Dean's Bookshelf Times Two

On the job roughly three months and already two recent contributions to the Dean's Bookshelf, which arrived in time for me to take them to Berlin (more on that later) both come from repeat players.

Leslie Levin, who has clearly caught the international bug so widespread within Hosmer Hall, used her time last fall at the Univesity of Queensland as the basis for her recently published Building a Better Lawyer Discipline System: The Queensland Experience, which appears in Volume 9 of  Legal Ethics  pp. 187-210 (Winter 2006). Imagine the joy of traveling half way around the world to discover that an idea you have already put forward as a positve step in your home country (see Leslie Levin, The Case for Less Secrecy in Lawyer Discipline, 20 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 1 (2007) (strongly suggesting that consumer interests ought to play a greater role in considering appropriate techniques of lawyer discipline)  has actually taken root overseas in a series of concrete reforms.  In this article, based on many intereviews she conducted with participants in the system, Leslie assesses the pros and cons of recent changes in the system of lawyer discipline adopted in Queensland.  She describes the creation of a new entity, headed symbolically by a non-lawyer, and the experiences of this new group in replacing the longstanding method of lawyer discipline that relied more heavily on self-regulation within the profession.   Her profitable analysis of these recent reforms offers both suggestions for how Queensland might do still better (for example in handling claims that involve neglect as opposed to malfeasance) but also provides needed reflection on how reforms tried Down Under might serve as a useful for experimentation here at home.  Bravo Leslie.

Mark Janis, whose dream of shipping each and every faculty colleague overseas draws ever closer to reality (again more on Berlin later), has lent his considerable Princeton expertise to Dartmouth (isn't this a bit like Macy's telling Gimbels?).    The Princeton part comes in that Mark has written an insightful essay concerning the intellectual trajectory of Woodrow Wilson.  Our only President who also served at Tiger-in-Chief has long been associated with a passionate faith in international law and with using international institutions to further American ideals such as Democracy and the Rule-of-Law. [An approach whose vaunted titled of Wilsonian has, perhaps, been somewhat tarnished by the recent embrace of the neo-cons].  Yet as any historian will tell you, things we think we know often turn out not to be true when you actually look them up.  So, as you'd expect from our scholarly colleague, Mark decided to check the record. And what he discovered is that most of Wilson's early writings show no real commitment to international law, and that Wilson's attitude toward international law was skeptical if not dismissive during his early career.  Mark also notes how Wilson was significantly less involved in the American Society for International Law (ASIL) than other leading diplomats of the day.  In short, in a brief but important essay, Mark demonstrates that Wilson's passion for international institutions was acquired rather late in his life, a passion Mark hints may have grown out of Wilson's own feelings of responsibility for the United States role in WWI.    Only at the end of his career, did Wilson truly deserve the label we now call Wilsonian.   All this Princeton learning arrives not in orange and black, but instead with a lovely green cover gracing Volume 5 (Winter 2007)  of the Dartmouth Law Journal.  Mark's essay appears at pp. 1-14 there as the John Sloan Dickey Essay on International Law with the great  title  How Wilsonian was Woodrow Wilson?  Congratulations Mark.


Jeremy Paul