Louisville 73, Murray State 10
Video and game report courtesy of ESPN.com.
The art of winning an unfair academic game
A member of the Jurisdynamics Network
Among those innovations, of course, Heisman's signature contribution to the sport was the forward pass. As Wiley Lee Umphlett documented at great length in Creating the Big Game: John W. Heisman and the Invention of American Football (1992), the forward pass probably saved the sport from extinction. From 1904 to 1905, according to the Times, "44 players [were] reported killed in football games, with hundreds sustaining serious injuries." Heisman advocated the forward pass as a way of "scatter[ing] the mob."Aside from leading the fight for the legalization of the pass in the early 1900s, Heisman pushed to divide the game into quarters and created the center snap. The ball had previously been rolled on the ground. Heisman introduced the ''hike'' vocal signal and the first audible at the line. He invented the hidden ball trick and what would now be called the fumblerooski. Because he wanted fans to understand play-calling, he made it easier for them to follow the downs and yardage needed by erecting something else new at games: a scoreboard.
The world is filled with problems that can be expressed in numbers. If the law harbors any hope of solving them, it cannot afford to discard so basic a tool as mathematics. As undergraduates approach the LSAT, as 1Ls matriculate, as professors end their collective estivation, I offer this wish for the coming academic year. Would it be that our profession no longer confessed -- no longer cherished -- its rampant innumeracy. Would it be that the law, reunited with the tools of quantitative analysis and reinvigorated with an appreciation of mathematical beauty, might cease to be the mathematical waste land of the social sciences.
The easiest way to measure front office efficiency is simply to divide a club's payroll by its wins to come up with "dollars per win." However, neither side of this equation reflects reality. The worst team a club can field won't go 0-162, and despite some owners' best efforts, it's impossible to spend $0 on a major league roster. It's then necessary to look at marginal wins and marginal payroll.All that it takes to translate Doug Pappas's marginal payroll/marginal wins formula for use in legal education is to develop analogous metrics for payroll and wins.The Marginal Payroll/Marginal Wins (MP/MW) system evaluates the efficiency of a club's front office by comparing its payroll and record to the performance it could expect to attain by fielding a roster of replacement-level players, all of whom are paid the major league minimum salary. The formula is:
(club payroll - (28 x major league minimum) / ((winning percentage - .300) x 162)The left side of this formula assumes that a replacement-level club would play .300 ball. That translates to 48.6 wins in a 162-game season, which before the 2003 Tigers was worse than any actual major league club since the institution of the amateur draft. [Editors' note: The 2003 Tigers went 43-119, good for a .265 record.] The previous low was the 52-110 (.321) record of the NL's two 1969 expansion clubs, the Expos and Padres, who began play with no minor league system, no way to sign free agents, and no players any other NL club really wanted to keep. After subtracting the replacement-level .300 winning percentage from the club's actual winning percentage, the resulting number is multiplied by 162 to calculate the number of marginal wins over a full 162-game season. This adjusts the formula for strike-shortened seasons and clubs which fail to make up a postponed game or two.
There was a . . . dean . . . whose effective tenure was devoted to making the school's stakeholders brave and dignified and good . . . . When he left the people burst into tears in the halls and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?"And if your literary taste runs far afield from John Steinbeck, then I'll offer another allegorical source of inspiration:
סלה -- Selah, y'all.And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho: and the Lord showed him all the land of Gil'e-ad, unto Dan, and all Naph'tali, and the land of E'phra-im, and Manas'seh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zo'ar.
Honestly, if you're a domestic LLM, chances are good you're mostly there to write - not to take more exam courses. Talking about how to do that (independant study options, thesis rules) would probably be extremely helpful.
There are at least three areas of controversy:
Interesting paper on NBER: Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd & Jacob L. Vigdor (all of Duke University, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy), How and Why do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement?. Here is the abstract:
Education researchers and policy makers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative data set from North Carolina to explore a range of questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new -- and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the "education production function" -- the availability of data on all teachers and students in North Carolina over a ten-year period allows us to explore them in more detail and with far more confidence than has been possible in previous studies. We conclude that a teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Taken together the various teacher credentials exhibit quite large effects on math achievement, whether compared to the effects of changes in class size or to the socio-economics characteristics of students, as measured, for example, by the education level of their parents.
(Hat Tip: Wall Street Journal.)
[Graduates of nonelite law schools] are . . . important cultural cogs in making the Constitution a living institution. Con law classic does a poor job of teaching students the role that the Constitution plays in political life.No, with all due respect, the fault does not lie in the course. It lies in the impoverished imagination and perverse priorities of some (though not all) teachers of constitutional law.