Friday, May 05, 2023

Making the Grade Roundup

It's grading season at Lewis & Clark. I have the entire 1L day class this semester across two sections of Con Law I, so it's a bit of a bear. But I'm almost halfway done!

You get a roundup.

* * *

As a professor, I cannot fathom the hubris it takes to see one of your papers rejected from a journal -- the most normal possible experience for an academic -- and decide to parlay it into an entire New York Times column decrying "wokeness".

Florida is set to legalize kidnapping trans children from their families. But don't worry -- they'll only do it if the families love their kids and provide them with healthcare. Family courts in other states better start boning up on asylum law, because the phrase "well-founded fear of persecution" is going to become increasingly germane in cases where there's a possibility of the child being sent to Florida.

Local elections in the UK are seeing the Tories getting absolutely stomped. Over a thousand seats lost by the party, most of which are going to Labour and a healthy chunk of which are going to the LibDems and Greens. It's amazing what Labour can do when it isn't being led by a wildly unpopular antisemitic extremist!

Princeton under fire for hiring prominent BDS activist to a fellowship position. The twist? The activist is a member of the Israeli far-right. But the BDS thing is real -- he supported a divestment campaign against Ben Gurion University in retaliation for its allegedly "anti-Zionist" tilt.

The UAW has new leadership (I had half an eyeball on this, since I technically was a UAW member in my capacity as a UC-Berkeley graduate student instructor), and they're playing hardball against the Biden administration demanding compensation for how new electric vehicles may reduce the number of autoworker jobs.

No comments: