Recent News About George Mason University
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Nothing better exemplifies the Gramscian “long march through the institutions” than the role of the American Bar Association in transforming America’s legal establishment.
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Protecting intellectual property is a critical component of our nation’s founding and is essential to strengthening our economy, however flawed jury awards disconnected from underlying legal doctrine could have disastrous effects on collaboration and innovation. The United States Constitution allows Congress to write laws granting “authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”. In the spirit of this constitutional objective, the Uniform Law Commission promulgated the Uniform Trade Secrets Act forty years ago to establish clarity about what a trade secret is and how misappropriation of trade secrets should be punished. To date 47 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the uniform code.
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A prior post (entitled “Who Runs the Legal Academy?”) attracted some much-needed attention from other sites, including Overlawyered.com, Instapundit, and the Tom Woods Show. The governance of law schools, although not a secret, is poorly-understood and seldom discussed. This lack of transparency empowers—or at least emboldens—some of the behind-the-scenes influencers to take unreasonable positions and to pursue self-interested goals that are contrary to the ostensible objective of training students to be effective and ethical lawyers. The result is a dysfunctional legal academy.
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As an alumnus of the University of Texas Law School and the father of a recent UT graduate, I pay close attention to what is going on at my alma mater. Sadly, I have witnessed at UT many of the ailments afflicting higher education generally: rising tuition, declining academic performance, bloated administrative bureaucracy, curricula infected with identity politics, officious “diversity” enforcers who abuse their authority, and a climate of political correctness that overreacts to every passing fad.
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The legal academy is a strange place.
It differs from other intellectual disciplines in that legal scholarship is published mainly in student-edited law reviews, not peer-reviewed journals. Most faculty members at elite law schools have never practiced law, or have done so only briefly and usually without professional distinction. The curricula at many of the nation’s law schools are larded with trendy courses devoted to identity politics and social issues du jour. Elite law schools eschew the teaching of “nuts and bolts” fundamentals, deriding such practical instruction as resembling a “trade school.”
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WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) – Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that overhaul the rules governing court-awarded attorneys’ fees in patent cases will have “significant” implications for so-called patent trolls, one law professor says.
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ARLINGTON, Va. (Legal Newsline) — U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill’s patent troll bill, introduced last week, could be even more devastating to the country’s patent system than those measures already introduced, one law professor says.
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We've all gotten them in the mail�the densely-written legal notices in tiny print advising us that we may be among the members of a class action currently pending in some far-off federal court.
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Mitchell AUSTIN � A faculty member from George Mason University in Virginia has been appointed as the chief appellate lawyer for the state of Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott announced Friday.
