What are law students doing to protect themselves from the horror of a law school exam that lawprofs could easily write following the advice I am giving in this post?

Do law professors realize how much law students are relying on Wikipedia for summaries and insights into the cases we are assigning? In the old days, students spent a lot of money on commercial outlines, stuff like this. I've never looked at any of those books, not as a student and not as a teacher, though over the years, I've had many students ask me to recommend one.

Back when I was a law student — I graduated in 1981 — you wouldn't want the professor to know you were the sort of person who'd need or want to use a study guide, so it always surprised me that students would ask me, and I had no answer to the question other than to be careful: These things can be out of date, they may contain errors, and you can be wasting time on a lot of detail that I am not including and missing things that I will develop in class.

The best view of what will be on the exam is what we're talking about in class, which is based on the assigned readings, so why would you put time into reading some questionable alternative material instead of reading the casebook, taking notes on that book, paying attention in class, and condensing your reading and class notes into an outline that forces you to understand precisely those things that the exam will be about?

These days, from what I've heard, students have shifted to Wikipedia, which has lots of great entries for the cases that we read.

I love Wikipedia. I think it is one of the greatest things that has happened in the history of mankind. But you've got to know what it is and what it is not. Who is writing and tweaking those articles on important Supreme Court cases? They're quite well done, but that means they are done by lawyers, law students, and law academics. These contributors offset each other and enforce Wikipedia norms of neutrality, but, of course, law folk are expert at embedding political and policy preferences in seemingly neutral material. (That's what makes the cases so hard to read and understand.)

The first time a student in my class referred openly to Wikipedia, he quoted something that was a bit off. Perhaps it described a state constitutional law provision as banning racial discrimination when what it banned was using race as factor in affirmative action. It was something that needed better editing in Wikipedia.

It immediately occurred to me that a very efficient way to write an exam in this course would be to quote the Wikipedia entry on various cases and, for each, ask whether it is inaccurate. One could pick 10 statements about 10 cases — or 20 statements about 20 case — and ask the student to pick the 3 — or 5 or 6 — that you believe to be most inaccurate and explain why.

It's fine to use Wikipedia. I love it. But you've got to know what you are dealing with.

"I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood..."

"... I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition."

Said Bradley Manning, in a statement released after he received his sentence of 35 years.

The statement went on to request that Private Manning’s supporters “refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility).” It was signed, “Chelsea Manning.”

Woke up, it was a Chelsea Manning.... and the first thing that I knew/There was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too...

Private Manning’s decision to live as a woman raises questions of how the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he will be held, will respond. A spokeswoman for the prison recently told Courthouse News that the prison does not provide hormone therapy or gender-reassignment surgery. As is the case for all soldiers, transgender inmates are only eligible for psychiatric care, she said....

[Manning's lawyer David] Coombs said that if the military did not provide hormone therapy willingly, “then I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure they are forced to do so.”

When asked whether Private Manning’s ultimate goal was to be housed in prison with women, instead of men, Mr. Coombs said, “No, I think the ultimate goal is to be comfortable in her skin and to be the person that she’s never had an opportunity to be.”

And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses... That's not really what prison is supposed to be. Not so much butterscotch sun in there. 

Oh, won't you stay/We'll put on the day 35 years/And we'll talk in present tenses....

This is a complicated prison law question which I've never researched, and I don't have a position on what the right answer is. It's easy to say prison should be stark, but medical treatments should not be withheld. The issue of who should be housed with whom is difficult, and we don't want prisoners hurting each other. As for sexuality, is the official policy to deny all sexual expression to prisoners? If so, is that enforced across the board? If not, what should the answer be for someone who chooses/feels called to express himself/herself this way?

And here's the erstwhile "Bradley Manning" page at Wikipedia right now:

"[S]ome have wondered if Wales, who couldn’t figure out a way to become rich off his innovation, was cynically making a play to cash in on being a great humanitarian."

From the NYT Magazine article "Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire."

Wales... realized early on that the community would revolt if he were to monetize Wikipedia by selling ads. He may now travel the world giving speeches and even include Bono as a friend, but Wales’s celebrity relies largely on being the guy who made the sum of the world’s information free without making a penny himself. As such, his reputation remains inextricably linked to the noisy, online volunteers who got him there.

Much more at the link.

Wales likes to invoke the higher purpose of Wikipedia. He applies his libertarian worldview to the Internet and has taken on institutions like the United States government and Apple for threatening to curb the free exchange of information on the Web....

[His] proximity to famous people doesn’t sit well with some members of the Wikipedia community who assert that Wales’s new life is, in some ways, contradictory to the egalitarian online world he created.....

Wales... ensures he is not taken for a radical. He treads carefully when weighing in on more extreme members of the free-culture movement, like Julian Assange — who he has criticized for using the “wiki” name — and online hacking collectives like Anonymous. Wales and I met for lunch the day after the 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz killed himself. The community had erupted with calls for Wales to weigh in, but he was hesitant. “People have been pushing me to comment, but I didn’t know him,” Wales told me. He has also stayed mostly mum on Edward Snowden, the contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked confidential information about widespread snooping by the United States government....

The article begins and is larded with info about his wedding and his wife (and wives), which I suspect is another example of the NYT's hackneyed, desperate playing up to female readers.

"WikiLeaks says Michael Hastings contacted it just before his death."

"Are they implying he was murdered?"

Michael Hastings was a much admired freelance journalist who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and helped to bring down General Stanley McChrystal. He was tragically killed this week in a car crash in Los Angeles, after his car hit a tree. Hastings is believed to have been alone in the vehicle.

"Lil Wayne Puts Mountain Dew in Crisis Mode."

"How much street cred is too much?"

The family [of 1955 murder victim Emmett Till] was not satisfied with [Lil Wayne's acknowledgement of the offense they took at his lyric likening Till's murder to sexual enthusiasm] and instead called for a meeting with executives at PepsiCo. At the same time, a publicist for the family said, they found an additional way to pressure Mountain Dew: to bring to public attention an offensive Mountain Dew video ad created by the hip-hop producer and rap artist known as Tyler, the Creator, that featured a battered white waitress, bandaged and on crutches, trying to identify her assailant from a lineup that included African-American men and a goat.

What niche of meaning does each particular soda occupy? The Mountain Dew brand was always transgressive:

"Mountain Dew" was originally Southern and/or Scots/Irish slang for moonshine (i.e., homemade whiskey).... Using it as the name for the soda was originally suggested by Carl E. Retzke at an Owens-Illinois Inc meeting in Toledo, Ohio, and was first trademarked by Ally and Barney Hartman in the 1940s. Early bottles and signage carried the reference forward by showing a cartoon-stylized mountaineer. 

Mountaineer? That's Wikipedia text. I guess someone edited "hillbilly," trying to get to something more decorous. To my ear, a "mountaineer" is "A person who engages in or is skilled at mountain climbing" — and that is the 5th definition in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. I'm surprised to see the first definition is: "A person who is native to or lives in a mountainous region; (occas.) such a person regarded as ignorant, uncivilized, or uneducated; (U.S.) a hillbilly." This usage goes back to Shakespeare:

a1616   Shakespeare Cymbeline (1623) iv. ii. 102   Yeeld, Rusticke Mountaineer.
a1616   Shakespeare Tempest (1623) iii. iii. 44   When wee were Boyes Who would beleeue that there were Mountayneeres, Dew-lapt [etc.].

The word "hillbilly" — "A person from a remote rural or mountainous area, esp. of the south-eastern U.S." — is only traced back to 1900:

1900   N.Y. Jrnl. 23 Apr. 2/5   In short, a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.

Has anyone ever before written a blog post that went from Lil Wayne to Shakespeare so quickly? I don't know, but I'm interested in how the product's branding evolved from low-class white to low-class black. But the branding has always been low-class. How do you do that well and remain current when there are high-minded groups getting press, demanding apologies, stirring up outrage?

IN THE COMMENTS: richlb said:

...poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed...

All right, then. That settles it.

"There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female..."

"... were being systematically removed from the category American novelists and assigned to the category American women novelists."

I remember going to bookstores, circa 1990, where "Fiction by Women" was a separate section from "Fiction." These were places that were pro-woman, I'm quite sure, because I remember seeing Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae" displayed with a warning label that it might not be what you were expecting and that you should bring it back for a refund if you bought it under the mistaken impression that it was good feminism and then found yourself offended.

ADDED: The biggest problem is leaving the male category plain rather than calling it "American men novelists." (Is the parallelism jarring? It should be "Female American novelists" and "Male American novelists.")

"A French intelligence agency threatened a Wikipedia volunteer with jail unless he deleted an article with which he had no connection..."

"... but which the spooks found inconvenient. Not surprisingly, that article has been restored and is now really popular."

"For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing."

Why, that's a sentence from "The Great Gatsby." Couldn't you tell?

The unreality of reality... the world... founded securely on a fairy’s wing....

So... I Googled "unreality of reality," and the second thing that came up was a Wikipedia article titled "Reality in Buddhism."

Some consider that the concept of the unreality of "reality" is confusing. They posit that, in Buddhism, the perceived reality is considered illusory not in the sense that reality is a fantasy or unreal, but that our perceptions and preconditions mislead us to believe that we are separate from the elements that we are made of. Reality, in Buddhist thought, would be described as the manifestation of karma^{[citation needed]}.

Isn't it always like that? Citation needed!

Getting the big picture.

That's "Today's featured picture" on Wikipedia's main page:

The Great Picture is a 32-by-111-foot (9.8 by 34 m) photograph on muslin taken to mark the end of 165 years of film/chemistry-based photography and the start of the age of digital photography. It was taken by converting an old hangar into a pinhole camera.

Nice choice of sublinks. Don't bother with "photography" or "film," but do take us to muslin and hangar and pinhole camera. 

Fictional characters with Wikipedia pages written almost like the pages of real people.

Here's an example:

Ethel Roberta Louise Mae Mertz (née Potter) is one of the four main fictional characters in the highly popular 1950s American television sitcom I Love Lucy, played by Vivian Vance....

Born around 1905 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her father, Will Potter, owned a sweet shop and soda fountain with the slogan "You can lick our cones, but you can't beat our sodas!" Ethel has had a career in music and acting, yet got her start at Albuquerque's Little Theater, singing her signature number "Shortnin' Bread". A flapper in the 1920s, she met and married Fred Mertz either in 1933 (episode #2) or 1927 (episode #42)... Their wedding anniversary date is May 3rd (episode #121). After eloping (episode #113 - "Ethel's Hometown") Ethel worked in vaudeville with Fred before settling down and purchasing their own brownstone apartment building in New York City, containing the apartment they rent to Ricky and Lucy. ...

She has a fine soprano voice, among other artistic talents, but unlike Lucy is now unambitious and content as a housewife and landlady. Somewhat lonely, she is devoted to Lucy and her family. Despite her commonsense outlook, she is often fascinated by the possibilities for excitement opened up by Lucy's mad schemes. Although continually complaining about Fred's penny-pinching and other faults, she defers to him far more than Lucy does to Ricky....

Now, this article is is flagged with an exclamation mark and "This television-related article describes a work or element of fiction in a primarily in-universe style." Going to the link, I see:

The problem with in-universe perspective

An in-universe perspective describes the narrative from the perspective of characters within the fictional universe, treating it as if it were real and ignoring real-world context and sourced analysis. The threshold of what constitutes in-universe writing is making any effort to re-create or uphold the illusion of the original fiction by omitting real-world info.

Many fan wikis and fan websites... take this approach, but it should not be used for Wikipedia articles. An in-universe perspective is inaccurate and misleading, inviting unverifiable original research. Most importantly, in-universe perspective defies community consensus as to what we do not want Wikipedia to be or become....

What an amazing effort Wikipedia is. I was charmed by the elements of what I now know is called the in-universe perspective, and now I also see how it conflicts with the grand enterprise of Wikipedia and the mechanisms of arriving at and enforcing the community consensus of what Wikipedia is or should be.

Why did I look up Ethel Mertz? 1. Meade asked me if I got his joke in the "Purchase of the Day" post.  2. I grudgingly admitted that I knew the song "Hey, Look Me Over," but I didn't think many readers would get it. 3. I played this YouTube of Lucille Ball singing the Broadway tune "Hey, Look Me Over," because I thought it would make Meade laugh because we laughed a lot 2 nights ago when I streamed "Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying To Murder Her" on my iPad and we've been referring to it ever since. 4. YouTube prompted me to play "Lucille Ball Loved her Ford Skyliner Retractable Hardtop," which included a segment with Fred and Ethel doing a song-and-dance routine. 5. I said "Weren't Fred and Ethel in vaudeville before they became landlords?"

Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon streaming video, iPads, cars with retractable hardtops, television, Broadway, vaudeville... I love America.

"Strains credulity to think that ice releases thousands of illegals..."

"... and no one there ran it up the food chain. Not even a 'heads up?' Hmmm."

The old buzzword "deniability" popped into my head.

ME (out loud): "Deniability. Who do you associate with that word."

MEADE: "Nixon."

ME (having Googled, reading from Wikipedia): "Kennedy. 'Plausible deniability is a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the withholding of information from senior officials in order to protect them from repercussions in the event that illegal or unpopular activities by the CIA became public knowledge.'"

I love Wikipedia. I love that there's a whole long article on the topic "plausible deniability." The name Nixon comes up — in a list of 6 "major flaws" in the "doctrine." The Nixon-related flaw is:

It rarely worked when invoked; the denials made were rarely plausible and were generally seen through by both the media and the populace. One aspect of the Watergate crisis is the repeated failure of the doctrine of plausible deniability, which the administration repeatedly attempted to use to stop the scandal affecting President Richard Nixon and his aides.

Also at the article, under the heading "other examples":

The Murder of Thomas Becket

King Henry II of England is often said to have stated of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Becket was indeed murdered, although the king denied that his plea was to be taken in such a way.

We don't live in a monarchy, and efforts to insulate a U.S. President from criticism should fail and will fail if we haven't lost track of our role as citizens.

(And, as noted a few posts ago, these Washington writers are nauseatingly dependent on clichés. The food chain, heads up. "Food chain" isn't even the right cliché. Perino meant the chain of command. That other chain. Django Unchained. Chain of Fools. Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Ball and chain. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Chain smoking. Hey, I'm only yanking your chain.)

"I successfully edited Wikipedia!"

Meade exclaims. It's his first time. It was over there in the page on The Gettysburg Address (which I linked to earlier today, as perhaps you noticed). His edit is in the third paragraph, which, before his edit, read:

Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the Declaration of Independence during the American Revolution in 1776, Lincoln examined the founding principles of the United States in the context of the Civil War, and memorialized the sacrifices of those who gave their lives at Gettysburg and extolled virtues for the listeners (and the nation) to ensure the survival of America's representative democracy, that the "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Meade took out the "the" before that last quote. Have you ever noticed that there's no "the" before "government" (even as there is a "the" before each of the 3 "people"s)?

... we here highly resolve... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Do you see what a big difference a "the" would make in that sentence? Meade had gotten into a back-and-forth over at the Isthmus forum (a site dominated by typical Madisonians, i.e., left/liberals).

The topic was the 2d amendment and, more generally, what rights are. Responding to TheBookPolice who'd asserted that rights are "100% about the government telling people what they can and can't do," Meade said:

Thank you but you have that exactly backwards, TheBookPolice. Check your high school Civics textbook. The amendments in the Bill of Rights are all about protecting the people from the power of the government. I know that concept can be a little difficult for Liberals and Progressives to grasp, seeing as how they begin with a fundamental utopian assumption in government we trust. But government - even a democracy - can become corrupt, coercive, authoritarian, and tyrannical. So if you look at the text of, say, the 2nd amendment, you'll see that it is addressing the government, not the people. The people's right shall not be infringed. Infringed by the people? No, of course not. The right shall not be infringed by the government. Take a closer look at the entire "Bill of Rights" and I think you will see that the first ten amendments to the constitution are completely about restricting government from infringing the people's rights.

TheBookPolice dragged in the Gettysburg Address:

Abraham Lincoln described the government of the United States as being "of the people, for the people, and by the people." Sounds to me like we're all in this together. You on the other hand seem to treat the government as a panther stalking the outskirts of your jungle village, waiting for the opportunity to snatch a wandering child unawares.

Tell me: who makes up the government you fear so much?

And Meade came up with this "the" point, which I'd never thought about before:

That's just it, Police -- I don't fear the government at all. Thanks to the constitution. And thanks, in particular, to the first ten amendments.

Now take a closer look at the text of the Lincoln speech you alluded to. Notice: he does not put the article, "the" before "government" and yet he uses it each of the three times he repeats "people".

Let that sink in for a minute.

Lincoln was not talking about preserving the entity that is The Government, that might overstep its bounds and oppress us.  He was talking about preserving government by the people, that is, preserving democracy. Or that's how it's sunk in for me.

"Err ... this Wikipedia entry as reported by Ann has some large factual errors."

"Neither Albania nor Yugoslavia were ever liberated by the Soviets. There was no 'EU military mission led by Italy,' if for no other reasons than that the EU does not have a military, and would not, in any case, have been so insensitive as to have sent one headed by Italy, the former colonial ruler. Wikipedia is an unreliable source."

If only there were some way to edit Wikipedia....

A map depicting each country in the world with the single word that appears most often...

... on that country's "History of..." page in Wikipedia (excluding the country's own name along with some list of common words like "the" and "was"). The project seems designed to throw "war" in our faces, so what I found interesting was looking for whatever isn't war. For example, Australia gets "new." Here's the big image of the map for your inspection.

Only one has 2 have the name of an individual human being. Not North Korea, because "Kim" isn't just one person. And, no, kids, Monte Video is not a guy, though he sounds like an amusing guy. That's Montevideo, broken into 2 lines. You knew that, but don't be so pleased with yourself, because, chances are you don't know one thing about the history of... Do you even know where Montevideo is?

Maybe a good project would be those "History of..." pages, not just for their most common words — WAR! — but to have had it run through your head, at least once, what happened in all of those places. Do you know how many pages we are talking about? The number of members in the United Nations is not the right answer, but do you know that number? It's 193. Wikipedia lists 206 sovereign states (including those with disputed sovereignty).

Let's make a New Year's resolution: Each day, read one Wikipedia "History of..." page. Will you join me? We'll go in alphabetical order, and I'll prompt you with blog posts.

Will you join me?
	No. I don't care about history spread out thin like that.
	No. I know enough history to get by.
	No. I've got a better history reading project.
	Kind of. I'll read what you put in blog posts and maybe click through a bit.
	Kind of. I won't make a resolution, and I'll glance at things now and then.
	Yes, to the extent that I'll read the blog posts, and I might do more.
	Yes, I'll commit to going to all the pages and skimming them, as long as you keep linking.
	Yes, I'm so into this that I'll go to each page, even on my own, and read it all.
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