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The University of Connecticut Federalist Society had an idea while sitting around drinking the blood of poor children and eating Chick-fil-A, and rather than keep that idea to themselves like literally everyone would have preferred, they decided to make a poster out of it and force everyone to deal with their douchebaggery.

Are you ready for October 23? Because October 23 is “Federalist Society Pride Day,” y’all!

Yes, next Wednesday, every FedSoc twerp will don their “Future ABA Not Qualified Federal Judge” pullover and try to incite a backlash from a student body that will almost assuredly eye them with more pity than rage. Is the “Violet” cut off the rainbow because that was Tinky-Winky’s color? So many questions.

For more on the event:

To some extent, this whole affair is another snowflake moment, with FedSoc kids complaining that no one likes them just because they’re morally bankrupt. There’s also a dash of Ben Shapiro-inspired “debate me, bro” — which is really less debate than “let me yell empty sophistry, bro” — in there as they so desperately want the other students to call them out so they can feel some sense of satisfaction in their own entirely self-imposed martyrdom.

But it’s also the natural consequence of outrage junkies upping the stakes to get another fix. MAGA hats aren’t doing it anymore… maybe we mock Pride by coopting it to complain that our struggle to defend the rights of rich white people is exactly like getting denied jobs and kicked in the face by homophobes. The only question is whether they plan to turn February into “Why Isn’t There A White History Month?” or “Actually, Martin Luther King Was A More Like Clarence Thomas Than You All Think Month.” Maybe both!

The Federalist Society writ large will passively distance themselves from this by pointing out that every chapter is its own entity that they can’t possibly control. It’s exactly what they said when every chapter in the country started catering all events with the same chicken menu to own the libs. Whatever the national organization wants to claim, it sits atop a collection of clubs that march in goose-step.

But, one may argue, Ted Olson argued for gay marriage and has rolled as a member of the Federalist Society Board of Visitors for years. Surely that’s proof that these students don’t represent the organization as a whole!

One may argue that, but they would be wrong. Because Federalist Society chapters are just troll farms where the conservative legal establishment feigns embarrassment before handing over federal clerkships to the most aggressive loud-mouth bigot they can find — the one who they can identify because they’re undoubtedly elected to a leadership position.

To rise above the din to become the candidate they hose down and turn into another Deputy White House Counsel, the FedSoc powers-that-be encourage, in both word and deed, students to be ever more confrontational to prove just how much they’re ready to be ideological warriors before the thin cloak of respectability gets draped upon them. When Leonard Leo is compiling lists of objectively acceptable (or not, sometimes!) nominees he’s looking for someone whose soul he knows outstrips their otherwise passively bland résumé.

They want David Souter in the streets and Sam Alito in the sheets, after all.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Change is a-coming to the traditional law school admissions exam, the LSAT. As you may recall, the first-ever digital administration of the exam began with the July 15th test, with exam takers being assigned to take the test either on paper or on a tablet upon their arrival. (Beginning with the September administration of the LSAT, all test takers use a tablet.)

To make the transition to the digital format easier, July test takers had a one-time offer to get a look at their scores before deciding if they want to cancel them (usually test takers have to make that call before their scores are ready), as LSAC, the body that administers the LSAT, explained:

To ease the transition, LSAC is also offering July test takers a special option: regardless of format, July test takers will have the opportunity to see their score before they decide whether they wish to cancel it. Those who decide to cancel can choose to retake the test again through April 2020 free of charge.

In the podcast Keeping Up To Data, LSAC’s Vice President and Chief of Staff Susan Krinsky explained that a lot of wannabe lawyers took advantage of this opportunity. Approximately half (!) of the test takers canceled their scores from the July administration. To put it in perspective, normally between 2 – 3 percent of LSAT scores are canceled.

I spoke with Jay Thomas, Executive Director of  Pre-Law Programs for Kaplan Test Prep, about this and he told me, “To call it historic is an understatement.” But, at the end of the day it was “not terribly surprising.” After all, July test takers had a unique opportunity and Thomas said many signed up for that administration without the typical amount of preparation because they felt, “What do I have to lose?” Thomas also said with the LSAC increasing the number of yearly administrations of the test (from four to nine), they are seeing a trend of procrastination among test takers, with prospective law students taking longer to decide when they’ll actually take the exam (some then have issues getting a seat at their preferred testing location), with some postponing the exam multiple times before they take it. But the good news, according to Thomas, is that the cancellation percentage was consistent across both formats, meaning there wasn’t an issue with the new digital exam.

And that’s very good news for bringing the LSAT into the future.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Back in the heady days of law school when I still thought legal jokes were funny, I remember the vehemence with which my Civ Pro professor, a salty old stalwart (whose biopic would be entitled “Sit Down, Shut Up, I Wrote That Text Book You Ingrates Are Using” and he would be played by a hangry Gene Hackman), addressed the issue of forum shopping. For those of you who have successfully wiped Civ Pro from your memory bank (tell me your secret, please), forum shopping is a practice employed by litigators to get their cases heard in a particular court or jurisdiction where they think they will have the best chance of securing a favorable judgment. Or just to be a total pain in the ass. My professor said this was definitely the second reason that attorneys decide to forum shop.

Of course, there’s another form of forum shopping, so twisted and annoying that it should be eradicated from the earth along with gym selfies, candy corn, and shareable entrees. This in-house counsel variation on forum shopping will be used by your business partners to lure you into doing their bidding. Resist the urge at all costs. Why? Because if you don’t, every time you fall for this crap, a jurisprudence fairy loses its wings.

The in-house counsel trap goes a little something like this:

Hey Kay,

Wanted to talk to you about the kickoff of Project Dancing Goats on Mountain Top. [I’m making that up, but honestly, why are project names so lame and weirdly long at my company…who the heck wants to mark each draft “Project Dancing Goats on Mountain Top?”] I was surprised to learn that one of your compatriots is working on it instead of you. I don’t feel like she knows our business like you do and I’m not sure she has the chops to handle something that will be in all of our products by year end. I think it’s best that you step in here and take over.

You see it, don’t you? How thick the business partner is laying it on? Appealing to my vanity and legal savior complex? Help me, Obi-Kay-Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Blah, blah, blah. More importantly, look how the little sneak ended it. “I think it’s best that you step in…” Right, so if anyone were to call this weasel on it, he could say it was my call to step in or not. Shameless.

I will admit that when I was young and new at my company and the need to prove myself hung over my head like the shiny law school diplomas on the wall, this email might have sent me scurrying to comply. I wanted to be a good business partner, right? I should be part of the team that got this project done quickly and correctly, didn’t I? If I was the subject matter expert, then why shouldn’t I offer to take this off another attorney’s plate?

Because it’s exactly what the business partner wants you to do. In reality, the average business partner doesn’t care which attorney does his or her work, that partner just wants it done yesterday and with as little headache as possible. So, if there’s a shiny new recruit willing to expedite review and not make too many waves over the deal, it’s a no-brainer.

Worse, if you let a business partner forum shop among your team, you’re sending the message that at best you’re disorganized and out of synch, and at worst, you’re weak and willing to step on a teammate to get ahead. And that is so not the image you want to project. Business partners, like dogs, bees, and people who sell timeshares, can smell your resolve unraveling from a mile away.

So, do yourself and your team a huge favor. Name the beast. That’s right. At last month’s sales meeting, I raised the issue of forum shopping. Several offenders in the room looked away. They knew exactly what I was talking about. And for those who didn’t? I gave the following example to demonstrate why it’s annoying and counterproductive as a business partner to do this:

Business partner: I call Kay at 9:30 to ask her about a rather sticky FCPA question that’s holding up this deal getting signed. She tells me she’s heading into a meeting but will circle back by EOD. At 10:45, I’m feeling puckish, so I call Randy who promises me an answer by COB. His timeline is better than Kay’s, but, I really want to get out of here by 3:30 so I can go home and oil my beard with artisanal oils, so at 2:00, I call Stacy and proceed to harangue our newest attorney into giving me an answer on the fly.

Kay, Randy and Stacy: And this is what we mean by forum shopping.

Once you name the beast, put up a fence around it. Get with your team and decide how you want to address forum shopping. We have a weekly check-in meeting where we touch base on what we’re working on. It’s not 100 percent foolproof, but it does serve to cross-check who is working on what and with whom. Generally, the bigger the deal, the more likely a business partner will try to forum shop.

Finally, wrestle the beast to the ground. Our team has decided that the most effective way to deal with forum shopping is to redirect that partner to the correct attorney, or in Stacy’s case, she forwards the entire email chain to the correct attorney with the forum shopper on copy. Let me tell you that practice has drastically reduced the number of “Kay doesn’t have the chops to work on my stuff” comments. The important part is to be consistent and firm. Caving in to the “but Randy is out for a root canal, can’t you just take a quick pass,” is a sucker’s bet. Don’t be a sucker.

Because no one wants their biopic to be called “The Sucker Who Fell for Everything and Stood for Nothing.”

Kay Thrace (not her real name) is a harried in-house counsel at a well-known company that everyone loves to hate. When not scuffing dirt on the sacrosanct line between business and the law, Kay enjoys pub trivia domination and eradicating incorrect usage of the Oxford comma. You can contact her by email at KayThraceATL@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @KayThrace.

As the practice of law continues to morph inexorably from a “profession” to an “industry,” lawyers must contend with seemingly ever-increasing client demands, fiercer competition, tighter margins, and a baffling onslaught of technological hype.

Fortunately, there’s a solution.

Innovative practices are looking beyond traditional law firm management methods and embracing the practices of the world’s most cutting-edge manufacturing companies: Lean methodologies and systems-thinking.

In this free webinar, on October 17 at 1 p.m. ET, you’ll learn what it means to be a Lean law firm and how to employ systems-thinking to see your firm from a new perspective.

Learn how to measure and improve your operations in order to maximize the value you’re supplying to your client. Gain practical tips you can employ immediately to improve your firm’s financial position.

As regular readers of this column know, I lived in London from 2012 to 2018.  (I’m back in Chicago now.)

A few people have asked me what I liked most about living in London.  The truth is, there’s plenty to love.  There’s the history, and the history, and the history.  There’s the art, and the food, and the culture.  There’s the weather.  (Yeah, yeah: It drizzles a lot, but it never goes below freezing or above 90.  Compare that to Chicago.)  There’s the proximity to Europe (for the weekends) and the cheap air fares (to get there). But the best part of living in London for me may have been that I was offered the opportunity to live there for only two years at a time.

Thus, my wife and I were asked to move to London for two years.  We ran around like crazy, because there’s an awful lot to do if you’ll be living in a place for only two years.  At the end of two years, it would be okay to say, “I really need a nap.”  But it would not be okay to say, “I lived in London for two years, and I blew the opportunity.”  With each passing day, you could almost feel the sand pouring through the hourglass.  We were time-constrained, and we knew it.

The truth, of course, is that we are all time-constrained.

But we don’t feel it quite as urgently.

When you don’t know the amount of time you’ve been given, you can waste it.  Once you see the finish line, things become more urgent.  Time’s a wastin’: Turn off the TV, get out on the streets, and explore this city.

When you move to New York for the rest of your life, you never bother visiting the Statue of Liberty.  You can always do that next week.

When you’re shipped to London for two years, you certainly do visit the Tower of London.  There may not be a next week.

As the two years were about to expire, my wife and I ran faster: Our opportunity was almost over, and we hadn’t yet done everything on our list.  Then, the company asked us if we’d like to stay for another two years.  Eureka!  We accepted, and ran around like crazy for the next two years, because time was running short.  We had only two more years in London.

After four years, same deal.  We hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of our list, and the company asked if we’d re-up.  So we stayed another two years, for a total of six. And we ran, and we ran, and we ran.

Finally, we learned that our revels were ending; we would be returning to the United States.  And so, for those last few weeks, we ran faster still: Stratford-upon-Avon!  Let’s get out there!  Blenheim Palace!  If Churchill could grow up there, we could visit.  Essaouira!  We haven’t visited Essaouira!  Where the heck is it?  Buy a ticket!

Why is it helpful to live life in two-year increments?

Because when you’re heading to work in the morning, a million things are eating at you:  “razza frazza frazza the traffic,” “razza frazza frazza opposing counsel,” “razza frazza frazza the boss,” “razza frazza frazza whatever.”

When you’re living in a place forever, you let those things bother you.

But when you’re living in London for just two years, you’re unfazed by the slings and arrows of daily life: “I’m walking down Regents Street heading to Oxford Circus to get on the tube to go to work!  And I’m upset because the tube will be too hot and crowded?  I must be crazy.  I have only these precious two years in London; why don’t I just enjoy them?”

Oddly enough, you do.

When you’re aware of time constraints, each minute becomes more precious.

I don’t know how you revel in the joy of the moment — mindfulness, maybe? — but it’s worth a shot.

Because living life in two-year increments is an uncommon gift that everyone has been given, if only everyone cared to accept it.  Maybe it’s time to pay attention.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

Democrats have lost on the courts. That’s not an opinion; it’s just a fact. Conservative ideology is triumphant across all article three institutions. Conservative voters have been taught to mouth court-sounding issues “mah guns” or “infanticide” to mask the true goals of bigotry and sexism that motivates that base. Outside groups like the Federalist Society or the Judicial Crisis Network pour money into promoting conservative judges and putting up campaign ads. The mainstream media is so cowed by the conservative onslaught that they parrot radical conservative views or unqualified conservative judges as “reasonable” possibilities. Republicans successfully stole an entire Supreme Court seat and managed to install an alleged attempt rapist on the Supreme Court, just as an “F You” to women who dare to wish for equal protection under the law.

If that is not what losing looks like, I don’t know what is.

There are Democrats who do not understand how deeply they’ve lost this battle. There are even Democrats who don’t understand why it’s important to win this battle. And then there are Democrats who think that the way to win going forward is to find acceptable older white men with centrist views who won’t immediately draw the attention of the conservative hive mind that will marshal against them.

The group Demand Justice has released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Their list is not for those Democrats. It’s not for Democrats who are scared of Republicans, of bigots, or of their own shadows. It’s not for progressives who are scared of JCN and FedSoc and their assorted overwhelming trolls. It’s a wish list of progressive legal and judicial stars. It’s a list that highlights that the progressive bench is deep and diverse and capable of bringing so much more to the table than whatever aging prosecutor cum jurist the centrist would offer up while begging conservatives not to be too angry. This list is an aspirational goal.

Now, a legitimate question is why we need such a list. People who are already paying attention know who the progressive stars are. People who are not paying attention are, you know, not paying attention and not going to start just because they hear Sherrilyn Ifill’s music in the background. There’s not a lot of evidence that progressive voters are actually moved by the Supreme Court, while there is a ton of evidence that conservatives love to campaign against the judges who will uphold pluralism and equality like the ones on this list. Might it be better for Demand Justice to do the normal progressive thing when it comes to the courts and, you know, hide? Tread lightly? Be mindful of pissing off the Republicans and avoid putting a name and a face on their true intentions?

Obviously, from the way I phrased the above, you can tell where I stand. I believe that Democrats have lost on the courts because they’ve spent the better part of 30 years being afraid of the issues most associated with courts. Americans are broadly against the kind of post-apocalyptic view of gun rights conservatives push with their interpretation of the Second Amendment. Americans are broadly in favor of a woman’s constitutional right to choose. Americans are broadly in favor of campaign finance reform. Americans are broadly in favor of equal protection under the laws, regardless of race, color, creed, or sexual orientation. Americans are broadly in favor of an interpretation of the 15th Amendment that includes people being allowed to vote.

But Democrats, at a leadership level, do not want to fight on these issues. They don’t want to fight for women — they want to triangulate, or do some other made-up strategy that is a synonym for bullshit. They don’t want to nominate aggressive progressives to balance out the arch-conservative takeover of the courts — they want to nominate gaumless centrists. President Barack Obama nominated a well-meaning white man to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat in hopes that Republicans would be shamed into playing ball. REPUBLICANS HAVE NO SHAME. It’d be nice if the Democrats recognized that before we all die.

That’s why philosophically, I like the list Demand Justice has put forward. The Merrick Garlands of the world are not on it. Instead, there are people like Ifill, like Gupta (both Vanita and Deepak, for those playing along at home). There are old standbys like Pam Karlan, new stars like Leondra Kruger, and my personal favorite, Larry Krasner. Folks, Larry Krasner would ignite criminal justice reform at the Constitutional level like nobody’s business, and I don’t even know how you’re a “liberal” if you don’t like that choice.

Is the list progressive? Yep. Can you remember the last time the conservatives got dinged because their list of reactionaries who hold gays and non-Christians in open contempt was “too conservative”? Yeah, me neither. Because the media never complains when the right goes too far right. So excuse me if I like people who can COUNTER Republicans instead of desperately trying to appease them.

I also like the list as a practical matter because, as you might have noticed, the Democrats are currently in debate over their nominee to take on Donald Trump. From 30,000 feet, sure, every single one of the Democrats running for president would nominate better judges than Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. But at a more granular level, I do not know if every Democrat has the will and the vision to make aggressive Supreme Court choices. In fact, I suspect most of them do not. I expect the fear of Republicans is so ingrained in some of these people’s DNA that even if they get a chance to nominate a justice — assuming Mitch McConnell is defeated and thus the normal operation of judicial appointments is allowed to continue under a Democratic president — I assume most of them will nominate justices designed to placate Republicans instead of fight them.

As a progressive, my primary vote is still gettable and the people who support the kinds of judges on this list are the ones who have a chance at getting it. I’ll “vote blue no matter who” but I’ll be damned if I willingly walk into the “let’s just re-nominate Merrick Garland” camp unless I am dragged kicking and screaming the entire time.

Because I want to win. I reject the notion that the way to do that is be afraid all the damn time. This list, whatever it is, is not one birthed in fear. That’s a nice change when it comes to liberals talking about the Supreme Court.

Demand Justice’s Supreme Court shortlist

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Kim Kardashian’s law school adventure continues!

Reality TV star, makeup mogul, and criminal justice reform crusader Kim Kardashian has received a lot of attention on her journey to becoming a lawyer. Though she is eschewing traditional law school (not having a bachelor’s degree makes that tough), she is studying via apprenticeship with plans to take the bar exam in 2022. As her studies to become an esquire continue, she frequently takes to social media to document the process.

She shared a criminal law issue spotter that cast Justin Bieber as a criminal mastermind, complained about the fact that law student life sucks and is a huge drag on your social life, she neglected her Keeping Up With the Kardashians livetweeting duties to keep up with torts homework, and she bailed on summer holiday festivities as she and continued with her contract homework. Over the weekend, she went to her Instagram stories to share that while her husband was in Washington D.C. for a surprise concert at Howard University, she was there too — with her study materials.

She continued her contracts work on Monday, shouting out Barbri and University of Washington contracts professor Steve Calandrillo multiple times in her IG stories.

A Kardashian endorsement? That must be something Calandrillo is excited to put on his résumé.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Professor Robert Anderson at Pepperdine Law School (place from which I wouldn’t mind a job offer — HINT) asked me a series of questions on Twitter, all of which are important.

If you don’t know Professor Anderson, you should.  His Twitter feed is a discussion of scholarly impact, and things related to problems of measurement and hierarchies in academia.  I’ve found his tweets cause me to think.  I blame him for this blog post.

His tweet that got me to thinking was this one:  “My pal @lawprofblawg has got some points here, but I think at some point s/he has got to get a little more concrete with an alternative. Is the status quo working? Why would citation-based metrics be worse? Should law schools evaluate scholarship at all? How should hiring work?”

All good questions.  There was some discussion in that thread about the fact that we ought to have some measure of stuff.  In fact, we already do when we hire people to join the faculty, when they go up for tenure, and even (to varying degrees of noneffectiveness) when we review them post-tenure.  They are imperfect, filled with biases, and are often deployed in an arbitrary fashion.  Sometimes they are hardly metrics at all.

Nonetheless, Professor Anderson is correct: I am in favor of having some metrics.  However, the current metrics aren’t working.   My coauthor and I have explained the biases and entry barriers facing certain potential entrants into legal academia.  Eric Segall and Adam Feldman have explained that there is severe concentration in the legal academy, focused on only a handful of schools that produce the bulk of law professors.  While in the academy, barriers block advancement.  And those barriers are reflected, in my opinion, in current citation and scholarly impact measurements seeking to measure stuff.

But if we’re seeking to adopt some measure, whether it is a global standard that could ultimately replace U.S. News or just a standard at one’s own law school, I think there are serious caveats that need to be addressed before we begin to measure stuff.  When I have seen these issues raised before, I have seen them too quickly dismissed.  So let’s try again.

1.   Measure what and why?  I think the first thing to understand is the purpose behind the metrics.  Why are we seeking to measure?  What are we seeking to measure?  As I mentioned last week, some universities are mistakenly measuring quality via quantity measures. This is likely due to mistakenly defined goals, poor planning, or perhaps mere marketing (“We have increased our stuff!”)

I’m skeptical that scholarly impact metrics are capable of being used for any purpose.  If you have a colleague who is lagging in writing, do you really need metrics to inform them of that?  Are we seeking to measure the quality of the legal education a prospective student can expect to receive at a law school?  You’ll have to take some extra steps here to draw the link.  Are we using it to see who deserves to be hired or tenured?

If you’re planning on deploying the metric for these reasons, I have some serious concerns.  Let’s talk more about those.

2.  Does the metric inherently favor the usual suspects? Any metric deployed should be free of bias based upon gender, race, or class.  My outrage about metrics currently deployed is that a blind eye is usually turned to the fact that entry barriers into the academy have long led to some obvious results: The most cited people in the legal academy are white men.  That didn’t happen by accident or the consistently higher scholarly acumen of white men.  So, the current game is rigged, and any new metric must be free of such biases.

3.  Are we actually measuring things we aren’t seeking to measure?  Citation counts that pick up noise based onthe author’s alma mater are problematic.  As my coauthor and I mention:  “[When] the author’s alma mater is a strong determinant of whether the article gets published in the top law reviews in the first place, the game becomes transparent. Your best chances of getting published in a top-10 law journal are if you graduated from a top-10 school. Your best chances of getting strong citation counts are if you publish in a top-10 journal. Your best chances of getting into academia are if you come from one of the top-10 schools. Your best chances of being published in a top-10 law journal are if you teach at a top-10 law school. Your best chances….”  That creates a huge problem if what you’re trying to measure is impact of scholarship and not the impact of privilege.  

4.  Are we comparing apples to oranges?  If so, that will prove fruitless.  In my opinion, it is problematic to try to compare professors across legal academic subdisciplines.   I imagine we could weight the relevant markets in such a way that we could potentially come up with a metric that compares the broad fields of constitutional law or corporate law to the somewhat limited fields of underwater basket weaving law.  But I think those weights might be problematic given the network (and networking) effects within those disciplines.  And apart from bragging rights, what is the point of a larger metric?  One answer might be school rankings.  If that’s the case, depending on how poorly the metrics are deployed, curriculum might be affected as schools opt to not have professors in lower ranked fields.  That would create more problems, even for professors in the dominant networks.

5.  If the purpose of the metric is to measure quality, will use of the metric affect quality?  I think it is problematic if the metric is a standard across law schools.  To me, that suggests that competition on quality will be limited to whatever the metric is.  Of course, this is my objection to U.S. News and the quest for rankings.

Don’t think that’s a problem?  Let’s try a thought experiment. You wrote an article about the mental health issues that lawyers face.  Of the following, which would you rather have happen to you?  A) You receive a letter from a lawyer stating, “Your article saved my life.”  Or B) Your article gets cited by a prominent scholar who is cited and read all the time.  This scholar cites your paper in a series of articles, which increases your citation count.  Did A or B have more value?

Yes, I know the example is contrived.  But what I’m suggesting is that an article’s value may not be fully (or even partially) captured by traditional (and even potentially innovative) measures of scholarly impact.  I suppose usage data might pick up some of this, but I’m not convinced that will be the case.

6.  Any scholarly impact metric must be free from gaming. As an example, if my faculty of 430 full-time members have gotten together and agree to cite each other’s work in any way that is even remotely related to our article, that is a game that cannot be replicated by a school with 20 full-time faculty.  I can imagine law schools potentially pressuring their students to add citations to articles from existing faculty, and perhaps even eschewing citations from competitor schools.  If there is a way to game the system, the system will be gamed.

7.  Are we measuring location location location?  A top-10 law review placement is not a good proxy for article quality, but it does have effects in terms of citation measurement.  How do we account for the perceived quality of the journal?  And there is literature that even article placement is important to citation metrics (being lead article is best).  In a game in which my university seeks to have me publish in law reviews because that is how scholarly impact might be measured, I will probably opt not to publish in other media (say, peer-reviewed journals, even if I could reach a broader audience).  My blogging should probably stop, too, even though the number of people reading this will far exceed the number of people who have read my articles.  Okay, that’s depressing.

8.   Will we start writing to the beat of the metric? I feel the same way about this as I feel about schools that contend with standardized tests, only to ignore education in order to teach to the test.  If the point of scholarship is to get cited, then perhaps we ought to rethink this whole scholarship endeavor.  In my previous blog post, I contend that the purpose of scholarship is to make the world a better place.

A friend pointed out that I didn’t define what that means.  True.  It is something that ought to be discussed before we try to measure it.

Huh.  I guess that’s my larger point.

TempDean, my frequent coauthor on Above the Law, pointed out that “the only metric that matters is: Will anyone care 20 years after we’re gone? And no one wins.”  That’s a pretty harsh indictment.  But it is also consistent with my concern about how law professors search for meaning.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here. He is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

During a CITES meeting, which ran from 17-28 August, it was decided to maintain a long-existing ban on international trade in elephant ivory. Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia had proposed that ivory from elephants in their region be traded.

“Europeans have consumed all their animals, but they want to set rules for us who have managed to conserve theirs!” fumed the Zimbabwean leader. “Our wild animals are being discussed in Geneva, an irrelevant place to the animals… they bar us from killing our animals for selling ivory, but they want us to protect them from being poached. We are sitting on ivory stockpiles worth $600 million. It’s a lot of money we can use for big (wildlife conservation) projects,” said Mnangagwa, who went on to hint that Zimbabwe could pull out of CITES altogether over this emotive issue.

He indicated that the country – which is already controversially exporting live elephants – could unilaterally sell its ivory to China and Japan.

In late June, Zimbabwe hosted a wildlife summit where the issue of trade in elephant products dominated. Zimbabwe, with its 84, 000 elephants, has the world’s second largest herd, which is way above the country’s carrying capacity of about 50, 000. Botswana has more than 130, 000 elephants.

Earlier in March, the leaders of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Zambia met in Botswana for the Kasane Elephant Summit where they discussed their common problem of the growing burden of elephant overpopulation.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa strongly criticised the recent decision by the Geneva-based Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) forum to refuse the country permission to trade in elephant ivory. (AP)

The general sentiment in these countries – which have the largest herds of elephants and other wild animals in the world – is that by being denied the right to trade in the products of some of these animals under CITES, they are in effect being punished for the success of their conservation efforts.

The Southern African countries have always argued that animal rights groups are notorious for exercising authority without responsibility within the 183-nation CITES framework by insisting on imposing a blanket ban on ivory trade as the solution to elephant poaching without basing the decision on scientific and other fact-based considerations.

Wildlife management projects that the Zimbabwean government says it will invest the proceeds of the ivory vary from training rangers to erecting buffer zones for wildlife, to drilling boreholes to supply water to the sanctuaries, among others.

“In areas like Hwange (National Park), where the largest population of elephants is found, there is no water and that area depends on 100 percent borehole water,” explained Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority spokesperson Tinashe Farawo.

On paper, the president has a valid case, but Zimbabweans however suspect that this could be a trick by his cash-strapped government to turn the country’s huge wildlife resource base into another revenue stream. Given the government’s track-record of corruption and poor resource management, there are real fears that even if the country were to be allowed to monetise it wildlife resources, very little, if anything, would benefit citizens, let alone go towards the advertised wildlife conservation goals.

 “This government cannot be trusted with money, any money,” said Miriam Maunganidze, a 34-year old cross border trader who – for the past two years – has been stranded, together with 340, 000 other citizens that cannot get their passports even after paying for them in full.

Instead of the money going towards the production of the passports, the government, which survives on a hand-to-mouth basis, diverted to its other commitments.

The country is in the throes of extended periods of power cuts, where citizens endure up to 18 hours of no electricity per day, because unpaid neighbours, South African and Mozambique, are cutting power supplies to the country. A majority of the customers of the country’s mismanaged power utility are pre-paid, but the money they pay upfront for their power is arbitrarily diverted to other uses.

The same is the case with the country’s road network that continue to get dilapidated despite the national road agency collecting about $300 million annually in road maintenance fees for the past decade.

Even a multi-billion dollar State-run pension fund has been looted dry leaving intended beneficiaries to die in abject poverty.

Farai Maguwu, the director of the Natural Resource Governance, a civil society organisation that monitors how the country’s natural resources are exploited and used says even if CITES were to allow Zimbabwe to trade, the political elite cannot be trusted with a financial windfall from ivory sales.

“Trade in ivory is part of transnational organised crime benefitting the ruling elites. Thus even if they are allowed to cull the elephants, the criminal behaviour of Zimbabwe’s ruling elites, which is so blatant in the minerals sector, will continue to fuel opaqueness,” Maguwu told TRT World in an interview.

He said even the poaching that the government says would be reduced if open trade is allowed has for long been fuelled by the same political elites. “Poaching and illicit trade in animal products, including ivory, has been championed by the ruling elites. Ivory is bulky and the markets are thousands of miles away, meaning these have to be smuggled through airports and our borders with the help of powerful government officials.”

Syndicates made up of powerful members of the ruling party, the military and government officials, control most wildlife safari operations in Zimbabwe. Some of these bigwigs are linked to the rampant poaching that has been taking place in the country’s wildlife sanctuaries.

Even the existing huge elephant and rhino horn stockpile (mainly recovered from poachers and from animals that die naturally) is not safe, as some of the stock has mysteriously gone missing from the National Parks’ vaults.

Dr Tapiwa Mashakada, a member of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, who is a former minister of Economic Planning and Investment Promotion, is also supportive of the national call for the lifting of the CITES ban, although he is sceptical about the possibility of generality of citizenry benefiting from it.

“I do not think Zimbabweans will benefit from ivory trade if Marange diamonds experience is anything to go by,” Mashakada told TRT World. “However Parks and Wildlife are competent enough to manage those resources and put them to good use if the State does not interfere. The ban should be lifted so that Zimbabwe can implement a sustainable conservation strategy which benefits the communities around national parks.”

The sad Marange diamonds experience that Mashakada referred to is now a local by-word for greed and corruption after the political and military elites grabbed control of some diamond fields discovered on the eastern parts of the country in 2006 and violently looted it dry. The late former president Robert Mugabe later revealed that from the estimated $15 billion worth of diamonds extracted from these alluvial fields, only a measly $2 billion reached the State’s coffers, the rest going into the back-pockets of these political and military elites. These elites worked in cahoots with the Chinese and other international criminal syndicates.

Another analyst, University of Kent law professor, Alex Magaisa, says while it would be great for the country to trade in its wildlife resources for the benefit of local communities, there is no guarantee that this would happen given the predatory behaviour of the country’s political elites.

“While there are legitimate reasons to allow some trade in available resources, there is no guarantee that the proceeds will be put to good use,” Magaisa said in an interview with TRT World. “All too often we have seen public funds being abused by political elites. It would be great if there were mechanisms to ensure that such proceeds are ploughed into communities so that they benefit.”

Currently Zimbabweans are saddled with local and foreign debts running into tens of billions of dollars, debts the bulk of which not even Parliament has managed to get explanation of how it was acquired or used.  This is because of the opaque nature of the way the Zimbabwe government has been run from the days of Mugabe on the pretext of busting the targeted sanctions that America, the European Union and some Western countries have imposed on some of the country’s leaders and business entities. This practice has continued under Mnangagwa’s so-called new dispensation.

The leadership’s lavish lifestyle in the middle of deep-seated poverty has not helped to engender trust between the ruling elites and the people that cheered them to the top when they toppled Mugabe from power in November 2017.

Post published in: Featured