pstrand

/Pamela Joy
Pamela Joy

About Pamela Joy

Palma Joy Strand graduated from Stanford Law School in 1984 and then clerked for Judge Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Byron White of the U.S. Supreme Court. She spent the next twenty years (1) teaching law part-time at the University of Maryland and the Georgetown University Law Center; (2) raising three kids; and (3) working as a civic organizer in her community of Arlington, Virginia, where she focused on the public schools. She is now at Creighton Law School, where she works closely with the Werner Institute for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. She teaches what she thinks of as “real people” classes in which the law touches the lives of everyday people: Local Government Law, Trusts and Estates, Civic Organizing and Democracy, Street Law, and Professional Responsibility. Her academic work is grounded in her community experiences and focuses on how law and community are connected and on how inequalities undermine civic integrity. In her spare (!) time, she tries to keep from becoming hopelessly outdated technologically, sews quilts inspired by those from Gee’s Bend, pores through catalogues of native plants for her garden, and spends as much time outdoors as is possible for a transplanted Californian in Nebraska...
1 Aug, 2012

Rights versus right?

2019-03-18T18:47:44-05:00August 1st, 2012|

Guest post by Elaine Sylvester   12 people were killed when a gunman entered a theater in Aurora, Colorado, and proceeded to open fire on the captive audience. Like many news-hungry Americans, I spent a sizable percentage of the days after combing the Internet for insight into the cruelties that we witnessed from afar. And [...]

7 Sep, 2011

Of Famines and Lawyers

2019-03-18T18:47:54-05:00September 7th, 2011|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

Query:  What is the connection between famine (on the one hand) and the current tangle of issues regarding the undersupply or oversupply of lawyers and legal services (on the other)? Answer:  The problem in both instances may be one of distribution.     As to famine… Thomas Keneally’s new book Three Famines traces the great [...]

11 Jul, 2011

JDB and Brown: Kids-(and Parents?)-and the Constitution

2019-03-18T18:47:56-05:00July 11th, 2011|Tags: , , , , , |

Two cases from the mopping-up phase of the recent Supreme Court term—J.D.B. v. North Carolina and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn.—have me thinking about kids and the Constitution. These two cases join prior Court decisions that delineate the constitutional rights of minors—cases such as Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1st Amendment—children [...]

14 Jun, 2011

Implicit Bias and Equal Protection: A New Game of “Pick up Sticks”?

2019-03-18T18:47:58-05:00June 14th, 2011|Tags: , , , , , |

Two Fridays ago, I attended the daylong Washington, DC, Judicial Conference on implicit bias. Implicit bias, as I observed in my prior post on Connick v. Thompson, is bias that is unconscious rather than conscious.  The fact that bias is implicit, however, does not mean that it is not invidious.  Implicit bias [...]

19 May, 2011

The Underside of (Legal) History

2019-03-18T18:48:01-05:00May 19th, 2011|Tags: , , , , , |

Have you ever wondered about the women who ran the households of the Founding Fathers while they Declared Independence, fought the Revolutionary War, drafted and ratified the Constitution, and then governed the fledgling United States? We know quite a bit about Abigail Adams, in large part because of the vibrant letters she [...]

27 Apr, 2011

Black and White Update

2019-03-18T18:48:02-05:00April 27th, 2011|Tags: , , |

A couple of weeks ago, I raised the issue of implicit racial bias in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in Connick v. Thompson. Recently, I was paging through the April issue of the DC Bar's Washington Lawyer.  There, on page 9, was a full-page ad for the upcoming (June) 36th Annual Judicial Conference of the [...]

12 Apr, 2011

The Black and White of Connick v. Thompson

2019-03-18T18:48:03-05:00April 12th, 2011|Tags: , , , |

To say that the recent Supreme Court case of Connick v. Thompson has racial undertones is akin to observing that the Pacific Ocean is wet. Yet a majority of the Court (in an opinion written by Justice Thomas) resolutely and steadfastly averts its eyes from race throughout the entire opinion.  It is [...]

7 Mar, 2011

Dancing, Quibbling, and Crocuses

2019-03-18T18:48:05-05:00March 7th, 2011|Tags: , , , , , , |

I shouldn’t quibble. When a law professor writes an academic article that is published in a law review, she is lucky to have it cited in other academic articles published in other law reviews. This is, after all, what we do. To have it not just cited but reviewed by someone who [...]