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Saul Cornell responds re: Joyce Fdn buying law reviews
Below I noted the Joyce Foundation had made a "generous grant" to Fordham Univ. Law Review to create a Second Amendment symposium issue, in which there was not a single noteworthy pro-individual rights author, and said they were back at it again -- a few years ago they made a hefty grant to Chicago-Kent Law Review to publish a symposium issue, which brought in Carl Bogus ( a former member of the Board of Handgun Control, Inc.) as an outside editor, and from which review pro-Second Amendment writers were excluded.
Saul Cornell has replied, via the Volokh conspiracy, saying that these are baseless claims. The response is not much more than a claim that he did try to get some individual rights authors, and one article was pro-individual rights. Not that one article in an entire symposium makes for balance, of course. It's not like there weren't candidates for articles. There's no word of his having bothered to reach, oh, Robert Cottrol, Glenn Reynolds, Wm. van Alstyne, Randy Barnett, Gene Volokh, Don Kates. [In a subsequent post, Cornell states that he did try to get van Alstyne].
What is revealing is that, once again, the law review that gets the generous Joyce grant pulls in an outsider to manage that issue of the review. And the outsider happens to be a fellow who is very much on the anti-individual right side.
Update:You must, of course, apply to Joyce for a grant. And its standards make it clear that the project -- or in this case law review -- is expected to advance the enactment of gun legislation (buzzword = "policy").
From its webpage on its grant priorities:
The Gun Violence Program supports efforts to bring the firearms industry under comprehensive consumer product health and safety oversight as the most promising long-term strategy for reducing deaths and injuries from handguns and other firearms.Program priorities are:
• Supporting state-based policy initiatives in Illinois and Wisconsin that can achieve meaningful reforms and provide a model for gun policy nationwide ....
• Supporting focused research to inform state policy efforts.
From its grant FAQ,
Do you fund educational programs in violence prevention? We generally do not fund such programs.....
Do you fund research? We fund research that is likely to have a strong impact on public policy.
Please tell me more about your focus on public policy. We focus our grantmaking on initiatives that promise to have an influence on public policies. That includes advancing the public debate about important policy issues, most notably the need for federal consumer product health and safety standards for the firearm industry. We believe such policy initiatives can lead to broad, systemic changes that affect the most people over the long run.
.....
In other words: don't come to us with a law review that will explore the Second Amendment. Come to us with an idea for one that will help enact gun laws. That is what we fund.
For anyone who's interested ... I found some interesting notes on Joyce Foundation's funding of the Chicago Kent issue...
From a Con law email list (the bolding below is mine)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 13:08:52 -0500
Reply-To: Discussion list for conlaw of firearms
Sender: Discussion list for conlaw of firearms
From: "Carl T. Bogus"
Subject: Answer to Eugene and Glenn's Query
To: [email protected]
Sorry for the delay in responding to Eugene and Glenn's question about whether contributors to the Chicago-Kent symposium on the Second Amendment received honoraria. I was out of the office for a few days. The answer is, yes, they did receive honoraria. But I should tell you that contributors to the Chicago-Kent Law Review routinely receive honoraria.
..... In the case of Second Amendment symposium, however, a grant from the Joyce Foundation enabled the law review to supplement somewhat its usual honorarium rates, hold a live conference, and distribute copies of the published symposium issue to constitutional law and legal history scholars and some judges.
.... I know the question of how large the honoraria are suggests ittself, but I don't think I'm authorized to provide that information, either with respect to Chicago-Kent's or Roger Williams' usual sums or the augmentation made possible by the Joyce Foundation grant. But I think it's fair to say no one would find the amounts shocking, or even surprising. ....
Eugene writes that Chicago-Kent's Second Amendment "symposium was intentionally designed to consist only of pro-collective-rights works." That may not be far off the mark but it isn't exactly how I would put it. We felt that, for a variety of reasons, the collective rights model was under represented in the debate, and wanted to give scholars an opportunity to enhance or further illuminate the collective rights position. Sometimes a more balanced debate is best served by an unbalanced symposium. I did not, therefore, invite anyone who I knew subscribed to the individual rights model.
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 13:41:59 -0500
Reply-To: Discussion list for conlaw of firearms
Sender: Discussion list for conlaw of firearms
From: "Carl T. Bogus"
Subject: Chicago-Kent Money
To: [email protected]
The Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Joyce Foundation have granted me permission to provide the following information:
The Joyce Foundation approved a grant of $84,000 for the Second Amendment symposium at Chicago-Kent. Only $73,758 of the grant was consumed, and the College returned $10,242 to the Foundation. The money was spent as follows:
Honoraria for Contributors $45,000
nine honoraria @ $5,000 each
Honorarium for Editor $ 5,000
Travel and Lodging $10,190
for all participants
Symposium Expenses $13,568
including meals for participants,
security for conference, and
printing and distributing
extra copies of the law review
[with cut and paste I lost track of which professor made the following post, but I think it was James Lindgren:]
the usual funding per symposium at Chicago-Kent in 1996 was about $11-12,000, which was not (then at least) a secret.... The grant of $84,000 from the Joyce Foundation is probably 2-3 times more than we got for any one symposium issue in my 6 years of involvement with the review.
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 13:44:06 -0500
From: Glenn Reynolds
Organization: Univ of Tennessee College of Law
Subject: Carl Bogus & the Kent symposium
To: [email protected]
Well, it's true. Stanford paid me $500. They also wined me and dined me. Fortunately, I am incorruptible.
However, I believe that the Kent symposium was in fact considerably more ideological than this description makes it sound. It was also far more ideological than the Stanford symposium, which was (more or less) evenly divided and which was not organized with the aid of outside ideological
money.
It happens that Sandy Levinson, David Williams, and I spoke on the Second Amendment at Kent a couple of weeks before Carl's Symposium met. The Joyce Foundation folks apparently objected strenuously to our presence at that school, so close to their symposium. In fact, they complained, I was told, that our presence suggested that the Kent faculty had a "sinister agenda of balance" that was inconsistent with the Symposium's purpose.
3 Comments | Leave a comment
I agree with david, A little hard to read. But still great info. Love the blog!
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If I might offer a suggestion:
Your formatting -- in particular, the lack of italics or blockquotes -- makes it very difficult to tell when you are presenting others' words and when you are speaking on your own.