1. can't resist:
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2009/10/ten-best-faculties-in-intellectual-propertycyberlaw.html
2. americanizing: spent a large part of our Sunday at a corn maze with my JSP cohort (just one eerie thing happened. It wasn’t an extra terrestrial abduction for those of you who know what corn mazes are. Instead it was a large woman sitting astride on a hay stack and wondering whether I too found hay to be arousing. Not the word she used exactly, by the way, but my fingers quiver on the keyboard when I try to write that one so I opted for the scientific term). And what do you do once you are out of the maze and yearning for food? Of course! You BBQ! What else. However, when your type of America is Berkeley-type, you barbeque tofu burgers which you eat on glutton-free rye buns.

* Two of the law school's professors had just been awarded faculty chairs. I offer my congratulations and part of the text of the announcment (the interesting part is highlighted)

Renowned professors of law Eric Talley and Jonathan Simon ’87 have been awarded faculty chairs at Berkeley Law.

Talley, a corporate law expert and faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law, Business, and the Economy, is the first holder of the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Chair. He teaches courses on corporate finance, contracts, and law and economics. Earlier this year, Talley was one of two risk-analysis experts tapped by the Congressional Oversight Panel to review the U.S. Treasury Department’s methodology in its stress tests of America’s 19 largest bank holding companies.

His chair was funded by the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, of which Martin Blank ’66 is a co-director. The foundation invests in programs that promote education, tolerance, social services, the State of Israel, healthcare, and the arts.

Cracks in the Future

Berkeley, Calif.

While the U.S. has struggled with enormous problems over the past several years, there has been at least one consistent bright spot. Its system of higher education has remained the finest in the world.

Now there are ominous cracks appearing in that cornerstone of American civilization. Exhibit A is the University of California, Berkeley, the finest public university in the world and undoubtedly one of the two or three best universities in the United States, public or private.

More of Berkeley’s undergraduates go on to get Ph.D.’s than those at any other university in the country. The school is among the nation’s leaders in producing winners of the Nobel Prize. An extraordinary amount of cutting-edge research in a wide variety of critically important fields, including energy and the biological sciences, is taking place here.

While I was roaming the campus, talking to students, professors and administrators, word came that scientists had put together a full analysis and a fairly complete fossilized skeleton of Ardi, who is known to her closest living associates as Ardipithecus ramidus. At 4.4 million years of age, this four-foot tall, tree-climbing wonder is now the oldest known human ancestor.