Paul from Paris

The Gallup organization did a major, international survey of religiosity. Gallup pollsters asked this question:

The results show Americans to be more religious than the French: 65% of Americans surveyed answered in the affirmative, compared to 25% of French respondents.

Conventional wisdom says that Americans are outwardly religious and that the French are deeply secular. The Gallup survey seems to support this conventional view.

The results for Americans actually turn to out to be more diverse than the average percentage. Religiosity spans a range, with “yes” votes climbing to 85% in Mississippi or 82% in Alabama, but falling to 46% in New Hampshire or 42% in Vermont. But all states in the United States showed affirmative answers far above French responders.

The question asked blots some important differences. As Gallup points out, the results “say nothing about what being highly religious means in different parts of the world and among different faiths.”

Gallup takes care in crafting questions used in surveys, but some aspects of the question give pause:

• In some parts of the world –such as Egypt, which scored a 100% affirmative answer– strong cultural pressures may promote or even require an outwardly religious lifestyle. For these people, the question may have been akin to, “Are you patriotic?” or “Do you love your spouse?”
• In other parts of the world, such as France, the question may be socially inappropriate. French secularism is rooted and attached to the idea that religion is a matter of personal conviction, and hence is a private affair. Replying in the negative may be a polite way to convey to a stranger that this is not an appropriate subject for casual conversation.
• In a similar way, the “important” qualifier may lead respondents, including sincerely religious people, to answer “no” out of modesty or the belief that it is polite or socially better not to show pride in religious practice.
• The “daily life” qualifier may have deflated affirmative responses, depending on styles of religious practice, especially if respondents think of visible practice instead of personal conviction. Attending church every Sunday may have skewed to “no” answers, if the respondent focuses on church attendance (and only on church attendance).
• Especially in post-religious countries –I’m thinking of France and the UK– practices that elsewhere would be thought of as religious or expressions of religiosity may be thought of as secular. in other words, the perimeter between religious life and secular life may not be the same in the USA and in the UK. Examples would include concern for the homeless or the environment.

Whatever the limits or shortcomings of the question, thanks to Gallup for contributing this data to the public square and providing an impetus for others to find out more.

One way to enrich continuing legal education (CLE) for lawyers might be to follow the lead of executive business education.

Legal CLE programs tend to have a few things in common:

• CLE requirements are just that: requirements. They're compulsory, imposed, required.
• Participants enroll in CLE programs to satisfy the CLE requirement, usually expressed in a number of hours, sometimes broken down by subject.
• Satisfying the requirement usually means showing up and signing in. Temptation runs high to duck out at a coffee break, or to discover that a crisis has flared at the office that requires immediate, personal attention. Some CLE programs now require actual, physical presence for the duration of the event in order to receive credit.
• As a rule (subject to exceptions) the participants are anonymous and passive. At most, someone asked their name (or at least had them sign in); no one asked why they were attending (because the answer is: I have a CLE requirement to satisfy). During the session, participants generally listen to oneor more speakers; at most, they'll ask a question.
• Evaluation mechnisms, if any, usually are of the "have you been listening?" variety. Multiple choice questions are popular.
• There's no serious expectation that the lawyer's practice will change because of the CLE program. Maybe participants will learn something, and maybe they can apply what they've learned; but no one will follow up and check in with them to find out whether this is the case.

Taking a lead from the best-in-class executive education programs at business schools, a better CLE program would:

• Offer sufficient value so that participants want to attend.
• Focus on building skills, especially new skills, and downplay accumulation of book knowledge (of the "a new law on …" or "leading cases of 2008" variety).
• Require an application and admit only selected applicants. The selection could be either done by the organizer or self-selection (which is often under-estimated).
• Insist upon pre-testing and pre-session reading.
• Be personal. Participants would explain what they expected to get out of the program, and also how they expected to contribute. Participants would know one another by name. This means that the program would be small –a dozen, two dozen, maybe three dozen participants– not a mass event.
• Be participative. Participants would do things during the program. Avoid at all costs passive note-taking exercises.
• Feature meaningful evaluation. If the evaluator doesn't offer guidance on further progress, the subject matter might not merit evaluation.
• Lead to action. Only if participants return to their activity and make some change will the program be deemed worthwhile. Participants will be given measurement tools to track change. The organizers will anticipate some sort of follow-up.

Governments and public agencies in Europe collect and analyze huge amounts of data on all sorts of subjects. This is not a vain exercise: much of the information gathered is useful and valuable to someone (if only the agency that collected it).

Efforts to facilitate and encourage public access often lag behind what citizens expect:

• Some information is basically inaccessible.
• Often raw data is digested by a priestly class of researchers who publish their findings in a report. Some reports are insightful and well-written; however, the data is usually kept off-limits.
• In France, where I live, web sites that disseminate public information vary widely in quality: some are great, others are antiques. My pet peeves include having to pay for public (taxpayer funded?) information and complicated registration schemes.
• The European Union Publications Office deserves special commendation for making it difficult for ordinary citizens to access a wealth of information.

I was thrilled to have encountered Show Us a Better Way, a site from the UK that challenges you, "Tell us what you'd build with public information and we could help fund your idea!" The Power of Information Task Force –I love that name!– is behind the site; cabinet office minister Tom Watson is behind the task force.

Show Us a Better Way organized a contest, with prize money, to attract ideas for how public data could be put to use. Winning submissions include:

• a mailbox (post box) locator, by postal code and street address;
• a bicycle route planner;
• a public bathroom locator ("loofinder");
• a map showing where schools are.

The contest may be over, but the projects are moving forward.

The whole site entertains and informs. It's not pretentious, and its content seems to have designed to be read. There's no boilerplate –corporate-speak or legalese– or fill. My favorite frequently asked question was: should I also file an application with the patent office? The reply:

"This is something for you to think about. The best source of
information about steps you can take to protect your idea is the
Intellectual Property Office itself. Their guidance is here."

Great question, great answer.

I wish there were more sites and initiatives like Show Us a Better Way.

The Associated Press claims that Shepard Fairey's iconic "Hope" poster of Barack Obama infringes copyright to a photograph taken by Mannie Garcia. According to an AP wire service report, "The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation." The Fair Use Project at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society reportedly represents Fairey and advances a defense based on free use (whose outlines were summarized in a nice BBC News report). Discussions apparently are underway.

What's going on here?

I have nothing to do with the case (and if I did I wouldn't post on it). I haven't turned to Nimmer on Copyright for insight and won't speculate about how this case plays out under US copyright law. These are the questions running through my mind:

1. Is the AP using Fairey's case to raise awareness about licensing for noncommercial use, much as Fairey used Garcia's photograph to raise awareness about Obama?
2. There's a longstanding tradition, in the United States, of a test case, whose purpose is to establish precedent. In a test case, plaintiff and defendant sometimes litigate a case to judgment even though the financial stakes are small. In this case, however, the AP doesn't seem to have actually filed suit. No one seems eager for this case to go before a court. Is the AP simply doing business in the public square?
3. As a matter of public policy, what should be the limits concerning copyright and photographs? I've never seen Obama with my own eyes, so I'd have to rely on images to form an impression of his appearance and to sketch a likeness of Obama. What should be the copyright protection of: a rapid-fire sequence of images taken at a rally, where press photographers are assigned specific places and compelled to take pictures from prescribed angles; or a still image taken from a remotely controlled or automated camera (such as a security camera used for video-surveillance)?
4. Is Fairey doing, in the sphere of the visual arts, what we're familiar with as remixing or sampling in the musical world? If so, as a matter of public policy, isn't this an activity we'd want to encourage? 

Thanks to my brother Ken for tipping me off about the AP wire report just seconds after it was released, and congrats to Mannie Garcia for his personal site.

A few years ago, I ran a European program for college students. I worked then with smart, savvy experts to develop a course that would use the wine industry as a lens through which to study the European Union. The prospect that actual wine could also be served as a class aid was not entirely absent from our reflections, and seemed a good selling point.  There was also an implicit promise that we could help a collegiate crowd take away from France a bit of style and connoisseurship, presented without snobbery or condescension. We were open-minded and had expected some students to be unfamiliar with wine. But we were unprepared for a practice then-current among Spanish students: mixing red wine with cola, served over ice. This hardly seemed imaginable, but was perfectly normal for Spanish students. I was dumbstruck. I was at an impasse, unable to move forward and unsure of which direction to turn.

The episode came to mind when I ran into a similar impasse in a legal writing workshop that I teach.

I stress guidelines or good (best?) practices: prefer the active voice; try to keep average sentence length under 20 words; avoid easily misused words or phrases, such as "shall" or "it being understood"; edit your writing systematically.

But French audiences seek out rules. Rules make their eyes bright as flash bulbs; guidelines make their eyes glaze over. This is akin to an impasse for me, because:

• I personally have little to add to a rule;
• Rules that I like –such as the serial comma (A, B, or C)– are routinely flaunted, including by writers beyond reproach;
• Rules that are part of language lore –such as the prohibition against splitting infinitives or words that make up a verb ("I will faithfully execute the office")– turn out not to be rules at all.