Sudeep's post below reminds me of a related quote from The Real Thing:

Henry: Buddy Holly was twenty-two (when his plane crashed). Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Happy Birthday to Mr. JS Bach, who turns 320 today.

Many happy returns.

Professor Solum is not the only person to have the good fortune to be relocating to Illinois for law school. Carina of an Inclination to Criticize will be starting law school at Chicago, after, apparently, much decision-making. Given that she is sending in her acceptance on something other than the last possible day, I can only presume that her decision-making process was healthier than mine. It is difficult to imagine a better choice.

Meanwhile, Chris Lawrence is going to Duke. Good. But what of his claim that this will make Duke (with four bloggers) "the most blogged political science department in the world"? At Chicago, I count polisci Professor Dan Drezner, and political science grad students Victor Muniz-Fraticelli, Andrew Dilts, and Deva who shares a co-blog with them at Political Arguments. That makes four bloggers and four blogs already, for a tie, and that's not counting any other members of Political Arguments who may also be UC Poli Sci grad students, blogger extraordinaire Jacob Levy (who is on blog-sabbatical), and Cass Sunstein, who guest-blogged with Jack Balkin and Eugene Volokh, and also blogs at The Constitution in 2020. Most-blogged, indeed!

UPDATE: Not to mention Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell's Blog (these U of C Prof blogs proliferate too fast for me to keep track!) and graduate student Jay Cost's.

According to the Tournament Directors Association Rule 35, players can't talk about their hands during play. Poker is supposed to be a knock-down drag-out battle to the bitter end, but apparently in tournaments players can't say (truthfully or not), "you better not call me, because I have two aces," or even flip their aces over and show their opponents what they're holding. This is basically a limit on one dimension of psychological competition between players and I don't understand why it persists. After all, it's certainly more fun for viewers (either live or at home) to watch their players take their bluffing to the next level. Sure, it'd be unnerving for players, but, hell, it's poker, not a tea party. Further, apparently players can talk about their cards during cash games -- just not tournaments -- so how terrible a practice can it be?

My first inclination whenever I see a random rule enforced by a self-regulating group is to assume that the rule is anticompetitive. In this case, perhaps, the No Talk rule favors experienced players. If I say, "I have a straight flush, don't call me," then I can watch how other players react. Of course, experienced players pick up on more subtle cues and perhaps don't have the same need for emotion-evoking comments. But for inexperienced players, this might be valuable. The end result then is that the rule favors experienced players over inexperienced ones, so perhaps it's no surprise that professional poker players adhere to the rule in tournaments where they can't choose with whom they play. Meanwhile, in cash games, where a poker pro can just get up and walk away from an annoying amateur, there's no need for the protective rule.

Two additional theories have been suggested: First, Will suggests that since the no-talk rule is anti-collaborative it makes it more difficult to team up against an outsider. However, because professionals can take the time to develop a complex system of cues (as was the case on the series premier of the ESPN drama "Tilt"), this rule gives collaborating professionals a leg up against amateurs who would otherwise collaborate. This rationale also conveniently explains the tournament / cash game divide. In a cash game any player can pick up and leave at any time, making it hard to gang up effectively. Similarly, in a tournament, players are assigned randomly to tables, making it harder to collaborate. (And because tournament players can't switch tables, the risk of being trapped is higher.)

A friend recently reminded me that experienced poker players know that there are already situations where players collaborate. For example, if one player is all-in and there are three players remaining, the players should know (although some amateurs do not) that the correct poker play in a tournament is to check through to the end of the round - not to bet at all. Why? Because the whole point of a tournament is to finish as high in the money as possible. The way to do this is to eliminate other players. At three players against one, the all in player is more likely to lose than if the remaining three players continue betting and raising against each other -- if they bet, and some of them drop out, it is less likely that the all in player will be eliminated. Thus, the rules of proper play build in this collusive and anti-competitive rule.

A second interesting theory: Assume one player starts with pocket aces (Ace / Ace). Against any single starting hand their likelihood of winning (before the flop) is about 85%. But against all five of their opponent's hands, the likelihood of winning is significantly less. The problem then is this: the player with pocket aces can flip his cards over and show everyone at the table what he has. Each individual player will know that their chances of winning are only 15%, even though the likelihood that the pocket aces player would have won against the entire table is less. Thus, the rule, in this sense at least, encourages competition.

So there are some theories. I'm curious if anyone else can think of a better rationale.

Stuart Buck comments on this post by Ann Althouse and comes out against internet access in law school classrooms. I disagree, but before explaining why I should probably make the relevant disclosures: As all too many of my classmates (and readers) are aware, I do indeed use the internet (and even blog) during class. I don't happen to use wireless, since my wireless card doesn't work very well and the wired connection seems faster, but presumably Mr. Buck objects just the same to both internet connections. That said, I think there are lots of benefits to using the net in class.

1: Research. At least here, class discussions can be pretty rapid-fire and can stray to areas that one didn't think to research before class started. When the class is suddenly quizzed about whether there are, say, state constitutional provisions or municipal regulations that bear on a given topic a student can actually look rather than waste everybody's time by guessing.

2: Fact-checking. Like it or not, law school professors and students sometimes say things that are untrue, or mischaracterize the facts of cases, or get dates wrong, etc. Sometimes this is for dramatic effect, sometimes unintentional, but I think it is good for students to be able to point out if somebody, professor or student, is making claims about the world that are not in fact true, and ready access to Lexis can go a long way towards this.

3: Paper saving. Many of our class-materials are available only online-- sometimes in printer-friendly or easily-saved formats, but sometimes not. Given that school printing runs 5-10 cents a page and many students lack printers of their own, many of them log online to actually look at the cases, zoning maps, slide shows, newspaper articles, &c. that the professor has assigned for the day. This benefit may be small compared to the others, but shouldn't be ignored.

4: Passing notes. This, I think, is the most important benefit of the internet in class, and it is a huge one. Law school classes are often large, and even when they are not large, nobody gets a chance to talk as much as they would like to, to ask and to press all of the questions they think are crucial as deeply as they think they deserve to be pressed, &c. Many students here Instant-Message and email during class, and this helps alleviate this problem in two ways. First, because students can continue to press the points they think are important amongst themselves after the professor has dismissed them or moved on, and can talk among themselves about whether the professor's treatment was adequante or in-. Second, and more importantly, students can pre-screen their questions amongst one another before taking up the scarcest resource-- speaking time in class-- and thus avoid A: dragging down more interesting discussions and B: using up a chance to speak that day and making themselves less likely to be called on again later. (I am a careful rationer of my commenting time in class; if I were not I would spend myself in the first fifteen minutes of many classes and be reduced to throwing things in frustration by the end). This could be done instead by whispering among each other or passing notes-- I did that a lot, especially in my math classes-- but both of those are far more distracting (and slower, and less effective) than a few flashing windows on the sea of laptop screens.

Do students use the internet to amuse and distract themselves too? Absolutely. Do students use the instant-messaging to goof off? Yup. I do both. But I think the benefits here outweight the costs, and the costs of distraction and goofing off are mostly internal. The occasional ADD student aside, it hurts nobody but me if I spend two hours blogging about Pablo Neruda rather than listening to a professor rehash the Coase Theorem for the ninth time, or to Professor Schuck's discussion about organ donation. If free wireless access means that during class some students trade graphic sexual fantasies about the professor or play chess with one another (they do) while Mr. Sachs and I wrestle with the primacy of content-neutrality, the first-amendment status of lies, the administrative gains of a flat-tax, the fine/tax distinction in federal income tax and the relevance of federalism concerns, &c. (we do), I think the benefits of the on-topic chatter outweigh the costs of the messing around.

One final word on distraction: Even if one thinks that the law school should not let students email one another about class, pull up unexpected cases, statutes and regs from lexis, or correct their betters on questions of fact, students can distract themself just fine without the internet. First, there are Solitaire, Spider, Freecell, Minesweeper and many more. Second, even if one banned laptops, students can read novels during class (I did regularly), play chess by passing a small magnetic board back and forth (did that too), pass notes, daydream while staring out the Eckhart windows, doodle, and so on.

Mr. Buck's attitude seems to be that since the benefits of internet use are very small the school should not subsidize distraction. I think the proper analysis is the reverse-- the marginal increase in distraction is uncertain, and in any case the costs of not-paying attention are personal rather than external. Meanwhile, the internet provides great rewards to some who use it well, which I think swamp the horrors of students' reading reading blogs during class.

[N.B. This post was not actually written during class, but during a spare hour in the library.]

Bob Mann has an op-ed in today's New York Times discussing Karen Hughes 's (nominee to be an undersecretary of state) performance and grade in a class he taught at Southern Methodist University in 1976. On its face, this (or Mann's habit of keeping these grades in his garage and printing them later in newspapers) looks to me like it may conflict with the Familyl Educational Rights and Privacy Act (1974). Perhaps not, but still the notion of one's professors hoarding one's grades and releasing them to the public thirty years later seems vaguely troubling to me.

Speaking of Lawrence Solum, it appears that he will be moving from San Diego to Illinois, much closer to my old stomping grounds. Congrats.

I had thought that upon returning to New Haven I would do nothing but finish up my Land Use and Criminal Procedure reading, as well as sleep my way out of jet lag. I accomplished the latter, but have had trouble getting to the former because I have been distracted-- not by reading blogs, though, but by reading (or re-reading) books and articles I didn't take on the trip with me: Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Blackburn's attack on Rationalists (PDF) (via Will Wilkinson), the Kelo arguments (PDF), &c. And now I see new distractions from Lawrence Solum: A Michelman book about Brennan and an article by Jeremy Waldron against judicial review (not to mention some Rubenfeld article at 53 Stan. L. Rev. 767). In Ethics last spring I grew rather upset with an article by Waldron about universal moral claims, but hopefully this one will not contain any silly slurs against pickles.

Jacob Levy discusses the appeal of Spiderman and evolution of Superman in Professor Drezner's comments.

[Levywatch]