When I was 16, my brother deployed to Afghanistan for the first time—and I became acutely aware of the ongoing conflict there. At the same time, I saw how little attention most Americans paid to the war. The next year, in 2004, Time magazine ran a cover story titled “Remember [...]
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85
Privacy and Mail
It’s a fairly common story. Mark writes an e-mail to Stephen about their weekend plans and, in a postscript, includes some choice comments—meant to be kept private—about their mutual friend Lisa. Stephen, not getting as far as the postscript, forwards the e-mail to his girlfriend and before long the e-mail [...]
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84
Advocating Science
My graduate school advisor, the late Stephen Schneider, liked to ask his students: “Is the scientist-advocate an oxymoron?” As he was fond of pointing out, the two professional value systems are often in conflict. The ideal scientist is a disinterested party with a neutral perspective, while the ideal advocate is [...]
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83
Stanford Prison Forum
A large part of what brought me to California was its prisons. As a lifelong East Coaster, I had a hard time fathoming the anomaly of Golden State incarceration. How could it be that such a progressive state clung to the harshest “three strikes” law in the nation? How could one state’s prison population rival the population of all the federal prisons combined?
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82
The Stanford Law Experience, Circa 2010
This year’s graduating class has taken to calling itself the “guinea pig” class. A joke, yes—but this group has lived through some of the most dramatic changes in legal education. From the law school’s switch to a pass/fail grading system to the expansion of the clinical program, the explosion of joint degree opportunities, the alignment of the law school’s calendar with the university’s, and the move to the quarter system—the Class of 2010 has been at the cutting edge …
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81
Soledad, Revisited
Ninety miles south of San Jose, California, beyond where U.S. 101 merges with El Camino Real and the highway narrows to four lanes, a billboard seeks to lure truck drivers and motorists off the road. It’s happening in Soledad.” It’s an odd sign, immediately belied by the vistas surrounding it: [...]