BLS Library Blog

This past April, the New York State Legislature authorized nearly $50 million to help plan for three new law schools in Rochester, Binghamton and Long Island.. The money is for two feasibility studies: $3 million for the State University at Binghamton and $2.25 million for St. John Fisher College, a Catholic school near Rochester and $250,000 for the “planning” of a law school at SUNY Stony Brook. Finally, the Legislature earmarked $45 million for a Stony Brook law school building should one be required. With Brooklyn Law School, there already are 13 private and two public law schools in New York.

According to the American Bar Association, there are 198 law schools around the country approved by the American Bar Association, with nearly two dozen more accredited schools than 20 years ago. Law school enrollment, meanwhile, is up some 27,000 students from two decades ago, reaching an all-time high of 150,000 this past academic year. See the chart for enrollment statistics and degrees awarded for the academic years 1963 to 2007. In all, there are more than 1.1 million attorneys currently active across the United States, the largest number in New York, where more than 147,000 live and work.

A report in today’s New York Law Journal contains mixed reactions from the deans of law schools already existing in New York. For example, Dean Thomas F. Guernsey of Albany Law School said “It’s pretty silly. The demand isn’t there nationally, and clearly it’s not in the state of New York.” Dean William M. Treanor of Fordham School of Law said “What we’ve seen in recent years is that there is not a general need for new lawyers.” Other law school deans did not comment on the possibility of increasing the number of law schools in New York to eighteen.

Given the heavy reliance on precedent in Anglo-American common law, creativity is not the first thought one has when thinking about the development of the law. But in Thinking about Law and Creativity: on the 100 Most Creative Moments In American Law, Prof. Robert F. Blomquist of Valparaiso University School of Law, does just that as he sets out a tentative list of the 100 most creative moments in American law. His criteria in compiling the list include five arguable aesthetic characteristics of artistic creativity that he parallels to legal creativity. They are originality, working within traditional forms, “objective perspective”, “the subjective view” and whether “consumers can have a role in co-creating the work”. Most of the top ten events on the list, according to Blomquist, are “associated with the articulation of basic governmental foundational principles for the new American nation during its first decades of emergence as a democratic-republic” and are:

1. The Constitution of the United States (1787) and the ratification debates (1787-1788)
2. The Declaration of Independence (1776)
3. The Bill of Rights (1791-1792)
4. The Articles of Confederation (1777)
5. The Ordinance of 1787: the Northwest Territorial Government
6. Marbury v. Madison (1803)
7. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
8. The Judiciary Act of 1789
9. President Lincoln’s suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War (1861-1865)
10. Brown v. Board of Education (Brown I & Brown II) (1954-55)

The only entry on the list dating from the 21st Century is No. 68. Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (1992) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

Source: BeSpacific, dated May 24, 2008

The US military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is in the news again. An article in the NY Times reports that the 9th Circuit has reinstated a lawsuit filed by Major Margaret Witt, an Air Force nurse, which challenges the policy on substantive due process grounds. Maj. Witt served in the Air Force for two decades, received several medals and was featured in the service’s promotional materials.

While in the Air Force, Major Witt shared a life with a woman not affiliated with the military for six years in Spokane, Wash., about 250 miles from the base to which she was assigned. Although the women kept their relationship private, it appears that a neighbor “called up and said there are these lesbian women living in a house here and one of them is in the Air Force and you should know that.”

After an investigation and military hearing, Major Witt was discharged. She then filed a lawsuit challenging the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as a violation of the Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses. In 2006, Judge Ronald B. Leighton, of Federal District Court in Tacoma, Wash., dismissed the case. On Wednesday in Witt v. Department of Air Force, a three-judge panel of the appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, disagreed, reinstating much of Major Witt’s suit and returning the case to Judge Leighton for further proceedings.

Only two years ago the US Supreme Court dealt with the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy when it upheld the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment which withdrew federal funds from schools that do not allow military recruiters equal access to on campus interviewing. In Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc. (FAIR), the court decided that law schools’ and law faculties’ First Amendment free speech rights were not violated by the Solomon Amendment (10 U.S.C. § 558) because law schools and faculties remain free to voice their opposition to the military’s discriminatory DADT policy.

JURIST reports that, on Thursday, the Supreme Court of California issued an opinion in In re Marriage Cases overturning a state ban on same-sex marriage. The 4-3 ruling held that the ban violated protections on the right to “form a family relationship” in the California Constitution. California becomes the second state after Massachusetts to recognize same-sex marriage. In 2003, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health that the state “deny the protections, benefits and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.” In 2006, the NY Court of Appeals in Hernandez v. Robles decided that New York law does not permit same-sex marriage and that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage.The topic remains a hotly debated issue as religious and conservative groups oppose gay rights advocacy groups who seek to gain the benefits of marriage for same sex couples.

The BLS Library has extensive material in its collection on the topic including these monographs published since the US Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

Same-sex marriage and the Constitution / Evan Gerstmann
Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008 2nd ed
KF539 .G47 2008 Main

America’s struggle for same-sex marriage / Daniel R. Pinello
Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2006
HQ1034.U5 P55 2006 Main

Same-sex marriage : the cultural politics of love and law / Kathleen E. Hull
Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2006
HQ1033 .H85 2006 Main

Same-sex marriage : the legal and psychological evolution in America / Donald J. Cantor
Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, c2006
HQ1034.U5 S245 2006 Main

The lesbian and gay movements : assimilation or liberation? / Craig A. Rimmerman
Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, c2008
HQ76.8.U5 R58 2008 Main

Queers in court : gay rights law and public policy / Susan Gluck Mezey
Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, c2007
KF4754.5.Z9 M49 2007 Main

Courting equality : a documentary history of America’s first legal same-sex marriages / text by Patricia A. Gozemba and Karen Kahn ; photographs by Marilyn Humphries
Boston : Beacon Press, c2007
HQ1034.U5 G69 2007 Main

Gay marriage : for better or for worse? : what we’ve learned from the evidence / William N. Eskridge, Jr., Darren R. Spedale
Oxford [England] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006

K699 .E85 2006 Int’l.

Gay marriage and democracy : equality for all / R. Claire Snyder
Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, c2006
HQ1034.U5 S58 2006 Main

The place of families : fostering capacity, equality, and responsibility / Linda C. McClain

Cause lawyers and social movements / edited by Austin Sarat, Stuart A. Scheingold

Out of the closets & into the courts : legal opportunity structure and gay rights litigation / Ellen Ann Andersen

Courts, liberalism, and rights : gay law and politics in the United States and Canada / Jason Pierceson

The long arc of justice : lesbian and gay marriage, equality, and rights / Richard D. Mohr

The case for gay rights : from Bowers to Lawrence and beyond / David A.J. Richards

Same sex relationships : from ‘odious crime’ to ‘gay marriage’ / Stephen Cretney

Legal Times reports that John Barrett of St. John’s University School of Law in NY recently found a parody of a song from The Mikado written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1953 in the papers of Justice Robert Jackson at the Library of Congress. Barrett’s article A Rehnquist Ode on the Vinson Court (Circa Summer 1953), Green Bag 2d, Vol. 11, p. 289 (2008) is available at SSRN. The full text of the parody for all you fans of Gilbert & Sullivan is here.

PARODY: Tune, Pish Tush’s solo from Act I of Mikado
(“Our great mikado, virtuous man, etc.”)

Our Great Chief Justice, Virtuous Man
When He to Rule Our Court Began
Resolved to try
A plan whereby
The Judges might be steadied

So he decreed with stern portent
That who thereafter did dissent
Unless he had the Chief’s consent
Would forthwith be beheaded

This hard decree, of such import
Caused great dismay throughout the court
Verbose and mum, and smart and dumb
Were equally affected

The judges who by F.D.R.
Had come to lord it o’er the bar
Took great offense
At this pretense
By one whom Harry’d selected

Now Stanley Reed evades the ban
In about the only way he can
“Without a label
No one is able
To tell if I’m dissenting”

And Bill and Hugo wrote the Chief
“It is our most considered belief
Your rule has taint
of prior restraint
To it we’re not consenting”

Felix too was up in arms
When Fred stood fast against his charms
“My weekly speech
Should rightly reach
The ears of errant lawyers”

R.H.J. the Chief embraced
“With this restriction on me placed
With Shay and you
I’ll now pursue
The vagaries of baseball.”