What struck me as remarkable is that a veteran journalist suspended for an entire month for a statement not made in the paper but on his private twitter feed not only doesn’t sue or protest, but seems contrite and accepting of the punishment and will presumably show up back to work ready to contribute in October.

But in the end, it proved two things: 1. I was right about nobody checking facts or sourcing and 2. I’m an idiot. Apologies to all involved.

How is it possible that this didn’t devolve into a nasty fight between employee and employer with colleagues picking sides and threats of lawsuits all around? Answer: the Washington Post’s Social Media Policy. It’s probably the clearest example yet of why every company should consider implementing one of their own.

The Post’s current policy guidelines don’t appear to be publicly posted, but PaidContent.org has an older version that sheds some light – Newsroom Guidelines for Use of Facebook, Twitter and Other Online Social Networks. The guidelines make it clear that there is no distinction between public and private for Washington Post journalists:

Using Social Networking Tools for Personal Reasons

All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.

Gone are the arguments that what a reporter says in his or her own capacity is somehow different than what appears in the paper. Here the paper represents a unique situation, cognizant that its reporters are still acting as reporters even when their statements aren’t made under the WP banner. There are probably arguments to be made on both sides here – is the Post thereby also taking responsibility for any individual twitter account by an employee?

The Post’s social media policy also imports higher journalistic standards in evaluating the propriety of individual statements.

When using social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, My Space or Twitter for reporting, we must protect our professional integrity. Washington Post journalists should identify themselves as such. We must be accurate in our reporting and transparent about our intentions when participating. We must be concise yet clear when describing who we are and what information we seek.

In my mind, this is where Wise’s tweets went rogue in that an experiment in whether other journalists fact-check information culled from sources like twitter before repeating them inherently lacks transparency in intention.

However, the Post goes even further.

Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online.

That could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias? By whose perception is this measured? is there any statement that would not reflect such a bias in the eye of the right beholder?

The Social Media Governance website has a database of social media policies available.

In response to decades of complaints that American law schools have failed to prepare students to practice law, several prominent and respected authorities on legal education, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently have proposed significant curricular and pedagogical changes in order to bring American legal education into the twenty-first century. It will not be possible to implement such proposed curricular and pedagogical reforms if law schools continue their trend of primarily hiring and promoting tenure-track faculty members whose primary mission is to produce theoretical, increasingly interdisciplinary scholarship for law reviews rather than prepare students to practice law. Such impractical scholars, because they have little or no experience in the legal profession and further because they have been hired primarily to write law review articles rather than primarily to teach, lack the skill set necessary to teach students how to become competent, ethical practitioners. The recent economic recession, which did not spare the legal profession, has made the complaints about American law schools’ failure to prepare law students to enter the legal profession even more compelling; law firms no longer can afford to hire entry-level attorneys who lack the basic skills required to practice law effectively. This essay proposes significant changes in both faculty composition and law reviews aimed at enabling law schools to achieve the worthy goals of reformists such as the Carnegie Foundation.

My translation: law schools largely fail to produce graduates who are competent lawyers upon graduation because the professors who teach them (a) are hired to publish academic writing, not teach practical skills, (b) don’t receive any particular incentive or training in becoming better teachers, (c) have relatively little experience in the legal profession before becoming professors.

It’s a debate likely to be riddled with semantics and caveats. I took a number of courses from extremely skilled and experienced legal practitioners, including Prof. Newton, who, when I took his Criminal Procedure course, was a veteran federal public defender who had just argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s not an argument about what’s available, but about what is valued and incentivized in our law schools.

The core of Newton’s proposal is what he terms the “teaching professor” a tenure-track professorship focused on practical training.

To enable this level of teaching competence, a teaching professor would have a significant amount of meaningful practical experience (typically a decade or more) and would have earned a reputation as a competent, ethical practitioner before joining a law school‟s full-time faculty. Such teaching professors also typically would have first proven themselves as effective law teachers while serving as adjuncts or visiting professors. Teaching professors would be expected to publish legal scholarship but not to the same degree as research professors. Moreover, the type of publications expected of teaching professors for promotion and tenure would be practical works, such as doctrinal law review articles and legal treatises.

I commend Prof. Newton’s article to your perusal. In the meantime, I’ll make a more modest proposal – start with the faculty profiles on the law school website. What does it emphasize? On most you’ll find: name, degrees, research interests, courses taught, a curriculum vitae, lists of publications. The emphasis is on pedigree and publication. Why not include some items of more interest to students? Perhaps have a profile picture taken sometime this decade, the past five years of student evaluation scores, audio or video of recent presentations, and audio or video of recent class discussions.

What’s the likelihood of any of these reforms succeeding? I’ll just note that of the Deans of the three law schools who have implemented significant curricular reforms that I’m aware of – Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Washington and Lee – none remain at the helm.

• Brent Newton, Preaching What They Don’t Practice: Why Law Faculties’ Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy (July 22, 2010). South Carolina Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1646983
• Law Librarian Blog, Why Can’t Johnny Research Practice Law? Or, would you hire a law prof to represent you?, August 23, 2010

Now I feel foolish for having indulged this clever, sycophantic website at all. Flattery will get you somewhere, it turns out, at least on the internet. My first instinct is to obsess over their methodology, but I can hardly muster the enthusiasm for that and it might involve math. Perhaps more galling is I’ve never read anything by Clarke or Lovecraft and if I ever do my impression will be inevitably colored by the notion that I write like them.

It made me wonder who other famous authors write like. James Joyce, quite reassuringly, writes like James Joyce. So does Ernest Hemingway, at least in The Old Man and the Sea. Malcolm Gladwell writes like David Foster Wallace, who in a baffling turn, writes like Stephen King, who writes like Kurt Vonnegut, who sometimes writes like Kurt Vonnegut but at others (even in the same paragraph) writes like Margaret Atwood. I decided this game could go on forever at about the same time I was informed that Christopher Hitchens also writes like H.P. Lovecraft, from which I deduced that I must write like Christopher Hitchens, an association I would gladly take any day and declared the experiment concluded.

In case you were wondering, this post was written like…. H.P. Lovecraft.

It might have languished in Warner Bros. sound effects library had it not been adopted by sound designer Ben Burtt and rechristened ‘Wilhelm’ after the soldier who coughs it up after getting shot in the leg by an arrow in “The Charge at Feather River” (1953). Burtt would use it in all of the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies and it took on a life of its own, appearing in over 200 films.

The cult status of the Wilhelm scream has become so great that actor and director Jon Favreau, in the midst of mixing Iron Man 2, announced on twitter “Spoiler for sound geeks: The Wilhelm Scream is in.”

Every act has the potential to be our legacy, let’s make it a good one.

• Steve Lee, History of the Wilhelm Scream, Hollywood Lost and Found (May 17, 2005)
• List of Movies Using the Wilhelm Scream
• Wikipedia, Wilhelm Scream
• Alex Pham, Listen up, sound geeks! Wilhelm Scream in ‘Iron Man 2,’ says Favreau, Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2010.

I’m equally fascinated with bassist, Lewis Keller’s ability to keep down a nice bass line, take care of the kick drum and the high hat and some great backing vocals all at the same time.

LEVI’S® CRAFT OF MUSIC – LISSIE from LEVI'S UK on Vimeo.

One looks to me like a smiling person. The other looks like a frog. Wikipedia agrees with me. I am right. My girlfriend is wrong. Also, graphic representations of emoticons are heretical.

That is all.

I happened to see on Yahoo Answers a question I had always wondered about myself – why are there three ducks on the seal of the University of Houston Law Center? So I did a little research. According to the Law Center website:

The Law Center seal includes three martlets above an opened text inscribed with “LEX,” the Latin word for law. Martlets, symbolizing peace and deliverance, also appear in the University of Houston seal – which in turn is drawn from the coat of arms of General Sam Houston who claimed descent from Sir Hugh of Padavan, an 11th century Norman knight.

I did a little more digging and found a more satisfying justification than symbols of “peace and deliverance” – two things you’ll find very little of in a law school. The martlets (also martelette, martinet or martin), “a byrde whose fete be so lytle, that they seeme to haue none.”¹. It became used in heraldry as a mark of cadency for a fourth son, symbolizing their position as having no footing in the ancestral lands.².

If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a Wills and Trusts professor with an interest in primogeniture, you may recognize the English practice by which the first son inherited the estate. The second and third sons traditionally went into the Church and the Army, and the fourth had no well-defined place. As the fourth son received no part of the family wealth and had to earn his own, the martlet was also a “symbol of hard work, perseverance, and a nomadic household.”³

A number of universities have adopted the martlet – Pembroke College, Cambridge, University College, Oxford, and McGill – sometimes shown without feet, thus denoting an inability to land and symbolizing the “constant quest for knowledge and learning.”⁴

The University of Houston Law Center no doubt inherited the martlets from the University of Houston as a whole, which adopted the seal in 1938, derived from General Sam Houston’s coat of arms.

I probably could have lived a long time without ever again pondering the significance of the ducks, but I like the image – a fourth child with no claim to the estate or designated career path but creating a legacy of his or her own through hard work and perseverance, in a never-ceasing flight in pursuit of knowledge and learning.

1. Thomas Elyot, Latin Dictionary (1538)
2. Oxford English Dictionary
3. Wikipedia: Martlet; Arthur Charles Fox Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry, 244, 489-90 (2008)
4. Wikipedia: Martlet