorite Halloween case.

UPDATE: A Canadian law professor passes along Nagy v. Manitoba Free Press, (1907) 39 S.C.R. 340 (S.C.C.), in which a newspaper disparaged a house by calling it haunted.

When I was considering the opportunity to become Academic Director of the law school's High Tech Law institute, a lot of people warned me that the administrative duties would cut into my time for scholarship. I knew this would be true, but after last week I can put better parameters on the time allocation. Last week, my administrative role included:

Monday: 1 hour meeting regarding curriculum matters; 1/2 hour on adjunct relations
Tuesday: 1 1/2 hour meeting with admissions regarding general admissions matters and preparation of marketing collateral; another 1/2 hour reviewing marketing collateral
Wednesday: nothing!
Thursday: 2 hour meeting to discuss strategic planning; 2 hour meet-and-greet with incoming first years
Friday: 1 hour research on curriculum review; 2 hour meeting regarding curriculum planning for Spring semester; 1 hour meeting with an LLM student to discuss his thesis paper; another 15-30 minutes on adjunct relations

There was probably another couple of hours on various event planning and scheduling sprinkled throughout the week. So, by my count, this week required about 15 hours about administrative matters. Now, some of this time reflects my learning curve/ramp up investment. And don't get me wrong--I'm not complaining. I actually enjoy these duties. But, I can't help but note that the semester hasn't even started yet.

James B. Levy, As a Last Resort, Ask the Students: What They Say Makes Someone an Effective Law Teacher, 58 Me. L. Rev. 50 (2006):

"[T]he profile of the ideal law school professor from the students' perspective is someone who is an expert in her field, projects confidence about that expertise, respects students, cares that they learn, and has great enthusiasm for teaching. Somewhat surprisingly, characteristics that we usually presume to be very important to students, such as teacher's learning students' names, the ability to entertain students in class, or socializing with them outside of class, were not as important to students as we often believe."

But what about professor sexiness?

I couldn't read this report without hearing the 1970s Rod Stewart song in my head: "If you want my body and you think I'm sexy, come on sugar let me know."

I've previously blogged on Ratemyprofessor.com, the role of sexiness in student evaluations, and the limitations of anonymous student feedback. See here and here. This report took the entire Ratemyprofessor.com dataset, regressed it for correlations between "quality" of instruction and professor "hotness," and found a 0.64 correlation between the two. The authors try to discuss with a straight face the possibility that there may be a recursive effect where students find teaching brilliance as sexy...hah! (They write: "most student comments point toward Quality as a function of Hotness when they focus on physical characteristics of their professors that could be captured in photographs"). Ruling out this possibility, it is almost impossible to reach any other conclusion than that, in this dataset, sexiness contributes to assessments of professor quality.

So what take-away points can we get from this? The authors cite this as another reason to believe that student evaluations of teaching are generally unreliable. ("Taken as a whole, these self-selected evaluations from Ratemyprofessors.com cast considerable doubt on the usefulness of in-class student opinion surveys for purposes of examining quality and effectiveness of teaching.") If, in fact, student evaluations are influenced by such factors as professor attractiveness, then there is good reason to be suspicious of them. I am planning to attach this article as part of my tenure review package to explain some of my teaching evaluations (I'm making the highly defensible assumption that this factor is working against me, not for me).

It seems there might be another obvious conclusion to draw. If I want to improve my teaching evaluations, I should not invest more time in class preparation or subject material mastery. Instead, I should hit the gym.

Seriously, though, it would be easy to overinterpret this study as it relies on self-selected data (students opine at Ratemyprofessor.com voluntarily). But this report has some very troubling implications for gender, age, race and physically challenged bias in student evaluations (the data also shows possible bias based on discipline--apparently, geeky scientists get hit hard on the sexiness-o-meter). At minimum, it is a good reminder that any evaluation metric (such as, in this case, the metric for evaluating professor teaching performance) must itself be evaluated for credibility. In the case of student evaluations, it is way too easy to overweight the precision of the "numbers," when the entire numerical dataset might be skewed by bogus exogenous factors (like sexiness).

At the ABA Annual Meeting, I was on a "train the trainer" panel with Sue Irion, Tina Stark and Charles Fox regarding the teaching of contract drafting. I talked about how to teach the substantive law that underlies contracts. Because this applicable law differs by contract, there was no way to address which laws should be taught. Instead, I tried to develop a taxonomy of subjects that should be covered in the training process. It turns out that I covered many of these topics in my Contract Drafting course, but this taxonomy helps identify some holes in my coverage and some new ways to organize the material. My slides.

In January, we had a roundtable at Marquette to discuss the steps we can take to increase readership/awareness of the articles we publish. This blog post summarizes some of our discussions.

Traditionally, law professor authors marketed their articles rather passively. The principal effort was to publish with an impressive journal. Not only did those journals have a larger subscription base, but people were more likely to read an article in a big brand like Harvard Law Review than an article in the Northwest Podunk State University Law Review. Authors might also confirm that the journal's articles were uploaded to the electronic databases (like Westlaw and Lexis). Typically, this was the complete universe of marketing activities for most articles. If authors took any proactive steps, usually that consisted of sending out physical reprints to personal contacts or the list of law professors who teach in the area per the AALS directory.

However, there are many proactive ways to get people to read and cite to our articles. Some ideas:

* spin out alternative versions of an article, such as by publishing a redacted version in a different periodical with a different audience. This redacted version can encourage readers to check out the full version of the article.

* present the article at conferences. I often bring reprints with me to hand out to people who approach me after my talk, or I get a business card so I can mail them a reprint (or email a URL) after the event.

* send reprints to casebook authors. I recognize that this may be subsumed under the general reprint distribution approach, but casebook authors are a special class. First, they may choose to excerpt some of the article in their casebook. Second, they may add the article as a citation so that casebook readers may check it out.

* send the article to lawyers (and perhaps judges) who are litigating cases relevant to the article's topic. In the Cyberlaw arena, this is usually fairly easy to do. Major Cyberlaw cases get a lot of news coverage when they are filed, and it's easy to find the lawyers involved in the case (often they are referenced in the news reports, but if not, their names are on the pleadings in PACER). Often, the lawyers will welcome an article that may help their research or arguments, and the citations may end up in the brief or even the reported decision. In some cases, the email exchange can open up the possibility of getting involved in the case.

* when I see a draft article on a related topic, I call my article to the attention of the author. This gets my article read, and my article may get cited in the forthcoming work.

* promote the article through SSRN. With the download tournament on SSRN, this has become a popular sport. SSRN has some great in-house tools to increase readership, such as the topical email lists and a school's research paper series (for example, Marquette just created one). In addition to these promotions through SSRN's tools, I do some marketing work on my own. I contact some bloggers and media contacts who are writing in the area to let them know when an article has been posted to SSRN. My hope is that some of these people will find the article valuable enough to promote it to their readers. This has the effect of boosting download counts, but more importantly, it increases the number of readers of my article.

If you have any other tips about how you market or promote your scholarship to increase readership or citations, I would love to hear about it.

There are many reasons why being a Dean must be frustrating. Among other reasons, the Dean is the guardian of the school's brand, but Deans have little control over brand perceptions in the short run. Instead, brand perceptions are largely shaped by exogenous influences such as third party rankings.

So an annual "rite of Spring" among law schools is to conduct post-mortems following each new US News & World Reports ranking. Each April, Deans around the country spend a lot of time answering for their latest rankings. The resulting news stories follow a predictable plot:

* law school drops in the rankings
* angry alumni and students demand to know why
* the Dean explains that the rankings are important but methodologically flawed

You could almost recycle the same story at every law school that isn't blessed by the USNWR gods.

The stories are flowing in at Marquette, where the school dropped from last year's three-way tie for 100 (at the very bottom of the second tier) to the third tier. This drop looks precipitous, but in fact the USNWR's data jockey says the school should have been ranked at 101. So, according to the USNWR methodology, the school dropped a single place from 100 to 101. This doesn't stop the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel from saying the school is "rattled" by the "tumble" in the rankings. See the Marquette Tribune's similar story.

(Note that because there was a three-way tie for 100 in last year's rankings, there were 102 schools ranked in the top 100. So, arguably, Marquette rose from 102 to 101 this year. Whatever.).

I won't recount the many, many reasons why the USNWR rankings are flawed. I will, however, offer an interpretive guide to the USNWR rankings that should be obvious but apparently isn't. Just like consumer surveys and political polls describe their margin of error (i.e., this poll is accurate within X% +/-), one should read each year's installation of the rankings as having a margin of error as well. (We could debate the size of that margin; personally, I think it's very large). So if a school changes from 100 to 101, does that reflect any real change? In my book, no. It is entirely consistent with the metric's margin of error.

Because of the metric's imprecision, USNWR rankings have some natural volatility from year to year. This means schools like Marquette will float up and down without any real intrinsic change. Because these changes are inevitable and not tied to reality, I can confidently make the following predictions:

1) Marquette Law will be back in the second tier in next year's rankings (or, at the latest, in 2008)
2) In the 5 years after that, Marquette Law will be back in the third tier at least once
3) Neither of those developments will accurately reflect any real changes at the school

Anyone planning to rely on this year's USNWR rankings should be advised accordingly.

When I was in private practice, I rarely traveled for business. In my eight years as a lawyer, I can recall 5 trips to Dallas (all for the same client), a client trip to San Diego and a few presentations out of the Bay Area (three trips come to mind). I’m sure I’m forgetting a few, but mostly the business trips stand out because of their exceptional nature.

Life is much different as a law professor. I travel constantly. I don’t think I fully appreciated how much travel the job would involve. As a law professor, travel takes me to new audiences; it also allows me to build and reinforce social relationships. So right now I travel a lot—-more than I expected, more than I would like, and way more than my wife and kids would like. In the 18 month period from January 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006, my business travels have taken/will take me to the following destinations:

Berkeley
Boston
Chapel Hill, NC
Chicago (6 times)
Denver
Lansing, MI (2 times)
Las Vegas
Los Angeles
Minneapolis (2 times)
New Haven, CT
New York (2 times)
Palo Alto (3 times)
Seattle
San Francisco (2 times)
San Jose
Santa Clara (3 times)
Washington DC (3 times)
Wilmington, DE

My tally: 13 states and 13 different law schools in 18 months. More significantly, this amounts to 34 different business trips in 18 months, or almost two trips a month.

I’ve realized that this level of travel is not sustainable. I lose a lot of productive time on the road, but more importantly, each trip requires me to leave my wife to single-handedly take care of our two young kids, and that’s just not fair to her or them.

As a result, I’ve been looking for ways to cut back on travel. One cut was easy. For the past 4 years, I’ve been actively involved in the American Bar Association. I’ve enjoyed the experience, but the price of admission has been high—-right now, based on my various obligations, I am committed to 6 trips a year for the ABA. By dropping out of the ABA, I can save those 6 trips a year.

I will also probably say no more based on cost-benefit analysis. From Milwaukee, the travel time to participate in East Coast events is comparatively low—-most East Coast and Midwest destinations are a two-hour flight away, and in many cases I can get nonstop flights from Milwaukee. For example, in February I flew nonstop to Washington DC as a day trip. However, starting next academic year, when I’m based in California, trips to the East Coast will require almost 2 full travel days. Thus, going forward, the trip’s benefit will have to outweigh this significant transaction cost. This surely means that I’ll take a pass on trips I would have taken without hesitation from Milwaukee.

(Fortunately, with my new administrative duties, I can bring people to Santa Clara, so I will have a mechanism to continue my social relationships without my having to travel at all.)

I’m sure some of you are thinking that I must have racked up some major frequent flyer miles with all of these trips. Unfortunately, I’ve scattered my miles. I tend to pick flights based on price and schedule first and airline brand second. The result is that I have one free ticket on just about every airline, but most of those are effectively unusable given the stringent redemption requirements imposed by airlines. Despite my low brand loyalty, I did take enough trips on United Airlines last year to make premier status. With my resolve to cut my travel, we’ll see if I can earn the status again this year.

I sent out my article to the law reviews a couple of weeks ago. Among other ding emails, I got a ding email from a journal at midnight on Saturday night and a ding email from a different journal at 10 pm on Friday night. Two possible explanations for the timing of these emails:

1) Articles editors are so overworked that they can't catch up with their workflow until very late on weekend nights; or

2) Instead of socializing with friends on weekend nights, law review articles editors derive even more enjoyment from sending ding emails and dashing professors' hopes.

I'm pretty sure that #1 is the better explanation, but I'm beginning to wonder...

UPDATE: Last night I got a ding email at 12:30 am early Saturday morning.

I've never actually seen the social science establishing this, but I've been told that the single biggest determinant of a student's evaluation of a professor is the student's estimate of his/her grade in the class. In practice, this does not affect most doctrinal law professors. Although there are exceptions, most doctrinal law professors don't give grading feedback prior to student evaluations, so we do little to disabuse students of their (possibly deluded) belief that they will get an A in our class. But in most of the rest of academia (including legal writing professors), professors do give grading feedback during the semester and have to cope with the consequences accordingly.

In this article, an assistant professor of English explains how she has deliberately chosen to inflate grades to improve her student evaluations. She says: "I've lowered my standards. I still teach with the same rigor and enthusiasm and I still enjoy the material, but I don't hold students as accountable as I used to. I need to get tenure."

There are two ways to look at this. One way is that she was using too harsh a standard, and the student evaluation mechanism regressed her to the institutional mean. However, the other way to look at it is far less charitable--she has deliberately bent her standards to increase her odds of getting a payoff (tenure).

If the latter is true, her decision would be an indictment of the entire student feedback and grading systems--the unreliability/manipulability of student evaluations, the temptation to overweight flawed evaluation instruments, and the flexibility of professors' norms in the face of significant professional and personal consequences from tenure decisions. Accordingly, this article may give a deep insight into the real dynamic driving grade inflation.

Professors joke about this all the time. We know that our job performance is influenced, in part, by how others perceive our teaching. Websites like RateMyProfessor.com help shape these perceptions, but they are very unreliable because they do not confirm the authenticity of comments. Given how easy it is to game the system, wouldn't it be funny [yuck yuck yuck] to boost our RateMyProfessor.com rating...and, while there, perhaps take a swipe at some of our colleagues so that we look better by relative comparison?

Stephen Berman, a 30-year math professor at University of Saskatchewan, found out that this is no joke. Berman went to RateMyProfessor.com, anonymously posted 80 comments where he bashed some colleagues he didn't like and stroked some colleagues he did, and for this he was fired (sub. required). I'm not sure the firing was unwarranted, but it does reinforce the inherent unreliability of any tool that allows people to post anonymous comments about other people.

The NYT has a reactionary story today about professor-student email interactions. The subtext of the article is that some professors don't like some of the emails they get from students:

"At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance."

The article also implicitly laments that professors are now more accountable to students, and students have high (in some cases, aggressive) expectations for professor availability.

All of this may be true, but it strikes me as a universally good thing to eliminate some of the unnecessary barriers between professors and students that may hinder student learning. When a student emails me, the student opens a new channel of communication that extends the pedagogical space outside the four wall of the classroom into a format that may be more comfortable for the student. What a golden opportunity for me as a professor! And while I expect students to exercise discretion and common sense in communicating with me by email, it's my responsibility to set boundaries and establish appropriate norms for our interactions. In some sense, this boundary-setting may be equally or more pedagogically valuable than the substance we cover in the classroom.

I felt particularly uncomfortable with the decision by some professors not to answer a student's email at all. If a student emailed me a question about which binder to buy, I can think of several responses that would be more helpful than silence, such as:

* "do what works for you"
* "either choice is a good one"
* "you might consult your peers for perspectives about how they manage their course information that is more current than my experiences"

I'm not suggesting that I'm perfect with email, but I can't imagine many circumstances where I would deliberately ignore an email from a current student.

Faculty activity reports (FARs) are the way that faculty members report on their year's activities to the Dean. The report is typically used to set faculty compensation for the subsequent academic year. At Marquette, the FAR determines annual salary increases and affects summer research stipends as well. Therefore, the FAR is my chance to state my case for some extra bucks next year.

Beyond compensation-setting, the FAR can serve other purposes. For example, the report helps the Dean's Office collect information about faculty activities for their various upstream reports to other constituencies, such as the University, accreditation bodies, press, alumni, students, prospective students, etc.

I suspect that at some schools, the FAR also serves double-duty as a report for tenure and promotion purposes. Sadly, I have no such luck--I have to separately report on my activities to our P&T committee. I can recycle some of the FAR work, but effectively I have to write a second report.

The words "faculty activity report" strikes fear into the hearts of every law professor, for good reason. I spent virtually an entire working day filling out on my FAR--a pretty heavy reporting tax. And I haven't even started on my P&T report yet.

Why so long? Our FAR request has seven major sections, most of which are not surprising (e.g., teaching, scholarship, service, goals for next year). However, collectively these seven sections consist of a total of 46 line-item questions (some of which are further composed of sub-parts). Further, these questions are written exactly how a lawyer writes interrogatories--overbroad and burdensome.

In anticipation of each year's FAR fishing expedition, throughout the year I make notes about various activities in a Word document as they occur. This way, I have captured most of my reportable activities in a single file that I can conveniently consult at the year's end. However, there always seem to be new questions every year on the FAR for data that I wasn't tracking. Further, I still need to pull information to respond to the FAR from other sources--my CV, TWEN, my website, and various other documents. At one point yesterday I had 5 different Word documents and several web pages open at the same time...and the printer was smokin'.

The product of my day's labor? My FAR will include a 12 page (3,000+ word) written narrative singing my praises and explaining how I'm an virtuous human being plus a binder of a couple dozen documents (published articles, work-in-progress articles, syllabi, exams, class handouts) totaling several hundred pages. I suspect the Dean will have as much fun reading it as I had fun preparing it.

The good news is that I'm looking forward to moving this binder off my desk so I can actually do some work that is worth reporting...right after I do my P&T report...

Mike Madison has undertaken the public service of providing a one-stop central repository for upcoming conferences and presentations by IP academics. The desperate need for this calendar was demonstrated by the multiple mid-air collisions of this weekend, when there were at least 5 attractive IP-related events scheduled:

* State of Play in New York
* Third Party Intermediary Liability conference at Santa Clara
* Work-in-Progress event at St. Louis University
* IP Conference at Univ. of Houston
* Association of Internet Researchers annual meeting in Chicago

This made for an extremely busy weekend for many professors! I flew from Santa Clara to Chicago very early Saturday morning to make a 3:30 Central time presentation on Saturday. I know several other professors, including my colleague Irene, who took red-eye flights from Santa Clara on Friday to other events. I'm hoping Mike's calendar function will help minimize these overlaps so we can participate in all of these great events. Thanks for doing this, Mike.

Academic reputation is a big component of US News rankings, but it's hard to influence. The academic rankings are partially self-reinforcing--our percepti