W I T N E S S E T H:

Robert's Rules for Effective Law School Teaching

I have been teaching in law school for 11 years now, so it's time to start giving back to the teaching community with some of my teaching tips. These tips are aimed at newer law teachers who would like to maximize their scores on student evaluations, the definitive indication of teaching quality.

Robert's Rules for Great Law Teaching:

1. Oversimplify the law. Each legal issue should have a single black-letter test comprised of a list of not more than 4 "prongs." Students find differences among states/circuits complicated and frustrating. Why bring them up? If you must, one "minority rule" may be presented for up to 10% of issues. Subtle differences in verbal formulations in actual cases must be avoided at all costs. Multi-factor tests are frustrating to students and should be avoided.
2. Do not acknowledge ambiguity in the law. Avoid acknowledging that the law is uncertain or that it varies from state to state. Only inexperienced professors are unable to definitively resolve all issues into a canonical list of prongs (see previous Rule). 
3. Answer all questions with confidence whether or not you know the answer. The more uncertain you are about the answer, the more confidence you should project when providing a random answer. If you show uncertainty, students will perceive you as weak. If you answer confidently but incorrectly, few students will check you and nobody will believe them anyway.
4. In the event you are too unprepared to make something up confidently, respond with a question. Preferably, respond with a question that subtly ridicules the student who asked the question for reading the assignment too closely or being a "gunner."
5. Do not require students to know anything outside the lecture notes. Sometimes students will ask questions such as, "There's a lot of complicated junk on p. 357. Do we need to know that for the test?" Always answer reassuringly that the students are not responsible for complicated junk in the reading assignments. Exception: if you follow Rule 6, then require students to know everything from the reading.
6. Consider assigning a commercial supplement you wrote as "recommended" reading. All of the students will feel compelled to purchase the supplement, and you will make more money. In addition, this will provide a much needed ego boost of showcasing your rigorous scholarship.
7. If a student asks a complicated question say, "That's beyond the scope of the course." The student will feel special that he or she went beyond the scope of the course, and everyone else will be relieved they don't need to know the answer. Feel free to test on the question, however, as students likely will have already filled out their evaluations.
8. Draw distinctions between the good teachers and the professors who write articles. Everybody knows that good classroom teaching and good scholarship are mutually exclusive or at least not complementary, so steer the students away from faculty members who write articles instead of caring about students.
9. Dress up for class. Yes, slackers can accomplish simple tasks like founding and running a $400 billion company wearing a gray t-shirt and jeans every day, but teaching is a super-serious thing that requires you to dress like you're at a funeral.
10. Never expect students to know arithmetic. This isn't 4th grade. We don't use fractions or division in advanced graduate school.
11. Mention your degrees frequently. This is especially the case if your degree came from a significantly higher-ranked school than where you teach. If you have a Ph.D., refer to yourself as Dr. and insist that others do so also. Otherwise, simply put Esq. after your name. If you are ashamed to mention the names "Harvard" or "Yale," say "Cambridge" or "New Haven." If you went to Yale but don't teach at Yale, talk frequently about people at Yale in a way that suggests you are close to them. If If you do teach at Yale, it probably doesn't matter what you say or do.
12. Provide cookies. Studies show that providing cookies enhances learning. Donuts may be provided for a morning class.
13. Provide many similar sample exams that telegraph exactly the issues you will test on the final exam. This will give students a strong sense of confidence going into the exam that they know exactly what the issues will be. By the time they take the exam, the evaluations will likely have been submitted already.
14. Near the end of the course, tell students you wrote an easy exam this year. Of course, in a curved course "easy" versus "hard" is meaningless, but never point that fact out.
15. If more recently hired professors have outpaced you, talk about the time you "hired" them. Preferably refer to the professor as a wee lass/lad at the time. It is important to soften the point by saying that the professor "is a good kid."

The reading level of law professor blogs

I recently discovered a feature of Google that allows the user to filter searches by "reading level." Apparently this feature has been around for years, but I hadn't seen it before. Invariably whenever I see something like this, my first thought is: how can I use this feature to rank something? And as a blogger, I immediately thought of ranking law professor blogs. So, drawing on the websites listed in Paul Caron's blog traffic rankings on TaxProf Blog, plus a few choices of my own, I produced the following ranking.

So how do the blog traffic rankings stack up against reading level?

New Year's RC helicopter flight over the Pepperdine campus

Here's New Year's video taken with a RC helicopter high over the hills surrounding the Pepperdine University campus. In the foreground are the hills above Pepperdine and the campus itself. In the background is the Pacific Ocean and Malibu Lagoon.

I took the video with a UDI U13A helicopter (affiliate link):

 

New with Video Camera! UDI U13A 3 Channel 2.4GHz Metal RC Helicopter w/ Video Camera

 

The video quality is not outstanding, but the helicopter flies well and is very resilient. I've enjoyed it so much I bought a second one (after the first met an untimely demise in a free fall from 400 feet).

If you are shivering in the northeast right now filling out your law school applications, you might want to take a close look.It was near 80 degrees today at Pepperdine, with a warm breeze gently swaying the palms outside the law school. There's no reason why you need to study Contracts in a miserable arctic tundra!

Disclaimer: If you are prone to motion sickness, you may wish to take some Dramamine before watching this video. 

 

 

 

Also, you should know that one RC helicopter and one law professor were slightly harmed during the filming of this video. Here is a video of helicopter harm.

 

 

 

SEC releases proposed crowdfunding regulations

The highly anticipated proposed crowdfunding regulations have been announced by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The release contains over 500 pages of regulatory goodness that only an hourly billing lawyer could love.

I doubt, however, that all the regulations will be enough to stop the fraud and waste that is likely to result from the crowdfunding initiative. This should be basic common sense, but anyone who is approached by a crowdfunding promoter should ask one basic question: why aren't real investors (venture capitalists, banks, accredited angel investors, institutions) already funding the proposal? Why is the promoter trying to persuade 1,000 people to invest $50 apiece in his or her idea, rather than asking one person with deep knowledge of the product or industry to simply write a $50,000 check? If the answer relates to a conspiracy theory among big business (as it often will) you should obviously run away from the crowdfunding promoter before he/she steals your wallet along with your investment.

SEC Proposes Pay Ratio Disclosure

On September 18 the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules to implement the "pay ratio disclosure" called for by the Dodd-Frank Act. The rules require publicly traded companies to identify (1) the median annual total compensation of all employees and (2) the median annual total compensation of Chief Executive Officer, and (3) for the benefit of those who haven't mastered the arcane art of division, the ratio of the two numbers. The rules, which are  pursuant to Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, are implemented through an amendment to Item 402 of Regulation S-K.

The pay ratio disclosure rule is controversial. Prior to even proposing the rule, the SEC apparently had received over 22,000 comment letters plus a huge number of form letters. The proposed rule itself passed by only a 3-2 vote at the Commission level and totaled 162 pages of text. Yes, it took the Commission staff 162 pages to describe a ratio of two numbers.

Part of the reason the proposal is so lengthy is that the Commission staff is trying to be flexible on how companies implement it. The proposal would exempt "emerging growth companies," "smaller reporting companies," and foreign private issuers, and would allow statistical sampling and other methodological flexibility in making the median employee determination.

The likely reason the staff is trying to be flexible is that they themselves realize that the pay ratio disclosure wIll be costly for businesses and has little to do with investor protection. As Commissioner Michael Piwowar correctly noted, the proposal "unambiguously harms investors" and has no benefits that are within the SEC's mission. And Commissioner Daniel Gallagher pointed out that the SEC staff themselves were unable to identify any benefits from the proposed rule.

So who is in favor of the proposal? Commissioner Luis Aguilar argued that the disclosure of the pay ratio is necessary because "investors are asking if such a high level of CEO-pay multiples is in the interest of corporations and their shareholders." But of course investors as investors are asking no such question. Investors may well believe executive compensation is too high, but that information is already disclosed in excruciating detail under existing rules. The only new piece of information is the determination of the "median" employee, and this is the most costly and irrelevant aspect of the rule. Imagine a large corporation with many subisidiaries, each with its own mix of part-time, seasonal, offshore, and other employees making such a calculation. How is a large company supposed to make that calculation at reasonable cost, and who cares? The most likely scenario is that companies will waste large sums of money attempting to comply with the requirement and investors will pay no attention to the disclosure. 

Aguilar cites only three agenda-driven social activist funds who are purportedly "asking" for the disclosure, along with the AFL-CIO (see footnote 3). Indeed, the most vocal supporter of the rules seems to be Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO. I think it's beyond question that the AFL-CIO may have overriding objectives other than investor protection.

The pay ratio disclosure may, somewhat ironically, work against the labor interests that pressed it so strongly. The disclosure will not reveal anything about overpaid executives (as that is already disclosed), but it may reveal something about overpaid rank-and-file employees. If employees are being overcompensated, one might actually see hostile bidders and activist hedge funds using this information to agitate for a takeover and mass layoffs. So the labor push to calculate this information could actually work against employee interests.

In a sense, the SEC had little choice but to issue pay-ratio rules because Dodd-Frank required this disclosure. However, the SEC has authority to create safe harbors from disclosure rules, and the SEC should do everything possible to minimize the impact on the economy. In particular, the best solution would be for the SEC to create a safe harbor for companies that estimate the pay gap between CEO and median employee on the high side or within a range. That would serve the objectives of the Dodd-Frank Act that assume is that a large gap is a bad thing, while not requiring companies to calculate the exact numbers. Or, alternatively, the Commission could only require disclosure of the ratio only if material to investors, but I won't hold my breath for that.