The University of California has been ordered by a California court to pay a $34 million judgment to former students, including me, whom the UC wronged when it unconscionably raised tuition in the middle of my first year of law school, and then again for each year thereafter.

Aggrieved students filed a class action lawsuit against the University, which the University lost in March 2006. Including the interest that accrued while the UC appealed, the judgment is now worth at least $40 million. This is a court-ordered judgment: the award is likely to be significantly more substantial than the free CD and a handshake that consumers typically get from a class action settlement.

According to the class action administrator, the plaintiffs consist of three subclasses:

1. Current and former University of California ("UC") students who enrolled in a UC professional degree program prior to December 16, 2002, and whose professional degree fees were raised after that date.
2. Students who attended any UC school on a semester system during the Spring 2003 semester, whose fees for that semester increased after they had already enrolled in classes and received bills for the semester.
3. Students who attended the Summer 2003 session at UC Berkeley or UCLA, whose fees for that summer session increased after they had already enrolled and received bills for the session.

If you qualify as a member of the class, notify the administrator immediately. They need current e-mail and postal addresses for all class members so that they can send you additional notices and, eventually, a check if you are entitled to one. If you have changed your name, please provide both names. Please provide any updated contact information as soon as you can and if possible by April 21, 2008, by sending an e-mail to ucfees@rustconsulting.com or mailing the information to Kashmiri v. Regents Class Action, P.O. Box 1931, Faribault MN 55021-7186.

The case is Kashmiri v. Regents of the University of California. A separate case, Luquetta v. Regents of the University of California, involves other potential breach of contract claims for the 2003-2004 school year.

Since returning to Washington, I've noticed students here frequently referring to their university professors as "doctor." This strikes me as strange, because at my school, the University of Rochester in New York, we always referred to our professors as "professor." I don't think I once heard the word "doctor" precede a teacher's name.

Somewhere along the way I have been taught that the more prestigious title ought to be used, and that since a PhD is typically a prerequisite to attaining the rank of professor, "professor" was the more prestigious title. My experience in law school doesn't seem to shed any light on the matter, because although all my professors were referred to as "professor," none of them had PhDs. (Law school professors frequently only have the same degree they award their students, a Juris Doctorate, which doesn't entitle them to be called "doctor" in common usage.)

So here are the questions for you to answer in comments:

1. What was the practice at your school?
2. What school did you attend?
3. If you are a professor, which do you prefer?

Testimony before the House Committee on Local Government
regarding Substitute House Bill 2797
Olympia, Washington
January 25, 2008

TVW Video: fast forward to 1:49:50.

-As Prepared-

Good afternoon. My name is Ryan Walters. I’m a special deputy prosecuting attorney for Skagit County and I’m here to speak on behalf of Skagit County to let you know that we need tools and assistance to help us prepare for the effects of climate change.

Skagit County has two major islands, miles and miles of coast and shoreline. We are concerned about sealevel rise. We have mountains, lakes, dams, and the third largest river system on the west coast of the United States. We are concerned about increased winter rainfall and flooding and decreased snowpack.

We have declining salmon populations. We have a declining agricultural base. We have had fights over water rights, even in one of the most undersubscribed rivers in the state. We are concerned that climate change will exacerbate all of these problems. That’s why Skagit County government is currently developing a plan to both do our part to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as an organization and to plan and prepare for those effects of climate change that are now already inevitable.

But how do we get there?

We need the state to help provide us with tools and assistance to implement plans and policies. We’d of course also appreciate appropriate funding, such as the grant program contained in the substitute bill, to help us plan for mitigation and adaptation and to hopefully demonstrate how local jurisdictions can successfully handle this challenge. It is simply beyond our capability to do this ourselves.

Communities that start planning for climate change now will serve their citizens well. Communities that start reducing their organizational greenhouse gas emissions will serve our planet well. We're asking for your help in doing both.

Whether writing a letter or composing a blog post, the following tips will make your prose look more professional:

1. One space after periods. Always.
2. Don't use ALL CAPS or small caps.
3. In a single document, use three or fewer fonts, including significant variations.
4. Keep line lengths short−60 to 72 characters per line.
5. Use “smart quotes” and em dashes. Avoid hyphens and primes except when required. In HTML, use proper entity codes.
6. Set leading, the vertical spacing between lines, to a multiplier of 1.2.
7. Use readable fonts. Ban Comic Sans.
8. Use hyphenation.
9. Left-align or full-justify your body paragraphs. Centered text is hard to read.
10. Replace underlines with italics, but use italics only when required by your style guide.

Why I did my undergrad in political science at the University of Rochester, in frozen northeast New York state:

Rochester Political Science Department Ranked Fourth in Nation

The University of Rochester's Political Science Department was recently ranked fourth in two national studies that measure the quality of graduate students produced by the program, based on their job placements and how often their research is cited.

Political Science Department chair Gerald Gamm noted that Harvard and Rochester were the only two universities ranked in the top five in both the study on job placements and in the study that ranked departments by the percentage of Ph.D.'s they produced who are among the most cited in the country.

"The University of Rochester political science department has been placing Ph.D.'s in the top departments since the 1970s," Gamm said. "The news here is the persistence of Rochester Political Science in training the best Ph.D. students in the country."

Read the whole press release or the department's history for details. Some noted Rochester political scientists:

• William H. Riker
• John Mueller (part 2; now at OHSU)

P.S. to alumni: I'll be at Meliora Weekend in October. Will you? Drop me a line.

In honor of today's worldwide Live Earth concerts, here's a video entitled, "A Beginner's Guide to Giving a Damn about Climate Change." Besides explaining the problem with cute woodland creatures, it also provides tips on what you can do -- although, as this Financial Times piece argues, buying locally-grown food probably doesn't reduce your carbon output much.

As published in the Anacortes American April 18, 2007: 

Robert Emerson’s April 4 letter opposing the Anacortes school bond, while breathtaking in the amount of ground it covers, has no relevance to Anacortes schools.

Emerson argues we should vote against the school bond because there is “liberal bias” at universities, unions are controlled by Democrats, and government monopolizes education. None of his grumblings address the undeniable need to repair Anacortes’s crumbling school buildings.

Emerson’s final complaint, that his property taxes increased 24 percent last year, reveals a common misunderstanding about how our property tax system works. While Emerson’s property value for 2007 did increase by nearly a quarter (to more than $1 million), his property tax increased only 8 percent, which is attributable to his property’s larger increase in value relative to others in the county.

Because bond amounts are capped, an increase in valuation does not necessarily mean an increase in taxes. To learn the facts about how bonds affect tax rates, please visit www.anacortesbond.com/bonds.aspx. Senior citizens can also find information there about how to obtain property tax exemptions and deferments.

Quality school buildings are critical to quality learning. Based on WASL results, Anacortes public schools are the best in Skagit County. But the one area in which Anacortes slips is the high school level — where the roof leaks, teachers don’t have dedicated classroom space, and the vocational wing is a mess. That’s why the high school is the principal target of the proposed bond.

Let’s make sure Anacortes kids have a quality environment in which to learn. Vote yes for Anacortes schools.

Ryan Walters
Anacortes

I mean, besides the same reason drivers crane their necks to catch a glimpse of a car accident.

Last week on his low-rated "Radio Factor" radio show, Bill O'Reilly verbally abused fellow Fox News personality Lis Wiehl, a law professor, over the U.S. attorneys scandal. This incident was the quintessential manifestation of all of O'Reilly's faults, and a fascinating example of how O'Reilly operates.

Listen to the clip at Crooks and Liars.

In the clip, O'Reilly and Wiehl are talking about the White House offer to allow Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to meet with a small group of senators in a closed session. O'Reilly calls Wiehl a liar when she correctly says the terms of the offer preclude testimony under oath or with a transcript. He then misunderstands Wiehl's recitation of the terms, "no oath or transcript," as "open transcript," a heretofore unknown term of art. (Go ahead, Google it; no such term existed before this incident.) He then goes on to define his newly-coined term, saying "open transcript means it gets to the New York Times," says that Wiehl was trying to mislead by slipping in the adjective "open," and repeatedly wrongly claims that Bush offered to allow a transcript.  He cuts Wiehl's mic, shouting at her that she has insulted and lied to his audience, and then screams "what can we do to her? what can we do to her?!"

While this is an extreme example, O'Reilly does this kind of thing all the time. He is routinely rude to his guests, cutting their mics, calling them names, and smearing their reputations. He yells nonsense. He enjoys inventing threats to the republic, like his supposed "War on Christmas." The man is seriously unhinged; he even demonstrates some serious sexual problems. He's also a pathological liar; you can't believe a word he says, and he sometimes doesn't even appear aware he's lying. Bill O'Reilly's willful ignorance of the truth, and that of others like him, are contributing to the worsening political debate in this country.

O'Reilly is horrible, but his fans enable him to continue by propping up his TV show's ratings. Although O'Reilly repeatedly decries organizations like Media Matters as "character assassins" and "vile smear merchants," those same fans apparently don't actually bother to visit the Media Matters website. There are enough examples there (some 672 as of this writing), all backed up with clips from his show and evidence refuting his assertions, to convince even the most die-hard conservative of O'Reilly's pathological inability to tell the truth. If only his fans could summon enough independent thought to spend just a moment checking into his claims.

By the way, this post isn't about the subpoening of White House officials; there's a legitimate case to be made for executive privilege, and also a valid argument that executive privilege should yield to Congress's oversight responsiblities where a violation of law, such as the f

Melissa Etheridge's Oscar-nominated song "I Need to Wake Up":

Fingers crossed for An Inconvenient Truth's two Oscar nominations.

"Awash in Trouble": read Bill Dietrich's excellent Seattle Times piece about Skagit County's inevitable flood disaster, including how it will be made worse by global climate change.

Here's the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that found to a 90% certainty that humans are causing a climate crisis.

As president-elect of the Anacortes High School Associated Student Body in 1997, I got involved in the last stages of the creation of Anacortes High School’s Activities Code. The code is intended to regulate student behavior outside of school by denying students participation in school-sponsored sports and activities.

Despite my efforts at the end of the process, the document, written by a citizen committee on a tight schedule and without the benefit of a legal draftsman, is confused, lengthy, and self-contradictory.

The code is a draftsman’s nightmare. For example:

• Section IV of the code requires student academic achievement to be monitored “weekly every five (5) weeks” (emphasis in the original).
• Nearly half the code is simply a paraphrase of Washington Interscholastic Activities Association regulations. Since they’re subject to change, WIAA regulations should be incorporated by reference.
• The code includes the cost of the ASB card, which has changed since the code was passed.
• The code suffers from several circular logical errors, meaning administrators must simply make up the rules when the code doesn’t provide clear answers.

The purpose of these kinds of regulations is to give students notice as to what types of behavior the school expects, and what discipline the students should expect if they fail to meet those standards. This code does neither. The problems with the code, and the resulting uneven and unprincipled enforcement, have led to more than a few challenges over the years. Eventually, Anacortes School District will end up in court over it if it's not changed.

For my final project in my law school's Advanced Legal Writing class, I rewrote the Activities Code. My version is less than a third of the length of the current code, easier to understand, more coherent, and more precise. While I've submitted it to the Anacortes School District administration as a free update to their decrepit version, I haven't heard that they've used it.

You can download a PDF of my revised Activities Code or a PDF of the old code.