A Law School Dean Offers Grief Counseling to "Hysterical" Students after Trump Wins: Legal Reasoning Suffers

Michael Schwartz, dean of the law school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock announced in November, 2016 that he would resign the following summer. His accomplishments included a lawyer-student mentoring program, live-client learning sessions, and a low-income clinic in the Arkansas Delta.[1] The trigger for his resignation was a school-wide email he had sent to students just days earlier in which he announced that he was making counseling available to any student who was upset by the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President. Besides effectively normalizing over-reactions and failing to recognize normal venting, the dean’s email interjected partisan politics, albeit tacitly, into higher education. Rather than turn the popularized context into a teachable moment for assumption-analysis, the dean modeled what happens when unsupported assumptions run unchecked. In the end, the legal reasoning of students could suffer.

The full essay is at "Grief Counseling to Hysterical Students."

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1. Emily Walkenhorst, “UALR Law School Dean to Exit Post,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 19, 2016.

The Courts Go After Gerrymandering: Deconstructing a Conflict-of-Interest

In the U.S., the boundaries of both federal (e.g., U.S. House of Representatives) and state legislative districts are redrawn every ten years after the census to “ensure that each district contains roughly the same number of people.”[1] Both major political parties in state legislatures “often remap districts to favor themselves, either by cramming opposition voters into a single district or by dividing them so they are the majority in fewer districts.”[2] I contend that a simple majority vote is problematic, given the irresistible temptation to redraw the districts for partisan advantage rather than merely to take account of changes in population.

The full essay is at "Gerrymandering."

1. Michael Wines, “Judges Find Wisconsin Redistricting Unfairly Favored Republicans,” The New York Times, November 21, 2016.

2. Ibid.