Lone Star Coffee Bar

Friday Five

On time.

1. What was your most memorable moment from the last week? Getting sued by an adjacent landowner. No biggie, just an annoyance, but definitely the most memorable moment.

2. What one person touched your life this week? My son Jake (6), who agreed (willingly) to forego presents at his seventh birthday party next week and have the guests bring food items for "birthday party" kits for distribution at local food pantries instead.

3. How have you helped someone this week? By keeping a secret.

4. What one thing do you need to get done by this time next week? Write an article for our church newsletter.

5. What one thing will you do over the next seven days to make your world a better place? Pray.

War Phrases

OK, the war is less than one hour old and I'm already overdosing on the phrases "shock & awe" and "surgical strike".

So, here we are. Funny, I don't feel the same sense of dread I felt when the Gulf War started. Probably because I'm at such a different stage of my life. Twelve years ago, dh and I were just starting grad school, had just gotten married and were living on the edge. I feared war more because our life was so precarious - partially educated, in debt, childless, rootless. Now, I'm settled. I have my children, I have a home, our education is complete. Not that I'm any more or less protected (although I live in a much safer area in terms of getting attacked), but somehow the different stage of life makes me less antsy. Maturity, perspective, call it what you will, it's a strange feeling.

Friday Five

On Wednesday, that's a new day for them.

1. Do you like talking on the phone? Why or why not? Sometimes I love it. Talking to a friend, my mom, my kids or sweetie when I'm away. Hearing dh's voice on the other end. Other times, I'd rather not. I rarely make phone calls. I mostly receive them.

2. Who is the last person you talked to on the phone? My friend Lucy.

3. About how many telephones do you have at home? Right now just two and it's driving us nuts. We're living in a long ranch house built in the 60s that only has two working phone jacks at opposite ends of the house. We're moving as soon as renovations are done on our other house so we aren't going to put more jacks in this place. Normally, we're a phone in every room kind of family.

4. Have you encountered anyone who has really bad phone manners? What happened? My definition of bad phone manners is calling again and again and again. If I'm not returning your call, it's nothing personal. I will get to it. Be patient. Otherwise, having practiced personal injury law straight out of law school, no one can be ruder than some of the plaintiff's lawyers and their staff that I had to deal with (and some defense counsel, too, for the record).

5. Would you rather pick up the phone and call someone or write them an e-mail or a letter? Why or why not? E-mail. I rarely make phone calls. I think my parents were a little zealous when I was younger about not bothering people with phone calls. My mom's motto: If someone wants to talk to you, they'll call you. Now, she was trying to curb teenage phone abuse, but it's so ingrained in me that I seriously have a hard time calling even my closest friends and family without fear I'm bothering them. And I'm 37 years old for pete's sake! It's a career limiting trait as a lawyer.

Unilateral?

Apparently, unilateral means "not unanimous"; or, "absent support from certain countries" because it seems to me we have quite a few on our side:

Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan (post conflict), Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan.

Plus, the 15 that are backing us "privately" according to Colin Powell.

What Would Jesus Do?

As a follower of Christ, I wrestle with the morality of war. God clearly used force in the Old Testament to punish evil. With the sacrifice of Christ, however, the just war doctrine gets a little cloudy in my mind. I have not thought this through as I should, but this gentleman has and his thoughts are worth reading. My prayers now are for justice, however God chooses to achieve it.

My idol ...

Missy Schwartz (a/k/a "Listen Missy"), one of my blogging idols, wrote me a comment. I'm verklempt. I live vicariously through her. Go, read her blog.

Good Advice

Warning: Boring legal stuff ahead. From The Volokh Conspiracy - How to Title a Legal Article (which is much harder than it sounds). This is another good reason to blog. I want to save this information, but not take up valuable space with a hard copy. Voila! I have the info when I need it.

A title should do three things. Most importantly, the title should persuade people to read the article. When busy people do a WESTLAW or LEXIS search that yields fifty items, how do they choose what to read? They look at the authors' names and at the titles. If the title looks helpful -- not necessarily exciting, but helpful -- they'll read further. The title is your opportunity to get people to devote time to at least reading the Introduction.
     Second, the title can frame people's thinking once they start reading your piece. If a title focuses the reader on a concept, the reader is more likely to keep that concept in mind.
     Third, the title can help readers remember your article. Remember, though, that a memorable title is of little use to you if it wasn't attractive enough to get people to read the piece in the first place.
     So how should you choose your title? Let me suggest the following approach.
     1. Start with a descriptive title, which summarizes the general question that your article is answering (though not necessarily your specific answer). If a person's query comes up with an article called "Freedom of Speech and Workplace Harassment," the person will have a good sense of the article's substance. Naturally, the title can capture only a small part of your point, but it can capture enough to give readers some idea of whether the article is relevant to their interests. Purely descriptive titles might not be that memorable, and might not much help frame readers' thinking, but they're good at getting people to read the piece.
     Of course, it's not enough that your title be comprehensible to you; make it comprehensible to your readers. I named one of my articles "Test Suites," but late in the publication process realized that few readers would know what that means. Renaming the piece "Test Suites: A Tool for Improving Student Articles" made the purpose and value of the article clearer (though I think the title could have been made better still).
     It's acceptable for an article to have a subtitle as well as a title. This can let you communicate two ideas, one general and one more specific. For instance, "Freedom of Speech and Information Privacy: The Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop Others from Speaking About You" conveys both a general point (the article is about the First Amendment problems with information privacy laws) and a specific one (the problems arise because "information privacy" really refers to a right to stop others from speaking about you). The title may be too long, but it takes advantage of its length. Likewise, "Academic Legal Writing: Student Notes, Law Review Articles, and Seminar Papers" gives people a short summary (the book is about academic legal writing) but also tells them that it's useful for three different purposes.
     2. If your article focuses on a particular concept -- and especially if it pioneers the concept -- include the concept in your title. Say you're writing an article about laws requiring passersby to help strangers whom they see to be in peril. Your main thesis is that these laws might have the perverse effect of discouraging some people from cooperating with the police; but you also think this broader idea of anticooperative effects of law deserves more attention.
     "Duties to Rescue and Anticooperative Effects of Law" may be a good title: It tells potential readers that your article is both about duties to rescue and about the general problem of law discouraging cooperation with the authorities; it focuses readers' attention on the concept of "anticooperative effects"; and it gives them a phrase that they can remember the article by. My colleague Ken Karst, for instance, pioneered the term "The Freedom of Intimate Association" in a Yale Law Journal article with that title, and now the phrase is a well-established part of constitutional jurisprudence.
     3. If you have a witty play on words that you'd like to include in the title, now is the time to consider it. I try to avoid such titles in my own work, but a little wit can make the article seem more appealing, can put the reader in a good mood, and can help the reader remember the article later. I still remember an article title I saw in the early 1990s, "One Hundred Years of Privacy" -- this both communicated the article's essence (a look back on the privacy tort a century after Warren and Brandeis first proposed it), and alluded to the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
     But be careful! First, amateur comedians notoriously overestimate how funny their jokes are. Second, with some topics (abortion, the death penalty, and the like), some readers will find any humor to be jarring. Third, even an amusing gag distracts the reader from your main point. To be effective, the joke must be interesting and memorable enough that its value overcomes the distraction. So read the title over on several occasions to make sure that the gag really works, and ask friends whether they agree. If you're in doubt, err on the side of having a purely substantive title.
     4. Edit the title even more carefully than you edit the rest of your work. Clarity, proper word choice, and liveliness are especially important in a title, both to make people more interested in reading the piece, and to set the right tone for their reading -- if the title sounds clunky or abstract, people will expect the rest of the article to be the same. Thus, for instance, "Considering the Advantages and Disadvantages of Prohibitions on Concealable Firearms" isn't as good as "The Costs and Benefits of Handgun Prohibition." The "considering the" is surplus; "costs and benefits" is shorter and simpler-sounding than "advantages and disadvantages"; and "handgun prohibition" cuts out an unnecessary prepositional phrase, and recasts the abstract "concealable firearms" as the concrete "handguns."
     5. Generally, avoid case names. Just as the article should usually be about a topic and not just a particular case (see Part I.A.7.b, p. [cross-reference to I.A.7.b]), so should the title. First, the case name might not be familiar to some readers, unless the case is very famous; a reader might be interested in the general subject, but might not connect the case to the subject. Second, stressing a particular case makes your claim seem narrower and less useful.
     Sometimes, a case may be so important and controversial that many readers will want to read articles about it -- referring to the case name will then draw more readers than it will repel. But generally speaking, titles should be about concepts, not cases.
     6. Generally, avoid jargon, little-known legal terms, and statutory citations. Readers may also be put off by titles with little-known legal terms, statutory citations (unless they're extremely well-known, such as "Title VII" or "42 U.S.C. § 1983"), and jargon, whether it's drawn from economics, literary criticism, feminist studies, libertarian philosophy, or what have you. Many readers will be interested in the general topic, but not fully understand the terms; and when the query gives them those fifty titles, they'll choose the ones they understand rather than the ones they don't. Again, there may be exceptions, for instance if the substance of your article will only appeal to those people who know the jargon -- then, the technical terms may attract exactly those readers that you want. But usually, stick with plain English.
     7. That other articles have silly or mystifying titles doesn't mean your should, too. Well-known authors can get away with less descriptive titles, since people will read their pieces because of the author's name, not the article's name. You don't have that luxury.
     So here's an example. You decide to write an article about whether compulsory licenses in copyrighted musical compositions make sense, using Allman v. Capricorn Records, a recent court of appeals case, as a launching-off point. Don't start with "Compulsion or Anti-Monopoly?" or "Licensing Fair and Foul," or, heaven forbid, "Copyright and § 115: Is Capricorn a Sign of the Times?"
     Rather, (1) start with a descriptive title: "Copyright and Compulsory Licenses," or "Compulsory Licenses in Copyrighted Musical Compositions," or "Compulsory Licenses in Copyrighted Musical Compositions: Keep Them, Expand Them, or Reject Them?" These aren't exciting, but people who see the title will know whether the piece is likely to help them.
     Then, (2) see if there are any other basic concepts around which your article is oriented. For instance, if you argue that compulsory licenses make copyright a form of "intellectual quasi-property," rather than true property, mention that concept in the title: "Compulsory Licenses in Copyrighted Musical Compositions: Intellectual Quasi-Property as a Remedy for Transaction Costs." This is especially so if you're trying to pioneer the concept of "intellectual quasi-property."
     If you do want to rework the title to (3) include some pun or witticism, now is the time to do it. This way, you have the descriptive title in front of you, and can compare it to the amusing alternative. If the amusing version is clearly better, go with it. But if it's not better -- and it probably won't be better -- then stick with the purely substantive title.
     Now (4) see if you can make your title shorter, clearer, and more forceful. Does the subtitle really add enough value to the title? Do you really need the word "Compositions," or will it be clear enough (and less technical-sounding) without it? Do you really need the word "Copyrighted," or will that be obvious, since virtually all musical compositions are protected by copyright? (I think "uncopyrighted" is probably helpful, because it makes it clearer to the casual reader that the article is about copyright law.) Can you make the title sound more active, perhaps "Compulsory Licenses in Copyrighted Music: Fighting Transaction Costs Through Intellectual Quasi-Property"? I'm not sure what the best title would be, but I am sure that you should spend some time editing it.
     You don't have (5) any case names here, and you probably don't need them. "Transaction costs" is a bit of (6) economics jargon, but it's so well-known that it's probably worth keeping, especially since there's no really good synonym. You don't have any technical legal terms or statutory cites, which is good: If your title had been "17 U.S.C. § 115: Fighting Transaction Costs Through Intellectual Quasi-Property," you should have changed it to our working title ("Compulsory Licenses . . .") -- many readers, even ones who are tolerably familiar with copyright law, might not be sure what § 115 covers.
     So you now have a pretty good title. It's not very exciting, but it should get the job done. Someone who is interested in information on compulsory licenses and who comes across a piece labeled "Compulsory Licenses in Copyrighted Music: Fighting Transaction Costs Through Intellectual Quasi-Property" will probably think it's worth looking at -- and that's the title's main function.

I'm So Busted. . . .

You are most like:



Republican - You believe that the free market will
take care of most things, but that the
government should be there with moderate
taxation to provide for national defense and
enforcing morality. Your historical role model
is Ronald Reagan.

Well yeah.


Which political sterotype are you?
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Via Instapundit

Amen

From Lileks:

We?ve been sitting at the top of the rollercoaster for about five months now. Today I saw a NEWS ALERT that suggested there might be another UN resolution that would extend inspections another three weeks, and I nearly shed my skin. No, please no. I cannot take another three weeks of UN maneuverings, another three weeks of haughty diplomats lecturing down to the rest of us, another three weeks of pretending Cameroon matters, another three weeks of ignoring the fact that Mexico - Mexico! - is holding out. And incidentally, isn?t that instructive? I don?t think Mexico is peeved that we haven?t signed Kyoto or the ICC, and I don?t think the Mexican population is ready to take to the streets to protest the withdrawal from the ABM treaty. I was under the impression that Bush and Fox had a warm relationship. Apparently not. Fine. Mine the borders.