I’m a HS art teacher, and I regularly share both “check out this inspiring kid!” and “check out this terrifying sociopolitical reality that affects our kids/field!” articles with my colleagues. This is a rare two-fer.
I’ve always been skeptical of Scholastic awards - I never participated as a student, and I never saw the value of pushing them on my students. However, it’s sometimes heavily pushed by my colleagues, and occasionally supervisors, I guess because it confers visibility and legitimacy on our field, which is such a precarious one at cash-strapped American public schools.
I’m glad to have learned this, though wish I had been aware BEFORE a lot of students submitted stuff this fall…
I’m curious - how is this a proper use of the term ‘sharecropping’, in any sense? Before you answer, please understand that I am a pretty good historian, and understand econ pretty well too. I get how this is a dick-move, and I’m happy they are getting pilloried for it. I’m just curious about why LL chose to overload the classic meaning of that term with something orthogonal.
Not really a theory, more like wild-ass speculation:
I think it’s a combination of laziness, CYA thinking, and not wanting to admit to your client that you don’t know something and not wanting to share the work with other attorneys.
Intellectual property is a complex and discreet field. If it’s not one of your specialties, the best thing to do would be to refer the work out to someone who knows that field. But that means losing that income to another attorney, and also admitting to your client that you don’t know something. Lots of people, not just attorneys, are afraid to say “I don’t know,” but the pressure is greater on attorneys because we are hired specifically for our knowledge of the law, and clients don’t always understand that “the law” is a complex field with lots of sub-fields. So I think some lawyers are afraid clients will leave if they show any signs that could be interpreted as incompetence.
If you’re not going to share the work with an expert, the next best thing to do is to try to become the expert. But that takes hard work and time, and most clients aren’t willing to pay for you to spend that time educating yourself. In addition they want the contract when they want it, so there is pressure to get a contract done sooner than later. But it would be malpractice to write a contract that you aren’t competent to write (not that that stops some people). So they end up getting a contract from a colleague or friend, or the SEC database, or someplace else; and they assume that since that deal didn’t go to litigation, the contract is good, and everything in there is necessary. I myself have had other attorneys call me up and ask if I had a “template” they could “borrow” for a deal that I knew was not something they specialize in.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was also some disconnect between the people that do the recruiting and the people that write the contract. Such that the contract writers make it exploitative because they can, and have no disincentive to do so-- i.e., they don’t get any blow-back for discouraging people to sign up. They don’t care how the signer is treated-- that’s another department’s problem.
Good for you, father. I try to find teachable moments with my kids all the time. My kids probably get sick of it, every waking moment is a potential teachable moment! But seeing that she was raising money for the ACLU (woot!), I bet she was able to get what was up pretty quickly, and perhaps it didn’t take too much explaining on your part.
Good for her for making noise about it. And for getting some retweet attention from some heavy hitters in that area! Lessig, wow, how cool is that! I be she knows that’s some serious got-yer-back horsepower!
Thank you for the explanation, @jpc2769. That makes sense. Using templates that seem to be solid seems reasonable for anyone to do, although in this case, the outcome is pretty bad.
It seems like a decent enough idea. The problem though, is that just because a contract didn’t end up in litigation, doesn’t mean that it was a well-drafted contract; it’s a survivorship bias problem. And a well-drafted contract should be specific to the needs of your client and the situation that they are in. Using somebody else’s template, without (usually) extensive modification, is neither of those things.
It can be useful if you know that you need a specific kind of provision, and you just want to see some examples of how others are drafted. Otherwise I don’t recommend it.
