Saturday, November 7, 2015

"Hip Hop and the Law": Dougie Fresh's magnum opus

Yes, it enrolled only 15 new students this year. Yes, it had to eliminate tuition just to achieve that feat. Yes, it has failed to earn accreditation. But don't count Indiana Tech out. With yet another literary masterpiece, it has secured northeastern Indiana's place on the intellectual map.


The celebrated André Douglas Pond "Dougie Fresh" Cummings and two other intellectual colossi of legal hackademia have co-edited Hip Hop and the Law, a compendium of the finest scholarshit in a field crucially important to bench and bar. Allow me to reproduce its promotional blurb:


"What is important to understanding American law? What is important to understanding hip hop? Wide swaths of renowned academics, practitioners, commentators, and performance artists have answered these two questions independently. And although understanding both depends upon the same intellectual enterprise, textual analysis of narrative storytelling, somehow their intersection has escaped critical reflection. Hip Hop and the Law merges the two cultural giants of law and rap music and demonstrates their relationship at the convergence of Legal Consciousness, Politics, Hip Hop Studies, and American Law. No matter what your role or level of experience with law or hip hop, this book is a sound resource for learning, discussing, and teaching the nuances of their relationship. Topics include Critical Race Theory, Crime and Justice, Mass Incarceration, Gender, and American Law: including Corporate Law, Intellectual Property, Constitutional Law, and Real Property Law."


Adam Lamparello—noted for his, er, personal revelations—recently hosted a reception for this world-historic publication. I am woefully sorry that I did not find out in time to attend. When shall I ever have another opportunity to get my very own copy of Hip Hop and the Law inscribed by Dougie Fresh, entirely in lower-case letters?


Practitioners, professors, and students should rush to Amazon.com and grab one (or more!) of the 19 available copies for the trifling price of $53, with free shipping. Learn how to apply the intersectionality of law and hip-hop to everything from Critical Race Theory™ to litigation over real property. Launch a new career in the dynamic field of Hip Hop Studies. Break new scholarly ground through critical reflection on this tragically neglected subject  You need this book.



47 comments:

  1. What can one say about this? You can't parody it because it is so ridiculous. This is what is wrong with legal scholarship today. This is what is wrong with law school today.

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    1. Frivolous research is rewarded with lower course loads.

      Lower course loads necessitate more professors.

      More professors cost more in salary and benefits.

      Higher costs raise tuition to exorbitant levels.

      Higher tuition means higher lifelong debt loads for ignorant students.

      Students are kept ignorant by frivolous research.

      QED

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    2. Let's not forget summer research funds that the law profs receive. And then they receive lower course loads so that they can do the damn research during the school year.

      It's the machinery of debt and keeps the income gap widening between the students with resources and the students with loans. The profs don't care. They talk a good game when it comes to liberalism but they are too entrenched in the debt-generating system. They are complete hypocrites.

      Delete
  2. I have found my next scholarly project. "A Hip-Hop View of Medieval Icelandic Law."

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    1. Cool! I'm doing "Nietzsche and the Hip-Hop Revolution."

      Let's do some intersectionality on this.

      Delete
  3. Careful Old Guy! You don't want to end-up on the sh*t list of some deranged legal scholar, like poor dybbuk.

    That being said, my ribs are aching from all the laughing I just did. I love your writing.

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    1. Thanks for the compliment and the warning. Deranged legal "scholars" have already been harassing several of us for the grave crime of lifting the lid on the law-school scam.

      Delete
    2. I was talking about deranged scholars with my friend the other day. He mentioned that they get that way because they have too much power over students, a false sense of superiority, and way too much time for obsessive thought.

      Let's help these scholars in their recovery from narcissism by rescuing their students, mocking their scholarship, and forcing them to obtain productive employment. In a few years, they could be as normal--and as broke--as anyone else.

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    3. I can see a few lemmings earnestly asking themselves "How lucrative is hip hop law?" Perhaps, this dung pit can create a Hip Hop and the Law Clinic?

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    4. How lucrative is hip hop law?

      let me put it this way, consider your favorite rap video. Take note of the fancy clothes, jewelry, and shoes everyone is wearing, the fancy cars and corporate jets everyone is hanging around, the stacks hundred dollar bills, expensive audiophile equipment, and weapons on the table, the mansions and office towers in the background.
      You will own exactly none of the stuff you imagined if you get a law degree and concentrate on hip hop law. Your net worth will be negative and you will be poorer than the grips and extras working on those videos.

      Also think about the situations your favorite rapper talks about in his songs; pulling up to the club in a Maserati, ordering bottles of Rothschild or Louis XIII, hanging around with beautiful women, expensive vacations, being involved in distribution across the Atlantic, going platinum, getting mad money.
      You will not do any of that stuff, instead you will be working part time at the club as security, taking orders for lattes or burgers, hanging with bastards who will not pay $100 for a court appearance, be involved with low level drug sales, going broke, and getting very little money.

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    5. I know someone who did a union crew job for several rap videos in the LA area. With all the overtime he got about $1200-$1500 a day for 18 hours days, though most of the 18 hours they sat around and got high.

      Delete
  4. Wow.
    While I have little faith that our efforts are going to shutter more than one or two schools, pointing out literary turds like this is invaluable therapy for me. And if there is one Toilet that desperately needs to be closed down, it's Indiana Tech.

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    1. Get a load of this extract of Dougie Fresh's acknowledgments (at xvii):

      "Our anthology is filled to overflowing with incisive, intellectually deep, and riveting chapters by our talented contributors who, like us, have seen and felt that intersection between hip hop and legal theory and have committed their thoughts to provocative writings. Each time I re-read one of our contributing authors' chapters, I find myself exclaiming 'This is my favorite chapter in the book,' except that I have uttered that very phrase more than a dozen times."

      In the "Representative Bibliography", the sections "Law" and "Hip Hop Literary Theory" together take up considerably less than a page. Jesus H Christ.

      Delete
    2. @7:52 -- I read somewhere that the shrinking class sizes of law schools has been like 65 schools shutting down.

      Personally, I think we'll see about 20 schools less in a few years. For there to be more, we need intervention by congress to cut off student loans.

      Delete
    3. By using both "intersection" and "provocative" in the same sentence he wins triple critical legal theory points.

      "...I find myself exclaiming..."

      I'm not sure I've ever found myself exclaiming anything. But many times in the course of reading an awful lawprof anthology?

      Delete
    4. If I had to read that thing, my exclamation would be a short, sharp speech.

      Delete
  5. This is going to be the cornerstone text to Indiana Tech's LLM in Hip Hop Law. No doubt it will.impart the knowledge necessary to spring Suge Knight from the clink upon tuition payment...er...graduation.

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    1. Oh, that worthy project must be on hold. With the decline in enrollment, Indiana Tech has (alas! alack!) had to cancel the course Hip Hop and the American Constitution, an Indiana Tech specialty (although Drexel, another intellectual Mecca, also taught it a few years ago). So it seems that only the Class of 2016 will ever get to wax philosophical, under the recondite tutelage of Dougie Fresh, on the funky beats that animated the Federalist papers and the Establishment Clause.

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    2. Poor ADPC. He just missed the chance to make his book a required text for his nonsense class. Oh, the lost revenues.

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    3. Oh the lucky class of 2016. Like the 90's Browns players under Belichick every one of them will get to tell of their brush with the soon-to-blossom greatness of D-Fresh. And that's the straight dope word up to your mother.

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  6. Old Guy, this review constitutes your own magnum opus. You have climbed the pinnacle of absurdity with the best of them, only to realize there's nothing left to do but scramble back down again.

    If enough students realize the fraudulence of the legal scholarship they are currently supporting, the pinnacle will collapse under its own weight. Here's to a sane and rational, socially just and debt-free future for everyone!

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  7. When I read that awkward phrase from andredouglaspondcummings about merging "the two cultural giants of law and rap music," I couldn't help visualizing a colossal two-headed monster. Both of its faces were ugly, sneering, and full of hate for one-headed people.

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  8. Old Guy, may we infer from your account that Adam Lamparello was pimping--so to speak--for this new publication?

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  9. Can't tell me Nothing:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E58qLXBfLrs

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  10. This compilation of worthless, self-indulgent "scholarship" is emblematic of a larger problem in academia, and not just legal academia. Professors of all stripes are having to justify their existence by cranking out books and journal articles that are, for the most part, pure, unadulterated rubbish. I think that law "professors" are the worst offenders in this regard, though, since the law is a pseudo-academic discipline, with no peer review process for publication. Law "professors" are people who trained to be lawyers, but who really want to be social scientists. Except for the handful of legal academics who also have Ph.D.s, these people are total frauds.

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    1. Interestingly enough, it is stated that at the end of every civilization education is at its highest and the most technological and scientific advances occur, although they generally don't mean anything.

      When a civilization first arises and thrives there are few schools. 3 universities are more than enough to serve an entire nation while it is rising. But at the end, there are hundreds.

      Most people don't like studying this history. They may superficially talk about the fall of Rome, but they won't examine why. And Rome will also be the only empire they can think of or mention. If you go back 3000 years and look through each empire's rise and fall, you see some patterns emerge.

      I am rather fond of John Glubb's "Fate of Empires" essay. It's short, about 20 pages or so, pretty easy to find on the internet. If Glubb's thesis is correct, Western civilization does appear to be on its decline (although many others outside of Glubb have mentioned that, and I think Glubb himself died awhile ago).

      This "scholarshit" as Old Guy puts it, is pretty embarrassing. Law schools themselves are rather absurd. I think law schools really proliferated the past couple of decades not solely because of the last decade of student loans, but also because the economy has had major issues for awhile now. 60 years ago people didn't go to college because they had good jobs with just an HS diploma, if you even needed that. 30 years ago just a college degree was fine. Nowadays, even a graduate degree, law or otherwise, guarantees nothing. We have way too much schooling which contributes nothing, it's just intellectual masturbation and keeps the academics employed, at very high wages.

      What does academia really contribute? Half baked nonsense studies? The real R&D is generally taken on by government or in corporate America. We have the equivalent of thousands of monkeys trying to type out Shakespeare nowadays.

      Delete
  11. I propose the following topic for inclusion in Volume 2 of this masterpiece: Articles exploring the frequency with which oh-so-progressive lawprofs produce jargon and gibberish-laden cultural studies in lieu of doing actual pro bono civil rights legal work--which, granted, they are seldom competent to do-- in order to maintain a sense of self-righteousness and intellectual relevance and to justify their own privileges and their exploitation of their students.

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    1. Sure, let's do some formal or informal studies of this. (Most law review trash is extremely informal, by the way.) I'm willing to look at some resumes and see if there's a correlation between using certain words in article or presentation titles on the one hand, and years of genuine practice experience on the other.

      Nancy Leong could be something of an anomaly. She had a couple of summer positions and a one-year fellowship with a lobbying group, which is exceedingly slim practice experience. But others have claimed that she currently does at least some of the pro-bono work mentioned by Dybbuk. I'd prefer to stick with documents like academic resumes, even though they are often inflated, to do such a study.

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    2. For proof of the informality (as you put it) of this risible tome of scholarshit, notice that the bibliography on "Law" and "Hip Hop Literary Theory" combined doesn't fill a page.

      Words such as neo-Rawlsian, cherished by hackademic fakes everywhere, are never used by practitioners, except for the limited but valuable purpose of mocking scholarshit.

      Delete
    3. “Intersectionality” is a fashionable term for cultural or identity studies, often of the Law-and-This-or-That variety. Perhaps because vehicle accidents occur so often at intersections, some of this work conjures up the image of a gruesome collision between ego-drunk law professors and non-law (and, of course, non-peer-reviewed) pseudo-scholarship.

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    4. Does anyone remember Bullshit Bingo? Popularized about twenty years ago, it consisted of bingo cards marked with bits of corporate jargon: "think outside the box", "pro-active", "value added", and the like. During a business meeting, players would check these off as they were used, and the winner would yell out "Bullshit!".

      Which terms would appear in Hackademic Bingo? A few spring to mind:

      Intersectionality
      Neo-Rawlsian
      Critical
      Nexus
      Pluralism
      Post-modern
      Structuralism
      Experiential
      Normativity
      Transformative

      Maybe some enterprising law students will stage a round of Hackademic Bingo during class.

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    5. I wonder how many of these terms are used in legal practice.

      Delete
  12. Ho-tel, Mo-tel, Holiday Inn,
    Say if your girl drops out of school, then you take her friend.



    Well, it's on'n'n'on'n'on on'n'on,
    The beat don't stop until the break of dawn.
    I said D-O-U, G-I-E, a G with a single E,
    I said I go by the unforgettable name
    Of the man they call the Master D.
    Well, my name is known all over the world
    By all the foxy ladies and the pretty girls.
    I'm goin' down in history
    As the baddest law prof there ever could be.
    Now I'm feelin' the highs and you're feelin' the lows,
    The beat starts gettin' into your toes
    You start poppin' your fingers and stompin' your feet
    And movin' your body while while you're sitting in your lecture seat

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  13. Maybe these guys can represent IRL drivers. Indy Race Car driver agents. I heard that they were UNDERSERVED.

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  14. I'm foreseeing an intersectional law review paper coming up:

    "Hip Hop and the Open Road"

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  15. I'd create a fawning five-star Amazon review if it wouldn't come back to haunt me.

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  16. I was curious enough about this book that I wanted to maybe read a little of it. I would not pay 53 bucks to do so I went to my alma mater's library catalog to see if they were dumb enough to buy it. They (Gdub) weren't but a neighboring school's (George Mason's) law library was. Someone even then checked out that book. Maybe they thought it contained wisdom. Or maybe they thought it contained bullshit and wanted to see how bad it was for themselves.

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    1. By all means post a review when you get your hands on the thing. The waiting list must be twenty leagues long.

      Delete
  17. Would someone be kind enough to help an ignorant old guy? I want to know what exactly hip-hop is. How does it differ from rap music?

    There seems to be a lot of so-called music these days that is little more than profanity and monotonous rhythm, possibly embellished by turning a record player the wrong way against the needle:

    Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Ka-boom!
    Ah fuck yo' fathuh and ah fuck yo' mothuh.
    Ah fuck yo' sissuh and ah fuck yo' brothuh.
    Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Ka-boom!

    Is that hip-hop?

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    1. There is a difference? I think maybe hip-hop is just rap with more accompanying acoustic instrumentals. Rap is either just verbal or has a very simple, I think percussion only based, instrumental accompaniment.

      I may have just exposed my own ignorance however. Perhaps the good Dean Pondscum can enlighten us, I know you're reading this Cummings, might as well chime in.

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    2. Hip-hop is the voice of a new generation, and has been for at least 30 years now. Not that it's getting old or anything...

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  18. What I haven't seen emphasized yet is that this isn't even original content - it's merely a collection of previously published work (no doubt all or almost all available for free individually in various hackademic publications).

    This is recycled garbage. Dougie Fresh can't even be bothered to create original garbage.

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    1. Dougie Fresh actually did contribute a couple of pieces. I haven't bothered to find out whether they were original or recycled.

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    2. Did Lisa McElroy grace us with a contribution?

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    3. "Did Lisa McElroy grace us with a contribution?"

      She'll send a link to it via email.

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  19. The real scam is Dougie Fresh's oversized and largely unearned salary. The book is just another item of paraphernalia that helps him run the scam. I don't think he cares if he makes a penny on the book. On the other hand, he's obviously desperate to keep the salary checks coming.

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  20. And also desperate to pad his CV with publications in hope of escaping the vortex of this soon-to-be-flushed toilet by finding another hackademic job.

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