f/k/a archives . . . real opinions & real haiku

paper route
knocking a row of icicles
from the eave

first on the trail—
the pull of a spider’s strand
across my face

clouds of pollen
drifting through sunbeams—
a sparrow’s sudden fligh

visiting mother—
again she finds
my first grey hair

……….. by Michael Dylan Welch – collected at Terebess Asia Online (TAO)

• by dagosan

three pink tulips
in an unkempt yard –
trespassers

[May 18, 2005]

potluck

I’ve bookmarked the month-old Barchives weblog, which is run by Toby Brown and Lincoln Mead and promises to “examine various aspects of owning and operating a bar association.” (via Ernie) It looks like Toby Brown has a special interest in a topic near to your Editor’s heart — the intersection of pro bono, self-help and access to justice, and the need for more participation by bar associations. (Toby, take a look at our Access/Self-Help Page, and especially here, here, and there.) Maybe Barachives will get into our quacks-like-a-guild debate, too.

• Barchives links to the excellent Access to Justice project at Chicago-Kent Law School. I urge you to take a look at its remarkable test self-help system. A2J describes itself as working “to bring together the most advanced process design technologies and the power of the Internet to fundamentally reengineer civil court processes from a customer prospective, in which self-represented

  litigants seek access to judicial services, in a research project entitled ‘Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants: A Consumer-based Approach”.

From now on, even if being humorous, I hope Prof. Bainbridge will point to Warren Farrell’s book Why Men Earn More whenever he mentions the gender pay gap. Steve notes that kids spend only 81% on dads for Father’s Day than on moms for Mother’s Day. That’s an interesting contrast to the fact that childless, never-married men, according to Farrell’s stats, “earn only 85% of their female counterparts—even when both are college educate and work full-time.”

There’s a interesting op/ed piece in today’s NYT, (Matt Miller, “Waiting for CEOs to Go ‘Nuclear’,” May 18, 2005), proposing that CEOs of major corporations get together to figure out how to fix our health care system . While checking out the Annotated NYT to look for more on the topic, I discovered Stuart Buck’s reaction at The Buck Stops Here to an NYT article on attractive kids getting treated better by parents. Buck’s link to a rearch paper from 1998, by Jeff Biddle & Daniel Hammeresh amused me.

 

In “Beauty, Productivity, and Discrimination: Lawyers’ Looks and Lucre,” the authors claim to show that more attractive lawyers make more money than homely ones [admit it, we always thought so]. They also note that private sector lawyers are more attractive than government lawyers. [ditto] The authors say:

“results support a theory of dynamic sorting and the role of customer behavior. We cannot determine whether this is because clients discriminate or because better-looking lawyers are able to obtain greater pecuniary gains for their clients.”

Does that NYCLA Diversity Pact cover lookism? Will clients want uglies or beauties? Does law really need more Metrosexuals? More Cro-Magnons?

afterthoughts: For more, see: “Beauty and Success: To those that have, shall be given” (The Economist, Dec. 17, 2007) [“The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand”] (via The dark goddess of replevin speaks, Jan. 9, 2008; and here)

Evan Schaeffer got lots of comments on the issue of whether a weblog can be a negative marketing tool for a lawyer. Like all things weblog-related, the answer is “it depends.” Weblogs are so different from each other, and clients or referring lawyers have such different needs and tastes, that it seems useless to make general, off-the-cuff appraisals. I must confess that there are some weblogs where the Comments are so consistently nasty and/or immature, that it reflects poorly on the Editor. I think Volokh does a very good job of keeping comments civil and respectful (e.g., here).

p.s. Sarni is threatening me with a Stick (or is it a boomerang?), and I’m waiting anxiously. Meanwhile, I’m wondering why they don’t get homework in Primary School downunder.