Terra Extraneus

Fort Hays State University fired its debate coach because he allegedly mooned others attending a debate round between the Fort Hays team and Towson University according to an article posted by the Kansas City Star at their website. A debate coach from the University of Pittsburgh was somehow involved. This allegedly occurred at the CEDA (“Cross Examination Debate Association”) national tournament in 2008. The tournament was attended by about a thousand debaters from colleges around the country, according to CEDA.

Fort Hays State University “dismissed” the debate coach, an “assistant professor of communications,” by holding him to the same standard of conduct that would be applied to a Fort Hays sports coach. That was undoubtedly a good decision. However, I would be willing to bet debate coaches at Fort Hays have never been paid as well as sports coaches.

Fort Hays also suspended its debate program, and this is the actual debacle. Apparently, someone else in the Fort Hays college community desired the budget. Would Fort Hays suspend a sports program because of the dismissal of a coach? Would Fort Hays suspend a sports program until misconduct in the activity was addressed “nationally?” In other words, Fort Hays actually held debate to a higher standard than sports.

CEDA is a relatively small organization, only a handful of colleges are members. Clearly, the organization is going to have to institute conduct guidelines, not just for coaches, but for the activity. Also, CEDA is going to have to negotiate such rules with the National Debate Tournament committee and the American Debate Association.

CEDA’s first national debate tournament (in perspective, something like the NIT) was held in 1986 (the National Debate Tournament started in 1947). The first (and the second) national champion of CEDA was coached by Scott Nobles, one of the debaters from Southeastern Oklahoma State University that won the first National Debate Tournament in 1947 at West Point. The first team from Oklahoma to win a CEDA national championship won in 1990 and was from the University of Central Oklahoma (then called Central State) and was coached by Doug Duke, one of Oklahoma’s great debate coaches. The University of Oklahoma won the tournament in 2007 when the tournament was hosted by OU (the tournament director was from the University of Miami so there was not likely much “home court” advantage). It was not until the 2000s that the CEDA tournament was considered by the same colleges that tend to dominate the National Debate Tournament.

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Here’s a fascinating webpage with images of 54 famous trials, and links to hundreds of additional pages of info about each of them. One Oklahoma trial is included. Can you guess which one? (Answer below)

The 54 trials start with the trial of Socrates, 399 B.C., and end with the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 9-11 terrorist. The website was created by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. (Answer to Oklahoma question: the 1997 trials of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.)

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• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

Terra Extraneus happily adds seven more entries to our list of Oklahoma Law Blogs. Six are based in Tulsa, which had been poorly represented on our Oklahoma Law Blogs directory. We now list 19 blogs: 9 in OKC, 8 in Tulsa, and 1 each in Paul’s Valley and Pine Ridge.

The newest additions come thanks to some help from a few friends. Michael Bates at the popular BatesLine blog was the first to join us in sounding the call for Sooner State blawgs. J.M. Branum of JMBzine.com also mentioned our quest. Bates and Branum were also kind enough to point us in the direction of law blogs they knew about. Thanks also to Jim Calloway at the OBA, who mentioned our directory on the OBA.net forum, which brought us a few more responses.

Here are the seven Oklahoma law blogs newly added to our list:

• Reinsurance Law Blog: Jody R. Nathan is a Tulsa attorney at Stauffer, Graves & Nathan. The firm works in insurance-related cases. Nathan has been writing the blog since Feb. 2006.

• Oklahoma Criminal Defense: Tulsa defense attorney Glen R. Graham has also been writing his blog since 2006. Graham is a frequent blogger on a variety of legal topics.

• Tulsa attorney Dan Nunley reports that he is now writing four law blogs. I mentioned Nunley’s Oklahoma Family Law blog in Part Two of this series. Nunley followed up in an email to tell us that he recently started three more blogs to promote his other practice areas: Personal Injury Lawyer Blog, Social Security Disability Blog and Workers’ Compensation Blog.

It will be interesting to see if Nunley can write quality posts for four blogs and keep them all up-to-date. He has been posting once or twice a month with consistency for almost two years. If he follows that pace on all four blogs, he will still be writing less than 10 posts a month, which is certainly doable.

• Jeffrey Taylor is an Oklahoma City University Law School grad who just took his bar exam last week. Taylor plans to enter private practice, and he has gotten a jump on his law marketing by beginning a blog, Legally Easy, at the beginning of this year. Taylor plans to practice in personal injury, business development and protection, and family law.

• Last by hardly least in today’s batch of law blogs is the Bill Kumpe Blog. Bill Kumpe is a Tulsa attorney who has been blogging since July 2006. Kumpe’s blog is by far the most interesting of the bunch. Kumpe passes along his strong opinions about the law, politics and the Christian faith. He brags, “My redneck Okie credentials are impeccable.” I’m not sure, but I think the very use of a four-syllable word like “impeccable” may disqualify you as a redneck, Bill. Kumpe and his blog are interesting enough that I believe I will review it further in a separate post.

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If you know of any Oklahoma law blogs, please tell us about them in the comments section. Our goal is to assemble the most complete list possible of active Okie law blogs.

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If you use Sitemeter on your blog or website, it is probably causing problems when people visit using Internet Explorer 7. The problem began on Friday and remains unsolved Saturday afternoon.

I took a day off yesterday and was away from my computers, so I only learned about the problem this morning. When IE7 users click on many Sitemeter-using sites, an error message displays: “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://___. Operation aborted.” Apparently some IE6 users are having the same problems.

I tried going to the Sitemeter website for an announcement, but I got the same error message there. Apparently Sitemeter changed something in its code on Friday. Many bloggers are blaming IE7 for the problem and are using this as an opportunity to promote its chief competitor, FireFox. However, 54% of all pages are viewed through Internet Explorer, so if you want your site to be accessible to most visitors, it won’t help to curse IE.

To prevent your visitors from having problems (and leaving your site in disgust), temporarily disable Sitemeter on your site. If you know how to access your sidebar or footer or homepage (or wherever else you display your Sitemeter), it is an easy fix. Just add < ! - - before the Site meter code and - - > after the code. That’s the HTML tag designers use to leave comments in the code that are not displayed online. That will prevent your Sitemeter from displaying. Then, when the problem is resolved, go back and remove that little bit of before-and-after code.

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LATER AUG. 2: Sitemeter says the problem is solved. I will restore Sitemeter operations on our site and hope for the best.

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