Five years of Blawg Review

Blawg Review #259

Five years of Blawg Review. What started as a "blog carnival" for everyone interested in law has grown into a community that comes together every week to review recent legal news, opinions, and commentary from an increasing number of remarkable law blogs. We owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who has participated in Blawg Review and helped to build this community over the past five years. Lookin' forward to the next five.

Colin Samuels, who received Blawg Review of the Year honors in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, has put some serious thought into what's going on here.

Where once we were isolated legal students, practitioners, and academics who could share our thoughts only with those in proximity, blogging and social media have turned us all into a kind of "other memory" for one another. The knowledge, experience, and insight we are able to access here, within our ever-expanding networks of colleagues and friends, colleagues-of-colleagues, friends-of-friends, is nothing short of amazing. By participating, we are able to give and receive and grow beyond ourselves while allowing others to grow as well. Thanks to our tools, these memories need not fade or become inaccessible, but we should always keep in mind that tools do not create — we do.

If that sounds a bit esoteric to the "trench lawyers" among us, perhaps some might prefer to think of this as Continuing Legal Education. For this week's syllabus, questions were selected from the blawgosphere. Click on the link for each question to learn more, and join in discussions in the comments on the blogs.

• If you haven't thought about criminal law since you were required to take it in law school, what can you expect to encounter when a client calls you in the middle of the night about a criminal matter? What questions do you ask? How do you counsel your client? What should you do -- or not do?

• Is an April Fools' joke an ethical violation?

• Fake News Is No News: Is "Unpublishing" the New "Retraction"?

• When courts no longer consider e-mail to be private, what is left?

• How can trial lawyers improve oral argument?

• Are some law firms going to be blind-sided by new players, with an unprecedented combination of size and speed, who are charging onto the playing field like a storm and rewriting the rules of the game as they come?

• What can border officials do with your laptop and cellular phone?

• How can you tell whether that guy down at courthouse is a practicing attorney or just someone who wears pinstripes well?

• What happens when a military lawyer is "morally opposed" to the treatment of a detainee he's assigned to prosecute?

• Is it legal for the U.S. government to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen overseas who is alleged to be a member of al-Qaeda?

• Do virtual law firms violate ethics laws?

• How generic is your cupcakery?

• Should referral fees be banned from the legal system?

• What is "contempt of cop" and what does it take to get a lawyer arrested?

• In the criminal law, what is really meant by "presumption of innocence" and does it vary from county to county?

• Isn't there actually a "presumption of guilt" once charged?

• What does the Star Wars brand have to lose by giving a legal blogger a media pass?

• If the Berkeley crowd gathered to mark the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne were to sing "Happy Birthday to You" and post the video of the performance on YouTube, would they have to pay a license fee?

• One increasingly common question being asked in the aftermath of the financial crisis is, “Where were the lawyers?" The popular press has also asked “Where were the economists?” At some point, perhaps we’ll even see the question posed: “Where were the law professors?”

• How does a constitutional scholar commemorate Confederate History Month?

• Is Justice Stevens the last common law justice?

• Will a new "Kennedy Court" emerge after the retirement of Justice Stevens?

• How do you get a law blog into the Library of Congress?

We're not saying it's sure to get your blog permanently recorded as part of legal history, but it might help if you host Blawg Review. Several law blogs that have hosted Blawg Review over the past five years are now permanently archived by the Library of Congress. Just sayin'.

If you're interested in hosting Blawg Review, just let us know and we'll be happy to find an available date that's perfect for your interests.

Blawg Review of the Year 2009 at Cyberlaw Central shows the community of law bloggers helping Blawg Review host Kevin Thompson put together a photographic presentation on Towel Day. Now, doesn't that sound like fun?

Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

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Posted by Ed Post on April 12, 2010 at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

FUENTE:
Saludos,

 

RODRIGO  GONZALEZ  FERNANDEZ
DIPLOMADO EN RSE DE LA ONU
DIPLOMADO EN GESTION DEL CONOCIMIMIENTO DE ONU
Renato Sánchez 3586, of 10 teléfono: 56-2451113
Celular: 93934521
WWW.CONSULTAJURIDICA.BLOGSPOT.COM
SANTIAGO-CHILE
Solicite nuestros cursos y asesoría en Responsabilidad social empresarial-Lobby corporativo-Energías renovables. Calentamiento Global- Gestión del conocimiento-Liderazgo,Energias Renovables.(Para OTEC, Universidades, Organizaciones )

Rodrigo te envió un mensaje privado

Si no deseas recibir avisos de correo electrónico en el futuro, haz clic aquí   Me gustaría ser tu amigo(a) en Quepasa.com. ¿Te gustaría agregarme como tu amigo? Si No Gracias. rodrigo gonzalez fernandez Si no deseas recibir más notificaciones de tus amigos de Quepasa.com, haz clic aquí. Cambiar preferencias de correo / Recuperar contraseña / Términos de Uso / Políticas de Privacidad / Soporte Quepasa Corporation 224 Datura Street, Suite 1100, West Palm Beach, FL, 33401. Recibes este mensaje porque tu amigo(a) es miembro de Quepasa. Agrega info@quepasa.com a tu lista de contactos para que siempre recibas correos de Quepasa.

Focus

 Focus

UNESCO / C.Roux

UNESCO World Anti-Piracy Observatory

The World Book and Copyright Day, on 23 April, is the occasion to highlight the importance of the fight against piracy to preserve creativity. The World Anti-Piracy Observatory (WAPO), launched in January 2010, is an innovative web-based reference tool that provides detailed information on national anti-piracy measures and policies. In addition, WAPO contains useful information on best practices, capacity-building, awareness-raising, and news pertaining to anti-piracy activities worldwide.

• The World Anti-Piracy Observatory Website: Online platform for a global exchange of information
• The World Anti-Piracy Observatory Newscorner: Worldwide news and events
• Collection of National Copyright Laws: Access to national legislations of UNESCO's Member States
• The ABC of Copyright (pdf):  An overall view of copyright essentials
• 10 Music Contracts (pdf):
  Tools for artists and professionals in the music sector

FUENTE:
Saludos,

 

RODRIGO  GONZALEZ  FERNANDEZ
DIPLOMADO EN RSE DE LA ONU
DIPLOMADO EN GESTION DEL CONOCIMIMIENTO DE ONU
Renato Sánchez 3586, of 10 teléfono: 56-2451113
Celular: 93934521
WWW.CONSULTAJURIDICA.BLOGSPOT.COM
SANTIAGO-CHILE
Solicite nuestros cursos y asesoría en Responsabilidad social empresarial-Lobby corporativo-Energías renovables. Calentamiento Global- Gestión del conocimiento-Liderazgo,Energias Renovables.(Para OTEC, Universidades, Organizaciones )

The Big Idea: Leadership in the Age of Transparency

The Big Idea: Leadership in the Age of Transparency

by Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby

Companies have long prospered by ignoring what economists call "externalities." Now they must learn to embrace them.

 Read the HBR In Brief

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Rarely do before-and-after business cases present such a neat study in contrasts. Compare the recent actions of the key players in the food industry with those of the tobacco industry two decades earlier.

In the 1980s, executives at Philip Morris were still fighting energetically to hold back the tide of evidence that cigarettes cause lung cancer, and claiming that customers were exercising free will in choosing to smoke. A 1993 Washington Post article titled "Scientists Testify Tobacco Company Suppressed Addiction Studies" tells the tale: Damning company-sponsored research had been spiked a decade before by senior executives.

Fast-forward to the turn of the millennium and you see a very different kind of behavior in the packaged food and restaurant industries. As the dangers of trans fats came to light, managers in the most powerful firms took the health implications to heart and responded quickly, before the issue became a cause célèbre, by changing recipes, funding public education campaigns, and pushing reduced-fat products. By 2005, a trade publication was already announcing "Kraft completes trans fat reformulation," and every one of the company's competitors was following suit. Given that the first U.S. state law outlawing trans fats in restaurants went into effect only this year, these were voluntary changes taken well in advance of legal or regulatory compulsion—or even public anger.

What transpired over those 20 years to drive such divergent managerial responses? Something very big, actually: As the impacts of business on the environment, on society, and on individuals became too substantial to ignore in many realms, and cheaper and easier ways to measure those impacts were devised, the rules of doing business shifted. Considerations that hadn't previously complicated the plans of corporate leaders started getting factored in. In other words, it was no longer possible to ignore externalities.

Externalities is the term economists use when they talk about the side effects—or in the positive case, the spillover effects—of a business's operations. They're the impacts that a business has on its broader milieu, either directly or indirectly, but is not obliged to pay for or otherwise take into account in its decision making. The classic example is pollution: A smokestack in Akron may send particulates into the air that descend on farmlands downwind, but in the absence of any measurement of those, the factory isn't charged for ensuing crop damage. Those effects are out of scope, and the company is off the hook. How a consumer disposes of your product at the end of its useful life is another form of externality, and so is the noise of your factory whistle.

The concept of externalities goes beyond impacts on the physical environment. Say your menu-driven phone system keeps callers on the line a bit longer and eats up their minutes, or your subcontractor decides to cut costs by using undocumented workers, or property values near your facilities start to slide: Those are impacts for which you will likely not be called to account.

 Taking Time

When Kraft, Nabisco, and Nestlé decided to reformulate their recipes, and national restaurant chains such as Wendy's and Burger King switched to less artery-choking fats in their fry-o-laters, they were choosing to internalize an externality. They were taking ownership of an issue that they could, by law, have continued to say was not their problem. Yes, they did so under some activist pressure, and yes, they could still do more. But unlike tobacco companies in the 1980s, the food companies didn't wait for regulation or lawsuits. They acted. That's a big change, and what's behind it isn't as simple as good public relations. There's something more nuanced, and at the same time more hardheaded, going on.

In this article, we'll explore the forces behind what we see as a coming sea change in corporate leadership. We'll make the case that the true measure of corporate responsibility—and the key to a business's playing its proper role in society—is the willing, constant internalization of externalities. Today, business leaders are bombarded with messages through many channels that they owe more to society, and many think so themselves. But often the result is an incoherent mishmash of charitable giving, CSR programs, and "going green" initiatives. Here, we present a far more disciplined way to respond to the challenge.

Copyright © 2010 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Written By

Christopher Meyer is the founder of Monitor Talent. He is the coauthor of three books with Stan Davis, including It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business (Crown Business, 2003).

 

Julia Kirby is an editor at large at Harvard Business Review Group.

 

FUENTE:
Saludos,

 

RODRIGO  GONZALEZ  FERNANDEZ
DIPLOMADO EN RSE DE LA ONU
DIPLOMADO EN GESTION DEL CONOCIMIMIENTO DE ONU
Renato Sánchez 3586, of 10 teléfono: 56-2451113
Celular: 93934521
WWW.CONSULTAJURIDICA.BLOGSPOT.COM
SANTIAGO-CHILE
Solicite nuestros cursos y asesoría en Responsabilidad social empresarial-Lobby corporativo-Energías renovables. Calentamiento Global- Gestión del conocimiento-Liderazgo,Energias Renovables.(Para OTEC, Universidades, Organizaciones )