June 9, 2007

"We are not always in agreement with University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School Professor Ann Althouse, the Internet uber-blogger."

The Cap Times has an editorial...
The idea came from a reader...
They link to my blog, but not to the post, which begins: "John IMs me that question from his bar review class in Ithaca." I don't actually have readers in classes everywhere IMing me. John is my son.

19 comments:

hdhouse said...

posted on the site:

"I am a frequent blogger on Ms. Althouse's blogsite. She would be a darn sight better moderator than the "stars" doing it now who rarely "pounce" on errors or contradictions and generally are no more than golf caddys teeing the ball up for the wannabes.

She is tough and fair minded and doesn't suffer fools Most of ideas, including this one, are worth a listen at the very least."

Bissage said...

Well? Will you be the moderator?

Come on, that would be uber-cool!!!

Ruth Anne Adams said...

Might [I immodestly propose] they have been referring to XWL as 'a reader'?

J. Cricket said...

You have now told us three times that the IM was from a bar review class. Why is this so important to you? Is multi-tasking such a point of pride for the A-Houses that they must always let people they that they are doing more than one thing at once? I have a feelig that I know what it would be like to talk to you at a party.

BTW, the uber-smart don't pay all that money just to own the bar-bri books and pretend they are attending classes; they pass the bar without wasting the dough. Haha.

Ron said...

"Uber-Blogger"? Maybe the Altermans of the world would be happy if just used Wehrmacht designations to classify all of the blogging Reich as it were... Ann might be an untersturmbloggingfuehrer. Heil Bucky!

uberblogger, indeed...

Swifty Quick said...

We are not always in agreement with University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School Professor Ann Althouse

Is that codespeak for "We hate Bush more than she does"?

John Stodder said...

This paper calling your blog a "blogspot" is Bush-like.

I wonder if they used The Google to find it on the Internets.

Dave said...

What are you implying? Your son John is also not a reader of your blog? Or that the journalists should have figured out that the reader who IM'd you was your son?

Yes, we all know journalists are lazy, ill-educated, biased, etc., etc.

But surely your son reads your blog...

Ann Althouse said...

Ruth Anne: The editorial quotes something I wrote in response to John. I posted on another day -- later -- linking to XWL.

daveF: I don't care very much, but it seems odd to assume it was from a reader, when I was getting an IM. Do many bloggers IM with their readers?

Dave said...

Ann: you're probably right that most bloggers don't IM with most of their readers. IM generally implies some sort of close relationship between the two parties; it is not surprising that this is lost on journalists.

John Althouse Cohen said...

BTW, the uber-smart don't pay all that money just to own the bar-bri books and pretend they are attending classes; they pass the bar without wasting the dough. Haha.

I will readily admit to not being smart enough to pass the bar without taking the class. But you don't know that I'm "wasting the dough"; most law students get reimbursed for BarBri by their employers.

Simon said...

Isn't it also true that a fairly significant percentage of people taking the bar fail it first time out? That'd suggest that any prep is money well-spent, subsequently reimbursed or not.

Brent said...

September 16, 2008:

"And overseeing the debate this evening, as she has for all of the last 16 Presidential candidate meetings, is our moderator, Ann Althouse."

AA: "Senator Rodham Clinton, good evening. You will start us off this evening with our first topic, the recent capture of Osama Bin Laden. Good for the war effort, or bad?"

HRC: "First of all, thank you to the University of Wisconsin for hosting the first of these 3 debates between myself and Mayor Giuliani in the beautiful Walmart Global Warming Studies Arena on the Madison Campus. And thank you again Professor Althouse for agreeing to be the one and only moderator for these debates. As a woman, I can certainly appreciate the extra work and scheduling that you must do to prepare for these debates while still teaching your internationally revered law classes. And, if my years at Yale Law taught me anything, it's that we sisters have to stick together when our country is facing attack from all areas: terrorists, fascists, Republicans, the patriarchy. As Lani Guinier was saying to me in the back room before I came out . . .

brylun said...

I've been a lawyer for many years and I don't know anyone who passed the bar exam without much preparation. Especially the New York bar.

Dave said...

Wasn't JFK Jr's strategy for the New York Bar to take it innumerable times till he passed?

XWL said...

Seems like whichever editor wrote this editorial misses quite a few points about either of your posts.

They should just come out and say they'd love to host a "Bush-Bash-Fest!!!", and screw helping voters in either party find a viable candidate, let's just pick four folks who really hate the current "regime" and let them go at it from the left and the right.

They clearly just got so turned on about the idea of getting four Bush Bashers together that they didn't bother really reading either post, or bothered to pay attention to the details of how the idea evolved or the back and forth in the comment sections, nor did they follow any of the links to understand the meat of the matter.

Not surprising really, newspaper editorials aren't where you go for fleshed out thoughts and well reasoned opinions. This sort of laziness isn't forgotten next time they decide to complain that it's bloggers who play fast and loose with facts and traditional media are the ones with layers and layers of editors that ensure a quality, error, and bias free product.

(bitter you ask? of course I'm not bitter about not being name checked or linked to by "The Capital Times". Why would I be bitter? I don't want their traffic anyway. Not that their little rag would produce any traffic as it is, even if I wanted the traffic a direct link would have generated. did I mention I'm glad they didn't link or name me? It's the ideas that matter, afterall, not some silly concept of authorship . . .)

XWL said...

I should add (cause my previous comment wasn't long enough), that Prof. Althouse would make an excellent moderator for whatever format they would hope to impose on the candidates (even a Bush Bash Fest!!!).

Bruce Hayden said...

BTW, the uber-smart don't pay all that money just to own the bar-bri books and pretend they are attending classes; they pass the bar without wasting the dough. Haha.

Nobody in their right mind tries to pass the bar w/o a bar review. The books are a minimum, a class is better, and IMHO, Bar/BRI is best.

There are a lot of things that go into this. First, most of us didn't take all the subjects on the Bar while in LS. If we had, we would have done little else, and today law is specialized. Instead of taking family law, I took IP, computer law, antitrust, etc. and now practice patent law. I learned my family law in Bar/BRI. Ditto for other parts of the law that I will never probably have to practice.

Another problem is that you cover stuff in much more depth in class than on the bar exam. Bar prep classes help you cut down to the essentials.

Also note that many law schools teach a generic national law. But in many cases, esp. on the essay part of the exam, you are tested on that state's law. And, indeed, some states have special subjects - when I first took Bar/BRI, we had some students prepping for the WY exam, and they had to know WY water law, which apparently often gets its own essay question.

Bar prep also lets you know your weaknesses and what to practice on. As for the multi-state, I was surprised to find that I was initially hitting towards 100% on the Con law, but had a lot of work ahead of me for contracts, and I wasn't in much better shape for torts.

In short, my experience is that the people who skip formal bar review are most often those who fail the first time around.

vrse said...

You're no "uber-blogger"! Silly silly Cap Times... your pool of commenters consists of 10 obsessive compulsive morons and most of your visitors come here because you said something really stupid, which is frequent, or because instapundit hack linked to you.

"Uber-blogger," what a joke.