Oh Shit, Here We Go Again W/ KeyStone Pipeline:
Thousands demand action on climate change
Obama has pledged repeatedly to tackle climate change. In his State of the Union Address, he gave Congress an ultimatum: if lawmakers don't act, he will. Protesters say they are holding him to his word. They want him to not only reject the pipeline but also set limits on carbon pollution from both new and existing power plants. Last year, the EPA proposed limits only on new plants.
In January 2012, Obama rejected the initial 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Port Arthur, Texas, saying he needed more time for environmental review. Since the project crosses a U.S. border, it needs a permit from the State Department, but Obama has said he'll make the final call.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, which has helped galvanize significant grass-roots opposition to the proposal, said Obama cannot ignore that the carbon-intensive process of extracting crude from Alberta’s oil sands will destabilize the planet.
“Whether it’s convenient or not for our politicians, this is the test,” McKibben said in an interview before being arrested, adding that Wednesday’s protest and a climate rally slated to take place Sunday in Washington were designed “just to keep this in front of people’s minds. . . . This is the first environmental issue that’s brought Americans into the streets in many, many years.”
Report: Former SEC employees helping to shield corporations from regulations
Between 2001 and 2010, some 419 former SEC employees filed almost 2,000 disclosure statements indicating their intent to contact the commission on behalf of a new employer or client, the group found.
“The revolving door between the SEC and the firms it oversees is so pervasive that it threatens the integrity of our regulatory system,” said Michael Smallberg, the report’s author. “The relentless flow of SEC officials to and from industry can enable powerhouse firms to shape the SEC’s culture and sway policies.”
Courting an education: New lawyers find programs to help them in court
"There's only so much that law schools can do," said Bryn Vaaler, the professional-services partner for the Minneapolis firm Dorsey & Whitney. "There are a lot of things we're better equipped to do than law schools. Law school is the place to get the theory of law."
Dorsey puts its associates to work on pro bono, or no-fee, cases and offers internal training through its "Dorsey U" program with senior members. Fredrikson & Byron, another Minneapolis firm, offers similar training and encourages young attorneys to participate in the federal "Pro Se Project" that helps individuals with limited financial means.
The Nilan Johnson Lewis law firm in Minneapolis participates with Felhaber in mock-court exercises. Fish & Richardson, like Felhaber and Dorsey, sends associates to work in the city attorney's office.
Taking It All In: On Declining Attention Spans in Today's Modern World
Discussion of the declining attention spans of today’s population seems to be a topic of perennial popularity, and the matter has been addressed by various academics from the humanities to the sciences too. But what is the real impact of changing ways of taking in information and what does it mean for the media?
Our shrinking law schools
According to the Law School Admission Council, the nation’s 200 law schools project just 54,000 applications for fall 2013 — a decline of nearly half since 2004. It’s the clearest indication yet of legal academia’s busted business model.
Why Stop Blaming The Law School Bubble On The 2007 Financial Crisis (Why Not?)
Existing schools are under pressure to cut costs and boost enrollment. In 2012 the number of first-year students entering law school fell 8.6% from 2011, according to the ABA.
Many established schools are luring elite students with scholarships in an effort to maintain their rankings. Some experts predict that some schools will be forced to close their doors if current enrollment trends continue. Mr. Currier said no ABA-approved school that he knows of has shut down in the past four decades.
"The notion that we need to open more F'ing law schools is absolutely F'ing crazy," said Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado who contributes to a blog called "Inside the Law School Scam." The current law-school model is unsustainable, given that "there are at least two F'ing graduates for every F'ing available legal job," he said, adding that educators launching new schools are "blind to the economic realities."
Dr Carl Heneghan, the director of Oxford University's Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine who has worked on research showing how childhood obesity negatively affects the heart, said the initiative would be a good way for the government to raise money, but would not provide a comprehensive approach to the obesity epidemic.
FICO Labs: U.S. Student Loan Delinquencies Climbing Fast, Showing No Signs of Slowing
The delinquency rate today on student loans that were originated from 2005-2007 is 12.4 percent. The comparable figure for student loans that were originated from 2010-2012 is 15.1 percent, representing an increase in the delinquency rate by nearly 22 percent.
While the delinquency rate is climbing, the average amount of student loan debt is increasing even faster. In 2005, the average U.S. student loan debt was $17,233. By 2012, it had ballooned to more than $27,253 – an increase of 58 percent in seven years. By contrast, the average credit card balance and the average balance on car loans owed by U.S. consumers actually decreased during the same period.
"This situation is simply unsustainable and we're already suffering the consequences," said Dr. Andrew Jennings, FICO's chief analytics officer and head of FICO Labs. "When wage growth is slow and jobs are not as plentiful as they once were, it is impossible for individuals to continue taking out ever-larger student loans without greatly increasing the risk of default. There is no way around that harsh reality."
Student Loan Consequences: Real, Costly, and Personal
The consequences of making low-interest loans to unqualified buyers created the real-estate bubble that popped in 2007, resulting in the Great Recession. According to Gary Jason at the American Thinker, it’s about to happen again, only this time over student loans. He wrote: “This bubble has been fueled by the federal government’s lavish subsidization of the student loan program … in a way similar to how the housing bubble was fueled by government agencies pushing subprime mortgages.”
Under the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) signed into law as part of ObamaCare in March of 2010, students may borrow money directly from the federal government regardless of their credit score or any other financial “issues” they may be facing.
U.K. targets Google, Amazon, Starbucks on taxes (Tax law may be a good area to practice)
In a report published Monday, the public accounts committee said the evidence provided by Google, Amazon and Starbucks was generally "unconvincing" and drew the conclusion that multinationals were exploiting existing legislation to move offshore profits generated from activity in the U.K.
Apple, Google, Amazon Pay Corporate Income Tax Well Below Official Rate
The report argues that Apple, which reported profit of $13 billion in its latest quarter, paid just 9.8 percent of its 2011 income in taxes. Apple, the world's most valuable company, is one of many blue-chip tech companies whose 2011 federal income taxes checked in at something well below the marginal 35 percent corporate rate.
Also See Tax Evasion Model #1: Frank Lucas: (Lucas is the model that all of the S&P 500 corporations, Congress, Senate and various other entities use for inspiration)
Lucas has been quoted as saying that his worth was "something like $52 million", most of it in Cayman Islands banks. Added to this is "maybe 1,000 keys (kilograms), (2,200 pounds), of dope on hand" with a potential profit of no less than $300,000 per kilo (per 2.2 lb).
This huge profit margin allowed him to buy property all over the country, including office buildings in Detroit, and apartments in Los Angeles and Miami. He also bought a several-thousand-acre ranch in North Carolina on which he ranged 300 head of Black Angus cattle, including a breeding bull worth $125,000.
Federal judge Sterling Johnson, who was special narcotics prosecutor in New York at the time of Lucas' crimes, called Lucas' operation "one of the most outrageous international dope-smuggling gangs ever, an innovator who got his own connections outside the U.S. and then sold the narcotics himself in the street." He had connections with the Five Families, holding an enormous monopoly on the heroin market in Manhattan. In an interview, Lucas said, "I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be Donald Trump rich, and so help me God, I made it."
Inflation, Money Supply, GDP, Unemployment and the Dollar - Alternate Data Series
Filtering out noise
Thousands demand action on climate change
Obama has pledged repeatedly to tackle climate change. In his State of the Union Address, he gave Congress an ultimatum: if lawmakers don't act, he will. Protesters say they are holding him to his word. They want him to not only reject the pipeline but also set limits on carbon pollution from both new and existing power plants. Last year, the EPA proposed limits only on new plants.
In January 2012, Obama rejected the initial 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Port Arthur, Texas, saying he needed more time for environmental review. Since the project crosses a U.S. border, it needs a permit from the State Department, but Obama has said he'll make the final call.
Activists arrested at White House protesting Keystone pipeline
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, which has helped galvanize significant grass-roots opposition to the proposal, said Obama cannot ignore that the carbon-intensive process of extracting crude from Alberta’s oil sands will destabilize the planet.
“Whether it’s convenient or not for our politicians, this is the test,” McKibben said in an interview before being arrested, adding that Wednesday’s protest and a climate rally slated to take place Sunday in Washington were designed “just to keep this in front of people’s minds. . . . This is the first environmental issue that’s brought Americans into the streets in many, many years.”
Report: Former SEC employees helping to shield corporations from regulations
Between 2001 and 2010, some 419 former SEC employees filed almost 2,000 disclosure statements indicating their intent to contact the commission on behalf of a new employer or client, the group found.
“The revolving door between the SEC and the firms it oversees is so pervasive that it threatens the integrity of our regulatory system,” said Michael Smallberg, the report’s author. “The relentless flow of SEC officials to and from industry can enable powerhouse firms to shape the SEC’s culture and sway policies.”
Courting an education: New lawyers find programs to help them in court
"There's only so much that law schools can do," said Bryn Vaaler, the professional-services partner for the Minneapolis firm Dorsey & Whitney. "There are a lot of things we're better equipped to do than law schools. Law school is the place to get the theory of law."
Dorsey puts its associates to work on pro bono, or no-fee, cases and offers internal training through its "Dorsey U" program with senior members. Fredrikson & Byron, another Minneapolis firm, offers similar training and encourages young attorneys to participate in the federal "Pro Se Project" that helps individuals with limited financial means.
The Nilan Johnson Lewis law firm in Minneapolis participates with Felhaber in mock-court exercises. Fish & Richardson, like Felhaber and Dorsey, sends associates to work in the city attorney's office.
Will texting law students with Attention Deficit Issues have future value in society? More than likely, you wont be alone and your clients will be total idiots (too).
Amadeus Script
lt's entirely new. lt's so new
that people will go mad for it.
l have scenes....
The end of the second act,
for example....
lt's a simple duet...
...just a husband and a wife quarreling.
Suddenly...
...the wife's scheming little maid
comes in. lt's a very funny situation.
Duet turns into trio.
The valet enters.
He's plotting with the maid.
Trio turns into quartet.
Then a gardener comes in.
Quartet becomes quintet,
and so on and on...
...sextet, septet, octet.
How long do you think
l can sustain that?
l have no idea.
Guess.
Guess, Your Majesty.
lmagine the longest
it could be sustained...
...then double it.
?
minutes.
minutes?
sire! minutes!
minutes of continuous music.
No recitatives!
Only opera can do this.
ln a play, if more than one person
speaks at once...
...it's just noise.
No one can understand a word.
But with opera, with music....
With music you can have individuals
all talking at the same time.
And it's not noise.
lt's a perfect harmony!
Taking It All In: On Declining Attention Spans in Today's Modern World
Discussion of the declining attention spans of today’s population seems to be a topic of perennial popularity, and the matter has been addressed by various academics from the humanities to the sciences too. But what is the real impact of changing ways of taking in information and what does it mean for the media?
According to the Law School Admission Council, the nation’s 200 law schools project just 54,000 applications for fall 2013 — a decline of nearly half since 2004. It’s the clearest indication yet of legal academia’s busted business model.
Why Stop Blaming The Law School Bubble On The 2007 Financial Crisis (Why Not?)
Existing schools are under pressure to cut costs and boost enrollment. In 2012 the number of first-year students entering law school fell 8.6% from 2011, according to the ABA.
Many established schools are luring elite students with scholarships in an effort to maintain their rankings. Some experts predict that some schools will be forced to close their doors if current enrollment trends continue. Mr. Currier said no ABA-approved school that he knows of has shut down in the past four decades.
"The notion that we need to open more F'ing law schools is absolutely F'ing crazy," said Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado who contributes to a blog called "Inside the Law School Scam." The current law-school model is unsustainable, given that "there are at least two F'ing graduates for every F'ing available legal job," he said, adding that educators launching new schools are "blind to the economic realities."
Debate on soda tax bubbles up in UK (laws against fatty foods)
Dental problems, heart disease, and type-II diabetes are some of the most prevalent health problems linked to obesity and high-sugar diets. The American Heart Association recommends an added sugar intake of no more than 36 grams per day for adult men; one 12-ounce (355ml) can of Coca Cola contains 39 grams.Dr Carl Heneghan, the director of Oxford University's Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine who has worked on research showing how childhood obesity negatively affects the heart, said the initiative would be a good way for the government to raise money, but would not provide a comprehensive approach to the obesity epidemic.
Will The Continuation Of The Great Recession & The Impending Student Loan Bubble Impact The Economy in 2013?
FICO Labs: U.S. Student Loan Delinquencies Climbing Fast, Showing No Signs of Slowing
The delinquency rate today on student loans that were originated from 2005-2007 is 12.4 percent. The comparable figure for student loans that were originated from 2010-2012 is 15.1 percent, representing an increase in the delinquency rate by nearly 22 percent.
While the delinquency rate is climbing, the average amount of student loan debt is increasing even faster. In 2005, the average U.S. student loan debt was $17,233. By 2012, it had ballooned to more than $27,253 – an increase of 58 percent in seven years. By contrast, the average credit card balance and the average balance on car loans owed by U.S. consumers actually decreased during the same period.
"This situation is simply unsustainable and we're already suffering the consequences," said Dr. Andrew Jennings, FICO's chief analytics officer and head of FICO Labs. "When wage growth is slow and jobs are not as plentiful as they once were, it is impossible for individuals to continue taking out ever-larger student loans without greatly increasing the risk of default. There is no way around that harsh reality."
Student Loan Consequences: Real, Costly, and Personal
The consequences of making low-interest loans to unqualified buyers created the real-estate bubble that popped in 2007, resulting in the Great Recession. According to Gary Jason at the American Thinker, it’s about to happen again, only this time over student loans. He wrote: “This bubble has been fueled by the federal government’s lavish subsidization of the student loan program … in a way similar to how the housing bubble was fueled by government agencies pushing subprime mortgages.”
Under the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) signed into law as part of ObamaCare in March of 2010, students may borrow money directly from the federal government regardless of their credit score or any other financial “issues” they may be facing.
U.K. targets Google, Amazon, Starbucks on taxes (Tax law may be a good area to practice)
In a report published Monday, the public accounts committee said the evidence provided by Google, Amazon and Starbucks was generally "unconvincing" and drew the conclusion that multinationals were exploiting existing legislation to move offshore profits generated from activity in the U.K.
Apple, Google, Amazon Pay Corporate Income Tax Well Below Official Rate
The report argues that Apple, which reported profit of $13 billion in its latest quarter, paid just 9.8 percent of its 2011 income in taxes. Apple, the world's most valuable company, is one of many blue-chip tech companies whose 2011 federal income taxes checked in at something well below the marginal 35 percent corporate rate.
Also See Tax Evasion Model #1: Frank Lucas: (Lucas is the model that all of the S&P 500 corporations, Congress, Senate and various other entities use for inspiration)
Lucas has been quoted as saying that his worth was "something like $52 million", most of it in Cayman Islands banks. Added to this is "maybe 1,000 keys (kilograms), (2,200 pounds), of dope on hand" with a potential profit of no less than $300,000 per kilo (per 2.2 lb).
This huge profit margin allowed him to buy property all over the country, including office buildings in Detroit, and apartments in Los Angeles and Miami. He also bought a several-thousand-acre ranch in North Carolina on which he ranged 300 head of Black Angus cattle, including a breeding bull worth $125,000.
Federal judge Sterling Johnson, who was special narcotics prosecutor in New York at the time of Lucas' crimes, called Lucas' operation "one of the most outrageous international dope-smuggling gangs ever, an innovator who got his own connections outside the U.S. and then sold the narcotics himself in the street." He had connections with the Five Families, holding an enormous monopoly on the heroin market in Manhattan. In an interview, Lucas said, "I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be Donald Trump rich, and so help me God, I made it."
Inflation, Money Supply, GDP, Unemployment and the Dollar - Alternate Data Series
The reality of an on-going Great Recession most likely will have an impact on many budgets, including law schools ... Best of luck.
"Once you decide on your occupation, you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably. — Jiro"
Tracking lawyers
Most sites that you'd want to use now offer an encrypted connection option, usually termed as "HTTPS" or "SSL." If a site doesn't have that option, and it's holding your personal data, consider whether you really need to be using that service. Here are the services for which you should definitely enable the secure/https option:
Gmail: Secure connections are usually a default now, but double-check: head into Settings, look under "Browser connection," and ensure that "Always use https" is enabled. (Be sure, too, that you've enabled two-step verification for your Google account, Gmail included.
Facebook: Recently offered, and not enabled by default. To make use of it, click the Account link on any Facebook page while logged in, head to Account Settings, then, under "Account Security", hit the change button and check the box that says "Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible." Hit the Save button and head elsewhere.
When you search Google
Tracking lawyers
Most sites that you'd want to use now offer an encrypted connection option, usually termed as "HTTPS" or "SSL." If a site doesn't have that option, and it's holding your personal data, consider whether you really need to be using that service. Here are the services for which you should definitely enable the secure/https option:
Gmail: Secure connections are usually a default now, but double-check: head into Settings, look under "Browser connection," and ensure that "Always use https" is enabled. (Be sure, too, that you've enabled two-step verification for your Google account, Gmail included.
Facebook: Recently offered, and not enabled by default. To make use of it, click the Account link on any Facebook page while logged in, head to Account Settings, then, under "Account Security", hit the change button and check the box that says "Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible." Hit the Save button and head elsewhere.
When you search Google
Continually Lost in 2013 Chaos
What Can The President Do When Congress Gives Him a “Trilemma” of Unconstitutional Choices?
If the President later seizes the authority to start cutting authorized spending, then those legislative compromises will suddenly be thrown out the window. The President would then be imposing his priorities on the budgetary balances that Congress enacted into law.
This, indeed, is why the Constitution requires that spending be made in full, rather than “up to” a certain amount. Allowing the President to reduce spending, at his discretion, would give him legislative power that he should not wield. The courts held that President Nixon violated his authority when he tried to “impound” funds forty years ago, and the Supreme Court held during the Clinton Presidency that even Congress itself cannot give the President the authority to cut spending at his discretion, through a line-item veto.
Dem lawmakers say courts should resolve debt-limit standoff
Udall believes the debt limit, which was created by the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, clashes with landmark legislation such as the Social Security Act of 1935, the Medicare Act of 1965 and various appropriations laws that direct the executive branch to spend federal funds on an array of priorities.
If Obama or Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner were to suspend payment for various government programs, they would ignore Congress’s previously expressed wishes, he argues.
Twenty-one House Democrats have signed a draft letter urging Obama to invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to raise the debt limit unilaterally if Republicans demand steep cuts to entitlement programs in return for expanding borrowing authority.
“The president will not increase borrowing authority without congressional approval. There will be a partial government shutdown,” he said.
“If Congress were to authorize spending that exceeds tax collection by $1 trillion in a year, at a time when the existing federal debt is only one-half trillion dollars below its statutory ceiling, then the president could not execute all three laws as written. Faced with that impossible choice, the president risks acting unconstitutionally no matter what he might do,” Dorf and co-author Neil H. Buchanan, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in a Columbia Law Review article.
"Section 4 of the 14th Amendment is not about default, it's about repudiation of the debt. It was passed in the wake of the Civil War with the single purpose of ensuring that when Southern representatives were readmitted to Congress that they could not repudiate the war debt," he said. "Repudiation is not the same as default."
Briefly, exo means outside; exopolitics therefore, for our purpose, politics outside politics. Because politics outside politics is emerging as the core phenomenon of American culture. And on the scale at which we are experiencing it it is novel.
So: the biggies: The Tea Party. The Occupy movement. And now, what I have begun to call the Internet Party, which brought down the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate equivalent in a way unparalleled in history. There are other exo-phenomena to be noted, especially the huge rallies promoted and led by cable news stars in Washington in the summer of 2010. Point is: these forces are emerging outside of and, while influencing, largely remaining outside of the normal political processes of which they are critical.
About Nicole Wells
Nicole Wells turned her greatest fear — public speaking — into her greatest passion, and has since taught thousands of professionals to do the same. She coaches individuals and groups from Fortune 500 companies, major Law Firms and leaders in the marketing, branding and financial services industries. Nicole has been an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Stern School of Business as well as the School for Professional and Continuing Studies (SPCS), where she taught Organizational Communication and Speaking Without Fear.
The Shock of the Loss of Personal Narrative
Law school is not about the self in part because it is about the client. This is not always readily apparent to 1Ls, but the reason they are being taught to abandon their instinctive sense of justice is so that they can craft succesful arguments that resonate with the purportedly objective, rational system of the laws (and powerful legal actors, including judges). And they will make these arguments, of course, on behalf of their clients.
It is also not about the self in the sense that Elizabeth Mertz observed the implicit values orientation of legal education, which I described in an earlier post as follows:
"In learning to speak [the] language [of law] and “think like a lawyer,” law students must embrace an abstract, professional identity that is divorced from any sense of identity that is different or particular to a given community."
Moron Faculty urged to turn student material requirements in on time
The University Book Store sent a friendly reminder to UW faculty at the Faculty Senate meeting to remember to turn in their books on time to help students plan budget for materials during their registration.
By state and federal law, universities are required to provide students with advance notice of the cost of books and materials for courses. However, recently, some members of the UW faculty have not been sending in their course material information on time, or at all, which results in unforseen costs for students.
UW senior DJ Nikaitani said, over the course of his four years at the UW, he has had three to four classes in which the instructor waited until the first day of class to inform students of what the required course books were. Nikaitani said that because he could not plan to purchase his books in advance, he ended up paying more for required materials.
“It’s annoying,” (and illegal) he said. “If you have more time to look for good deals, you will obviously get a cheaper price. But if the teacher tells you on the first day, and you have reading assignments a week from then, you have to pay a higher price because you cannot wait for shipping from Chegg or Amazon.
==> Example: 1L Survival Guide - Tips on Navigating your 1st year at UW Law School
Required Textbooks on MyUW
Many professors submit textbook information to MyUW. Click on the Academics tab to see a list of your courses with required texts.
==> Don't forget to buy (or rent) your text books on-line.... early, from places like Campus Books!
Smartphone addiction disrupts Canadians' lives (Will Smartphones impact law schools?)
The interdependence of smartphone and user is spawning a whole new spectrum of pathologies.
Nomophobia, a state of anxiety experienced when separated from one’s smartphone, affects 65 to 66 per cent of users, according to recent studies in Canada and the U.K.
n South Korea, the government has reported 11 per cent of Korean children have been diagnosed for smartphone addiction, and clinics and educations programs are being set up to deal with the problem.
Dysfunction issues forchildren law students include disruptions in school, social isolation, compulsive use and massive phone bills
Wilkes University finds large number of law students text in class
Director of UW-Madison’s Center for Communication Research Joanne Cantor said (law) students who actively text message while in class are not effectively processing lecture information.
“Research shows that your brain can’t divide its attention, so while you’re texting or even just reading a text you are not able to process the information presented,” Cantor said.
Cantor added the bits and pieces students may pick up on is processed at a much lower level of the brain than if the student were paying full attention.
A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin in the Spring of 2009 showed similar texting trends among students on this campus, said Brian Rust, the Communications Director for UW’s Division of Information Technology.
A guide to surviving law school
With swarms of friends made at university, students often begin their vocational legal study minded not to make a huge effort to socialise with their peers. It's a mistake, says LPC graduate Cat Pond, who's currently working as a paralegal at Constituency Management Group. "Make allies in your class," urges Pond. "Not only will you have someone to drink (fresh juice) with but they may very well end up being a better teacher than the one actually hired by your college. Law students are surprisingly great at tutoring each other, and if you find yourself baffled by promissory estoppel in land law class then chances are your mate across the room may be an expert."
A law school survival guide
Even if you feel confident that you want to specialize, push yourself to take other types of courses as well. You never know if, during your third year, you're going to become the center of a political fight, and your life and career plans are going to change. OK, that's probably not a normal occurrence, but you see my point: Plans change, so don't get too focused too early.
Are Odd Electives a Waste?
In a visit this fall to the University of Wyoming, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia urged students to avoid "frill" courses whose titles begin with "Law and..."
"Professors like certain subjects that they're writing a book on, so they teach a course in that subject," Justice Scalia said.
His colleague on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, has poked fun at legal academia's fascination with the arcane.
"Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something, which I'm sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn't of much help to the bar," he said in a speech at a judicial conference last year.
The Best Jobs For Women In 2013
... Interestingly, most of these jobs are high-level professional jobs requiring a major education and time commitment. For example, lawyers and judges and top-level managers and executives—jobs known for long hours and a lot of stress—have some of the highest satisfaction levels among women.
Shatkin says these types of jobs offer a high level of intellectual satisfaction, and, because more education typically results in higher pay, the women are able to feel more secure and fairly compensated. Furthermore, he says the trend of hiring more professional support staff unburdens them from much of the grunt work.
How Many Yale Law Students Does It Take To Figure Out How To Pee?
In fairness, peeing at Yale Law School is a pretty big issue. In the past, students haven’t been able to figure out precisely where to do it. Since Yale Law women have had problems peeing properly in the past, maybe it’s not weird for a Yale Law man to ask a woman on proper bathroom procedure. From the Wall: ...
Tech Addictions, Neurological Disorder & Economic Chaos
Above the Law’s 2012 Lawyer of the Year Competition: The Finalists!
Without further ado, here are the nominees for Above the Law’s 2012 Lawyer of the Year. We’ve listed them in alphabetical order, with a brief blurb about each:
Benula Bensam: The winner of July’s Lawyer of the Month title, this Cardozo law student’s got enough kookiness to rival that of any lawyer. After being reprimanded for sending notes to Judge Jed Rakoff during the Rajat Gupta trial, she decided to sue everyone and their mother for taking her cell phone. Her family must be so proud of her legal exploits....
Six of the best law books
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Somewhere in the new Rolls Building, a modern Jarndyce v Jarndyce is doubtless lumbering - or perhaps the Technology and Construction Court is hosting a particularly lengthy dispute involving tree roots. Dickens was a court reporter for four years and undoubtedly drew on his experiences, particularly at the Old Bailey, for his fiction - this coining trial may have inspired part of Great Expectations.
What Can The President Do When Congress Gives Him a “Trilemma” of Unconstitutional Choices?
If the President later seizes the authority to start cutting authorized spending, then those legislative compromises will suddenly be thrown out the window. The President would then be imposing his priorities on the budgetary balances that Congress enacted into law.
This, indeed, is why the Constitution requires that spending be made in full, rather than “up to” a certain amount. Allowing the President to reduce spending, at his discretion, would give him legislative power that he should not wield. The courts held that President Nixon violated his authority when he tried to “impound” funds forty years ago, and the Supreme Court held during the Clinton Presidency that even Congress itself cannot give the President the authority to cut spending at his discretion, through a line-item veto.
Dem lawmakers say courts should resolve debt-limit standoff
Udall believes the debt limit, which was created by the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, clashes with landmark legislation such as the Social Security Act of 1935, the Medicare Act of 1965 and various appropriations laws that direct the executive branch to spend federal funds on an array of priorities.
If Obama or Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner were to suspend payment for various government programs, they would ignore Congress’s previously expressed wishes, he argues.
Twenty-one House Democrats have signed a draft letter urging Obama to invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to raise the debt limit unilaterally if Republicans demand steep cuts to entitlement programs in return for expanding borrowing authority.
“The president will not increase borrowing authority without congressional approval. There will be a partial government shutdown,” he said.
“If Congress were to authorize spending that exceeds tax collection by $1 trillion in a year, at a time when the existing federal debt is only one-half trillion dollars below its statutory ceiling, then the president could not execute all three laws as written. Faced with that impossible choice, the president risks acting unconstitutionally no matter what he might do,” Dorf and co-author Neil H. Buchanan, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in a Columbia Law Review article.
"Section 4 of the 14th Amendment is not about default, it's about repudiation of the debt. It was passed in the wake of the Civil War with the single purpose of ensuring that when Southern representatives were readmitted to Congress that they could not repudiate the war debt," he said. "Repudiation is not the same as default."
The New America: Exopolitics Emerging
Briefly, exo means outside; exopolitics therefore, for our purpose, politics outside politics. Because politics outside politics is emerging as the core phenomenon of American culture. And on the scale at which we are experiencing it it is novel.
So: the biggies: The Tea Party. The Occupy movement. And now, what I have begun to call the Internet Party, which brought down the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate equivalent in a way unparalleled in history. There are other exo-phenomena to be noted, especially the huge rallies promoted and led by cable news stars in Washington in the summer of 2010. Point is: these forces are emerging outside of and, while influencing, largely remaining outside of the normal political processes of which they are critical.
About Nicole Wells
Nicole Wells turned her greatest fear — public speaking — into her greatest passion, and has since taught thousands of professionals to do the same. She coaches individuals and groups from Fortune 500 companies, major Law Firms and leaders in the marketing, branding and financial services industries. Nicole has been an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Stern School of Business as well as the School for Professional and Continuing Studies (SPCS), where she taught Organizational Communication and Speaking Without Fear.
The Shock of the Loss of Personal Narrative
Law school is not about the self in part because it is about the client. This is not always readily apparent to 1Ls, but the reason they are being taught to abandon their instinctive sense of justice is so that they can craft succesful arguments that resonate with the purportedly objective, rational system of the laws (and powerful legal actors, including judges). And they will make these arguments, of course, on behalf of their clients.
It is also not about the self in the sense that Elizabeth Mertz observed the implicit values orientation of legal education, which I described in an earlier post as follows:
"In learning to speak [the] language [of law] and “think like a lawyer,” law students must embrace an abstract, professional identity that is divorced from any sense of identity that is different or particular to a given community."
Moron Faculty urged to turn student material requirements in on time
The University Book Store sent a friendly reminder to UW faculty at the Faculty Senate meeting to remember to turn in their books on time to help students plan budget for materials during their registration.
By state and federal law, universities are required to provide students with advance notice of the cost of books and materials for courses. However, recently, some members of the UW faculty have not been sending in their course material information on time, or at all, which results in unforseen costs for students.
UW senior DJ Nikaitani said, over the course of his four years at the UW, he has had three to four classes in which the instructor waited until the first day of class to inform students of what the required course books were. Nikaitani said that because he could not plan to purchase his books in advance, he ended up paying more for required materials.
“It’s annoying,” (and illegal) he said. “If you have more time to look for good deals, you will obviously get a cheaper price. But if the teacher tells you on the first day, and you have reading assignments a week from then, you have to pay a higher price because you cannot wait for shipping from Chegg or Amazon.
==> Example: 1L Survival Guide - Tips on Navigating your 1st year at UW Law School
Required Textbooks on MyUW
Many professors submit textbook information to MyUW. Click on the Academics tab to see a list of your courses with required texts.
==> Don't forget to buy (or rent) your text books on-line.... early, from places like Campus Books!
Smartphone addiction disrupts Canadians' lives (Will Smartphones impact law schools?)
The interdependence of smartphone and user is spawning a whole new spectrum of pathologies.
Nomophobia, a state of anxiety experienced when separated from one’s smartphone, affects 65 to 66 per cent of users, according to recent studies in Canada and the U.K.
n South Korea, the government has reported 11 per cent of Korean children have been diagnosed for smartphone addiction, and clinics and educations programs are being set up to deal with the problem.
Dysfunction issues for
Wilkes University finds large number of law students text in class
Director of UW-Madison’s Center for Communication Research Joanne Cantor said (law) students who actively text message while in class are not effectively processing lecture information.
“Research shows that your brain can’t divide its attention, so while you’re texting or even just reading a text you are not able to process the information presented,” Cantor said.
Cantor added the bits and pieces students may pick up on is processed at a much lower level of the brain than if the student were paying full attention.
A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin in the Spring of 2009 showed similar texting trends among students on this campus, said Brian Rust, the Communications Director for UW’s Division of Information Technology.
With swarms of friends made at university, students often begin their vocational legal study minded not to make a huge effort to socialise with their peers. It's a mistake, says LPC graduate Cat Pond, who's currently working as a paralegal at Constituency Management Group. "Make allies in your class," urges Pond. "Not only will you have someone to drink (fresh juice) with but they may very well end up being a better teacher than the one actually hired by your college. Law students are surprisingly great at tutoring each other, and if you find yourself baffled by promissory estoppel in land law class then chances are your mate across the room may be an expert."
A law school survival guide
Even if you feel confident that you want to specialize, push yourself to take other types of courses as well. You never know if, during your third year, you're going to become the center of a political fight, and your life and career plans are going to change. OK, that's probably not a normal occurrence, but you see my point: Plans change, so don't get too focused too early.
Are Odd Electives a Waste?
In a visit this fall to the University of Wyoming, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia urged students to avoid "frill" courses whose titles begin with "Law and..."
"Professors like certain subjects that they're writing a book on, so they teach a course in that subject," Justice Scalia said.
His colleague on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, has poked fun at legal academia's fascination with the arcane.
"Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something, which I'm sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn't of much help to the bar," he said in a speech at a judicial conference last year.
The Best Jobs For Women In 2013
... Interestingly, most of these jobs are high-level professional jobs requiring a major education and time commitment. For example, lawyers and judges and top-level managers and executives—jobs known for long hours and a lot of stress—have some of the highest satisfaction levels among women.
Shatkin says these types of jobs offer a high level of intellectual satisfaction, and, because more education typically results in higher pay, the women are able to feel more secure and fairly compensated. Furthermore, he says the trend of hiring more professional support staff unburdens them from much of the grunt work.
How Many Yale Law Students Does It Take To Figure Out How To Pee?
In fairness, peeing at Yale Law School is a pretty big issue. In the past, students haven’t been able to figure out precisely where to do it. Since Yale Law women have had problems peeing properly in the past, maybe it’s not weird for a Yale Law man to ask a woman on proper bathroom procedure. From the Wall: ...
Tech Addictions, Neurological Disorder & Economic Chaos
Above the Law’s 2012 Lawyer of the Year Competition: The Finalists!
Without further ado, here are the nominees for Above the Law’s 2012 Lawyer of the Year. We’ve listed them in alphabetical order, with a brief blurb about each:
Benula Bensam: The winner of July’s Lawyer of the Month title, this Cardozo law student’s got enough kookiness to rival that of any lawyer. After being reprimanded for sending notes to Judge Jed Rakoff during the Rajat Gupta trial, she decided to sue everyone and their mother for taking her cell phone. Her family must be so proud of her legal exploits....
Six of the best law books
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Somewhere in the new Rolls Building, a modern Jarndyce v Jarndyce is doubtless lumbering - or perhaps the Technology and Construction Court is hosting a particularly lengthy dispute involving tree roots. Dickens was a court reporter for four years and undoubtedly drew on his experiences, particularly at the Old Bailey, for his fiction - this coining trial may have inspired part of Great Expectations.
Facebook paid £2.9m tax on £840m profits made outside US, figures show (Tax Law Anyone?)
Margaret Hodge, the chair of the public accounts committee, said multinationals had been allowed to get away with "ripping off" taxpayers (everywhere) because of a weak tax authority, poor legislation and a lack of international co-operation.
"Global corporations with huge operations in the UK generating significant amounts of income are getting away with paying little or no corporation tax here (and everywhere else). This is an insult to British business and individuals who pay their fair share.
"Corporation tax revenues have fallen at a time when securing proper income from taxes is more vital than ever. "The inescapable conclusion is that multinationals are using structures and exploiting current tax legislation to move offshore profits that are clearly generated from economic activity in the UK (and everywhere else)," she said.
Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons: Supreme Court Hears Contentious Copyright Case
Justice Stephen Breyer asked Olson whether, without seeking permission, people could resell their foreign cars, libraries could sell or lend books bought from foreign publishers or museums could display paintings by Pablo Picasso. "Those are some of the horribles that they sketch. And if I am looking for the bear in the mouse hole, I look at those horribles, and there I see that bear. So I'm asking you to spend some time telling me why I'm wrong."
Olson did not allay Breyer's concerns with his answer. "I would say that when we talk about all the horribles that might apply in cases other than this, museums, used Toyotas, books and luggage, and that sort of thing, we're not talking about this case."
When Rosenkranz returned to the podium to conclude the argument, he said, "To Justice Breyer's question, the bear is there. It is very much there."
The current case has attracted so much attention because it could affect many goods sold online and in discount stores. The resale of merchandise that originates overseas often is called the gray market, and it has an annual value in the tens of billions of dollars.
More Colorado schools turning to iPad to improve education (Are Robots taking over?)
There's also the possibility that the technology itself can become a distraction from learning. Willingham notes that teachers have come up with some effective uses for other emerging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook — but also some trivial uses.
Apple iPad for Kindergarten Students? Schools Try Them (Are Robots taking over?)
As the school year starts up again, a number of wee ones across the country will be tapping fancy iPads while their peers in neighboring states continue to scribble with their No. 2 pencils. Maine, Tennessee and South Carolina, among other states, have launched iPad programs in kindergarten classrooms. For most schools this means the students will be given iPads to supersedesupplement teacher instruction.
A Beginner's Guide to Legal Education
Those who take legal education rites of passage most seriously contend that the development of highly refined, structured, stylized, rhetorical, argumentative, performative skills can indeed change not only the way we think but also reconfigure our emotional and moral repertoire. With changes in emotional response, cognitive schema, and moral sensibilities, we indeed reformulate the story we tell about who we are. As one classmate told Turow: "They're turning me into someone else. . . . They're making me different." Turow's experience, confirmed by other student accounts of legal education, suggest a psychological and intellectual roller-coaster, at first exhilarating and then debilitating. "Studying, I often feel," Turow says, "as if I'm borne aloft, high just on the power of enlarging knowledge, making connections, grabbing hold. Then, suddenly, I'm close to dread." The early exhilaration for those who set out to learn law is often accompanied by frustration, anxiety, and dread. Turow, after his first weeks at Harvard, felt "[h]arried, fearful, weary" and sometimes "near to panic." Surrounding the work was "a ferocious, grasping sense of uncertainty. . . ." Law school was, for Turow, an "emotional merry-go-round." Legal education dumps us, psychologically, as it locates us literally, in a world of conflict.
Part II: A Hacker's guide on how to prepare for law school and study law
Prepare for law school 1: pre-law school preparation by course or self-study That is, read commercial outlines or hornbooks for each of your classes before you start law school. To understand what your professor is talking about and what you need to write down, since he or she will not be clear about it, you need to be somewhat familiar with the basic rules of each substantive area of law before you start law school.
Prepare for law school 2: Look at old final exams. The first week of law school or even earlier, find a copy of previous final exams given by each of your professors in the subjects they are teaching you. I suggest some helpful law school books here. ==>
How to Succeed in Law School – Student Guide #1
The following article was adapted from a fantastic series of TLS Blog posts by user “JayCutler’sCombover”. This student achieved immense success during 1L at a Tier 2 school; in turn, he was able to transfer to UC Berkeley Law. He generously took the time to detail his successful strategies below... ==>
Resources for preparing for Law School exams
Past exams: Perhaps most importantly, the Library provides copies of past exams given at the Law School, in addition to model student answers and memos written by the professors where available. The exams are organized by course and faculty member. Everything we have been given permission to post is available on the Library website... ==>
H20
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with support from the Harvard Law School Library, has developed a Web-based platform — H2O — for creating, editing, organizing, consuming, and sharing course materials. With this capacity to develop countless customized electronic textbooks, we envision building a corpus of open-source materials available for dynamic use by faculty and students at Harvard and beyond. Piloted with legal casebooks, H2O has been received with broad approval in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s Torts class, with the planned expansion into a number of additional courses in the 2012-2013 school year.
Lawyer Makes His Move in a Return to Chess
Mr. Maher can still recite the cheesy mnemonic devices through which he absorbed new strategies: "Knights on the rim are grim," he repeated during a recent interview.
Other lessons of the game he first encountered through Chess in the Schools have followed him into his profession, including the concept of "zugzwang," a situation in which any allowable move weakens a player's position. It was a good lesson for a would-be lawyer to absorb.
Chess, Mr. Maher said, "forces you to make do with what you have, not to squander your opportunities, and to think ahead."
26 Lessons from a 26 Year Old CEO
Focus is the most underrated skill that you must master. 90 percent of the time, what is on your computer screen is not resulting in a positive ROI. Learn to focus on what truly matters in your business. Then, do it consistently.
Margaret Hodge, the chair of the public accounts committee, said multinationals had been allowed to get away with "ripping off" taxpayers (everywhere) because of a weak tax authority, poor legislation and a lack of international co-operation.
"Global corporations with huge operations in the UK generating significant amounts of income are getting away with paying little or no corporation tax here (and everywhere else). This is an insult to British business and individuals who pay their fair share.
"Corporation tax revenues have fallen at a time when securing proper income from taxes is more vital than ever. "The inescapable conclusion is that multinationals are using structures and exploiting current tax legislation to move offshore profits that are clearly generated from economic activity in the UK (and everywhere else)," she said.
Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons: Supreme Court Hears Contentious Copyright Case
Justice Stephen Breyer asked Olson whether, without seeking permission, people could resell their foreign cars, libraries could sell or lend books bought from foreign publishers or museums could display paintings by Pablo Picasso. "Those are some of the horribles that they sketch. And if I am looking for the bear in the mouse hole, I look at those horribles, and there I see that bear. So I'm asking you to spend some time telling me why I'm wrong."
Olson did not allay Breyer's concerns with his answer. "I would say that when we talk about all the horribles that might apply in cases other than this, museums, used Toyotas, books and luggage, and that sort of thing, we're not talking about this case."
When Rosenkranz returned to the podium to conclude the argument, he said, "To Justice Breyer's question, the bear is there. It is very much there."
The current case has attracted so much attention because it could affect many goods sold online and in discount stores. The resale of merchandise that originates overseas often is called the gray market, and it has an annual value in the tens of billions of dollars.
Media companies fear that most users will opt to stay within Apple's ecosystem and iTunes interface to buy subscriptions, and disallow the sharing of their information unless Apple gives media companies the ability to give them incentives to share details such as a subscriber's name, email address and postcode.
In Australia, publishers have had their iTunes apps rejected for exploiting loopholes that allow them to sell subscriptions and accept payments without giving a share to Apple. Sometimes apps are rejected without an explanation.
Content industry executives, including Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Michael Ephraim, have accused Apple of holding publishers to "ransom". The Online Publishers Association, representing such publishers as Bloomberg and Time, has expressed reservations about Apple's model.
A corporate law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, Shuba Ghosh, told The Wall Street Journal that Apple's rules on pricing could see it face legal issues for anti-competitive behaviour. Similar comments were made by British lawyers to the Daily Telegraph.
Apps make perfect sense for legal professionals — who are always running between the office and the court room — and apps are especially useful to help lawyers stay connected to clients, their office and the justice system while on the go.
Article on eTextbooks in Legal Technology News (Are Robots taking over?)
As I have said before (in the LS2 book and elsewhere), we often think of new technologies as replacing, rather than as being additive. It makes for good media - "the sky is falling," and all that - but more often, new technologies are additive. We still have records and CDs after all. We will still have books - a far more useful technology than either records or CDs - for a long, long time.
More Colorado schools turning to iPad to improve education (Are Robots taking over?)
There's also the possibility that the technology itself can become a distraction from learning. Willingham notes that teachers have come up with some effective uses for other emerging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook — but also some trivial uses.
Apple iPad for Kindergarten Students? Schools Try Them (Are Robots taking over?)
As the school year starts up again, a number of wee ones across the country will be tapping fancy iPads while their peers in neighboring states continue to scribble with their No. 2 pencils. Maine, Tennessee and South Carolina, among other states, have launched iPad programs in kindergarten classrooms. For most schools this means the students will be given iPads to supersede
Ninja Training Is a Cumulative Process
Those who take legal education rites of passage most seriously contend that the development of highly refined, structured, stylized, rhetorical, argumentative, performative skills can indeed change not only the way we think but also reconfigure our emotional and moral repertoire. With changes in emotional response, cognitive schema, and moral sensibilities, we indeed reformulate the story we tell about who we are. As one classmate told Turow: "They're turning me into someone else. . . . They're making me different." Turow's experience, confirmed by other student accounts of legal education, suggest a psychological and intellectual roller-coaster, at first exhilarating and then debilitating. "Studying, I often feel," Turow says, "as if I'm borne aloft, high just on the power of enlarging knowledge, making connections, grabbing hold. Then, suddenly, I'm close to dread." The early exhilaration for those who set out to learn law is often accompanied by frustration, anxiety, and dread. Turow, after his first weeks at Harvard, felt "[h]arried, fearful, weary" and sometimes "near to panic." Surrounding the work was "a ferocious, grasping sense of uncertainty. . . ." Law school was, for Turow, an "emotional merry-go-round." Legal education dumps us, psychologically, as it locates us literally, in a world of conflict.
Part II: A Hacker's guide on how to prepare for law school and study law
Prepare for law school 1: pre-law school preparation by course or self-study That is, read commercial outlines or hornbooks for each of your classes before you start law school. To understand what your professor is talking about and what you need to write down, since he or she will not be clear about it, you need to be somewhat familiar with the basic rules of each substantive area of law before you start law school.
Prepare for law school 2: Look at old final exams. The first week of law school or even earlier, find a copy of previous final exams given by each of your professors in the subjects they are teaching you. I suggest some helpful law school books here. ==>
How to Succeed in Law School – Student Guide #1
The following article was adapted from a fantastic series of TLS Blog posts by user “JayCutler’sCombover”. This student achieved immense success during 1L at a Tier 2 school; in turn, he was able to transfer to UC Berkeley Law. He generously took the time to detail his successful strategies below... ==>
Resources for preparing for Law School exams
Past exams: Perhaps most importantly, the Library provides copies of past exams given at the Law School, in addition to model student answers and memos written by the professors where available. The exams are organized by course and faculty member. Everything we have been given permission to post is available on the Library website... ==>
H20
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with support from the Harvard Law School Library, has developed a Web-based platform — H2O — for creating, editing, organizing, consuming, and sharing course materials. With this capacity to develop countless customized electronic textbooks, we envision building a corpus of open-source materials available for dynamic use by faculty and students at Harvard and beyond. Piloted with legal casebooks, H2O has been received with broad approval in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s Torts class, with the planned expansion into a number of additional courses in the 2012-2013 school year.
Lawyer Makes His Move in a Return to Chess
Mr. Maher can still recite the cheesy mnemonic devices through which he absorbed new strategies: "Knights on the rim are grim," he repeated during a recent interview.
Other lessons of the game he first encountered through Chess in the Schools have followed him into his profession, including the concept of "zugzwang," a situation in which any allowable move weakens a player's position. It was a good lesson for a would-be lawyer to absorb.
Chess, Mr. Maher said, "forces you to make do with what you have, not to squander your opportunities, and to think ahead."
26 Lessons from a 26 Year Old CEO
Focus is the most underrated skill that you must master. 90 percent of the time, what is on your computer screen is not resulting in a positive ROI. Learn to focus on what truly matters in your business. Then, do it consistently.
Why Does This all Keep Coming-Back to Money???
Vt. law school cutting jobs, preparing for changes (Will fewer ninja's result in better ninja's?)
At Top Law Firms, a Class Conflict During Bonus Season
In a twist that will probably delight the 99 percent, these associates, who are in the top 2 percent of wage earners in the country, are getting economically squeezed by other, more important lawyers who are in the top 1 percent. That’s because the partners who own these law firms—most of whom have seen their profits rebound to pre-recession heights—are hoarding a bigger share of the pie than ever before. Yep, the older lawyers who helped structure the instruments that wrecked the economy in the first place and who constantly give sound bites about how worried they are about business prospects are sitting like dragons atop piles of cash. American Lawyer reported that the average profit for a Cravath partner in 2007 was $3.3 million. In 2011 it was back up to $3.1 million.
Too many lawyers? Says who?
The median starting salary for the 36 percent of 2011 law graduates who were in jobs requiring a law degree and whose salary was known was $61,500. This means that fewer than one in five 2011 law school graduates were known to be making at least $61,500 while working as lawyers.
The mean salary for all practicing lawyers was $130,490, compared with $176,550 for corporate chief executives, $189,210 for internists and $79,300 for architects.
These estimates come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which also estimates that 728,200 people were working as lawyers in America in 2010. ABA law schools have issued approximately 1.4 million law degrees over the past 40 years. This suggests that 48 percent of the people who graduated from law schools over the past four decades are not working as lawyers.
Postgraduate Information (Reality Check)
In 2011, 73% of the students graduating from the (Cornell) Bachelor's program went directly into the workforce, at a mean starting salary of $51,648. 24% of the class went directly into postgraduate studies, with 18% going to law school and 6% pursuing other graduate programs. Graduates of the Master's program group earned a mean salary of $84,333, with 92% obtaining employment by the time of graduation and 6% pursuing additional education.
The Perils of Law School
Megan: How much does the rankings system matter in driving up costs?
Paul: It plays a significant role, in that it provides a pragmatic justification for spending ever-more money without regard to the net present value of law degrees. Indeed, the rankings treat spending per student as a direct proxy for institutional quality. So if two schools are identical in other respects but one spends more per capita to get the same results, it will be ranked more highly. You can well imagine what effects this incentive system has.
Megan: That's crazy.
Paul: Yes but extremely profitable for law professors. To quote Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Megan: I take it you've gotten some flak from your fellow law professors for pointing all this out?
Paul: Oh yes of course. Basically legal academia right now is France in 1780, and my lord doesn't care to hear about the supposed troubles of the peasantry.
Vt. law school cutting jobs, preparing for changes (Will fewer ninja's result in better ninja's?)
The declines in numbers at the South Royalton campus reflect a national trend. Word has been spreading in recent years that there are fewer job openings for lawyers. The American Bar Association reported in June that barely half of those who finished law school in 2011 had landed legal jobs within nine months of graduation.
That, in turn, has brought about a 25 percent drop in the numbers of people applying to law schools nationwide during the past two years, according to The National Law Journal.
Campos scoffed at VLS advertising itself as the place to go for people who want to work in public-interest environmental law. Just a tiny percentage of lawyers end up in such jobs, he said. ‘‘You might as well say your career aspiration is to be an NBA power forward,’’ he said.
At Top Law Firms, a Class Conflict During Bonus Season
In a twist that will probably delight the 99 percent, these associates, who are in the top 2 percent of wage earners in the country, are getting economically squeezed by other, more important lawyers who are in the top 1 percent. That’s because the partners who own these law firms—most of whom have seen their profits rebound to pre-recession heights—are hoarding a bigger share of the pie than ever before. Yep, the older lawyers who helped structure the instruments that wrecked the economy in the first place and who constantly give sound bites about how worried they are about business prospects are sitting like dragons atop piles of cash. American Lawyer reported that the average profit for a Cravath partner in 2007 was $3.3 million. In 2011 it was back up to $3.1 million.
Too many lawyers? Says who?
The median starting salary for the 36 percent of 2011 law graduates who were in jobs requiring a law degree and whose salary was known was $61,500. This means that fewer than one in five 2011 law school graduates were known to be making at least $61,500 while working as lawyers.
The mean salary for all practicing lawyers was $130,490, compared with $176,550 for corporate chief executives, $189,210 for internists and $79,300 for architects.
These estimates come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which also estimates that 728,200 people were working as lawyers in America in 2010. ABA law schools have issued approximately 1.4 million law degrees over the past 40 years. This suggests that 48 percent of the people who graduated from law schools over the past four decades are not working as lawyers.
Postgraduate Information (Reality Check)
In 2011, 73% of the students graduating from the (Cornell) Bachelor's program went directly into the workforce, at a mean starting salary of $51,648. 24% of the class went directly into postgraduate studies, with 18% going to law school and 6% pursuing other graduate programs. Graduates of the Master's program group earned a mean salary of $84,333, with 92% obtaining employment by the time of graduation and 6% pursuing additional education.
The Perils of Law School
Megan: How much does the rankings system matter in driving up costs?
Paul: It plays a significant role, in that it provides a pragmatic justification for spending ever-more money without regard to the net present value of law degrees. Indeed, the rankings treat spending per student as a direct proxy for institutional quality. So if two schools are identical in other respects but one spends more per capita to get the same results, it will be ranked more highly. You can well imagine what effects this incentive system has.
Megan: That's crazy.
Paul: Yes but extremely profitable for law professors. To quote Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Megan: I take it you've gotten some flak from your fellow law professors for pointing all this out?
Paul: Oh yes of course. Basically legal academia right now is France in 1780, and my lord doesn't care to hear about the supposed troubles of the peasantry.
For God's Sake, Why is Law School so Confusing?
"First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure." -- Mark Twain
Are Law Students Trapped In a Paradox? (Can scummyness ever be altered?)
Stated simply, the Novikov consistency principle asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. In short, it says that it is impossible to create time paradoxes.
"First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure." -- Mark Twain
Are Law Students Trapped In a Paradox? (Can scummyness ever be altered?)
Stated simply, the Novikov consistency principle asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. In short, it says that it is impossible to create time paradoxes.
CIRAC? Better than IRAC, but still not perfect. (Best Scummy Writing Resource Award)
CIRAC is better than IRAC, but it’s still not perfect. Under CIRAC, the all-important Conclusion is presented early on, which is certainly a good thing and far better than presenting the Conclusion last, as IRAC requires. But CIRAC requires two Conclusions: an opening Conclusion and a final Conclusion. Good writers know that it is probably not wise to write the exact same paragraph twice in a paper. So, under CIRAC, when we write that second and final Conclusion, our instinct tells us to vary the language slightly. The careful reader notices the slight difference and ends up comparing the two Conclusions and asking “How does this final Conclusion differ from the first?” So the final Conclusion ends up undercutting the authority of the opening Conclusion–exactly the result we want to avoid. Except in a very long paper (say 25 pages or more), you should conclude once and once only. And that Conclusion belongs in the opening page and a half of your paper.
IRAC/CRAC
What is it?
• Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion OR Conclusion, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion
• Method for organizing legal analysis so that the reader can follow your argument
• Especially helpful in writing exams (IRAC) and legal memos (CRAC).
Law schools teach IRAC?
IRAC might be taught as the structure for an exam answer, but not for the Discussion in a memo. Modern legal-writing teachers, with few exceptions, left IRAC behind long ago. If any acronym is used in “many law schools” to teach the organizational structure of the Discussion section of a memo, it’s probably CREAC (Conclusion, Rule, Explanation, Application, Counter-analysis).
The First Year of Law School - American Bar Association
Your first year will still be a challenging ordeal. The first year is critical in your development as a lawyer. First-year grades will determine your class rank (which probably will not change measurably during your remaining years) and may foreclose many opportunities for all but the top few students. There still will be competition for the top grades, which are earned through hard work and study. The research and writing skills you develop now will apply to your practice throughout your career.
Hornbooks. These scholarly treatises, written by law professors, are outstanding research tools. If a number of hornbooks are available in a particular area of the law, ask which ones your professor prefers. You can also check with upper-level students to learn which hornbooks may help in a particular professor’s class.
Don’t write a dissertation on the area of law being tested (or on the area of law you wish had been tested). The IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) structure is preferred for most law school essay examinations, but ask your professor how he or she expects the essays to be organized.
Is the Law School Glass Simply Half Empty or Just Broken?
STEM degrees may not mean more jobs (The Post Information Age Robot Empire & Decline of Humanity)
Some studies, meanwhile, have challenged the notion of an overall STEM worker shortage — instead finding that the United States is producing vastly more STEM graduates than there are STEM jobs awaiting them. As science organizations and corporations continue to sound the STEM shortage alarm, critics charge that these groups are motivated by self-interest — tech companies, for example, have claimed a shortage of trained workers even as they laid off thousands of U.S. employees, and moved those jobs to low-wage developing countries.
“It’s a way for them to sort of excuse why they’re shifting so much work offshore,” said Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ron Hira, who has testified before Congress on the need to tighten the legal loopholes that allow such maneuvers.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 1872 - 1970
* "It is because modern (law school) education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young."
==> Choosing a Practice Area (Resources for scummy law students)
In her excellent book on major legal practice areas, The Official Guide to Legal Specialities: An Insider's Guide to Every Major Practice Area (Barbri Group Publishing, 2000) Lisa L. Abrams, Esq. identifies 24 different practice areas. You may or may not agree with how she breaks down the practice-area universe, but to keep it simple, we shall borrow her list and much of her thinking. In the process, we created for you a quick overview of the different types of specialties you might consider entering.
==> Finding and Funding (Resources for scummy law students)
CIRAC is better than IRAC, but it’s still not perfect. Under CIRAC, the all-important Conclusion is presented early on, which is certainly a good thing and far better than presenting the Conclusion last, as IRAC requires. But CIRAC requires two Conclusions: an opening Conclusion and a final Conclusion. Good writers know that it is probably not wise to write the exact same paragraph twice in a paper. So, under CIRAC, when we write that second and final Conclusion, our instinct tells us to vary the language slightly. The careful reader notices the slight difference and ends up comparing the two Conclusions and asking “How does this final Conclusion differ from the first?” So the final Conclusion ends up undercutting the authority of the opening Conclusion–exactly the result we want to avoid. Except in a very long paper (say 25 pages or more), you should conclude once and once only. And that Conclusion belongs in the opening page and a half of your paper.
IRAC/CRAC
What is it?
• Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion OR Conclusion, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion
• Method for organizing legal analysis so that the reader can follow your argument
• Especially helpful in writing exams (IRAC) and legal memos (CRAC).
Law schools teach IRAC?
IRAC might be taught as the structure for an exam answer, but not for the Discussion in a memo. Modern legal-writing teachers, with few exceptions, left IRAC behind long ago. If any acronym is used in “many law schools” to teach the organizational structure of the Discussion section of a memo, it’s probably CREAC (Conclusion, Rule, Explanation, Application, Counter-analysis).
The First Year of Law School - American Bar Association
Your first year will still be a challenging ordeal. The first year is critical in your development as a lawyer. First-year grades will determine your class rank (which probably will not change measurably during your remaining years) and may foreclose many opportunities for all but the top few students. There still will be competition for the top grades, which are earned through hard work and study. The research and writing skills you develop now will apply to your practice throughout your career.
Hornbooks. These scholarly treatises, written by law professors, are outstanding research tools. If a number of hornbooks are available in a particular area of the law, ask which ones your professor prefers. You can also check with upper-level students to learn which hornbooks may help in a particular professor’s class.
Don’t write a dissertation on the area of law being tested (or on the area of law you wish had been tested). The IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) structure is preferred for most law school essay examinations, but ask your professor how he or she expects the essays to be organized.
Is the Law School Glass Simply Half Empty or Just Broken?
STEM degrees may not mean more jobs (The Post Information Age Robot Empire & Decline of Humanity)
Some studies, meanwhile, have challenged the notion of an overall STEM worker shortage — instead finding that the United States is producing vastly more STEM graduates than there are STEM jobs awaiting them. As science organizations and corporations continue to sound the STEM shortage alarm, critics charge that these groups are motivated by self-interest — tech companies, for example, have claimed a shortage of trained workers even as they laid off thousands of U.S. employees, and moved those jobs to low-wage developing countries.
“It’s a way for them to sort of excuse why they’re shifting so much work offshore,” said Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ron Hira, who has testified before Congress on the need to tighten the legal loopholes that allow such maneuvers.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 1872 - 1970
* "It is because modern (law school) education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young."
==> Choosing a Practice Area (Resources for scummy law students)
In her excellent book on major legal practice areas, The Official Guide to Legal Specialities: An Insider's Guide to Every Major Practice Area (Barbri Group Publishing, 2000) Lisa L. Abrams, Esq. identifies 24 different practice areas. You may or may not agree with how she breaks down the practice-area universe, but to keep it simple, we shall borrow her list and much of her thinking. In the process, we created for you a quick overview of the different types of specialties you might consider entering.
==> Career Specialties (Resources for scummy law students)
5 Ways to Avoid Hiring Scummy Lawyers (What about scummy law schools?)
When you need to hire a lawyer, it is essential to put care and thought into the hiring decision. Unfortunately, as more graduates come out of law school and enter the legal profession, the standards in the profession continue to be lowered. You can avoid hiring someone who is unethical or who has no foundation in legal knowledge by sticking to these 5 strategies when you hire a lawyer.
What They Didn’t Teach You in Law School
Soft Skills Matter. Soft skills range from having good phone manners to maintaining a professional appearance and not being grouchy in the office.There is truth to the old saying, “there’s never a second chance to make a good first impression.”
When you arrive in the office, greet the receptionist (and learn his or her name). When you go out for a cup of coffee, ask your neighbor if you can bring him or her one. Do not leave dirty plates and cups in the kitchen sink. Do not help yourself to other people’s food in the common refrigerator. Pick up a lunch tab occasionally. Knock before entering someone’s office. These are simple acts that make a good impression.
Top Five Personality Traits Employers Hire Most
New research shows that the vast majority of employers (88%) are looking for a “cultural fit” over skills in their next hire as more and more companies focus on attrition rates.
Professionalism (86%), high-energy (78%) and confidence (61%) are the top three traits employers say they are looking for in new hires. Kathy Harris, managing director of Manhattan-based executive search firm Harris Allied says these first-impression traits are the most critical for employers to prepare for as they all can be evaluated by a recruiter or hiring manager within the first 30 seconds of meeting a candidate.
“A manager can read you the moment you walk in the door,” she says; from the clothes you wear to the way you stand to the grip of your first hand-shake, presenting yourself as a confident, energetic professional is about as basic as career advice gets.
“We remind every candidate of the most granular advice,” she says. The most successful applicant is the one who walks into every interview with her hand outstretched for a handshake, has done her homework on the interviewer and company and is dressed to fit effortlessly into the culture of the workplace.
The Best Law Schools For Getting Rich ($$$ Licking chops)
The website PayScale culled its database of salary information to find out which of 98 popular law schools had the graduates who earn the most. The resulting compensation figures are all medians, where half of a school's grads make more and half less.
Profiles in Pitiful “Logic”: Luke Bierman, “Law Professor” at Northeastern University
"Conclusion: Luke Bierman is a liar. He did not cite to any hard data, to support his $elf-$erving opinion. Remember, these idiots pride themselves on “training people how to think like lawyers.” When someone does not bolster their argument with actual facts or evidence, it weakens their case. If this cretin fails to do so, with regards to his specific industry, how is he going to prepare others to practice law?"
When you need to hire a lawyer, it is essential to put care and thought into the hiring decision. Unfortunately, as more graduates come out of law school and enter the legal profession, the standards in the profession continue to be lowered. You can avoid hiring someone who is unethical or who has no foundation in legal knowledge by sticking to these 5 strategies when you hire a lawyer.
What They Didn’t Teach You in Law School
Soft Skills Matter. Soft skills range from having good phone manners to maintaining a professional appearance and not being grouchy in the office.There is truth to the old saying, “there’s never a second chance to make a good first impression.”
When you arrive in the office, greet the receptionist (and learn his or her name). When you go out for a cup of coffee, ask your neighbor if you can bring him or her one. Do not leave dirty plates and cups in the kitchen sink. Do not help yourself to other people’s food in the common refrigerator. Pick up a lunch tab occasionally. Knock before entering someone’s office. These are simple acts that make a good impression.
Top Five Personality Traits Employers Hire Most
New research shows that the vast majority of employers (88%) are looking for a “cultural fit” over skills in their next hire as more and more companies focus on attrition rates.
Professionalism (86%), high-energy (78%) and confidence (61%) are the top three traits employers say they are looking for in new hires. Kathy Harris, managing director of Manhattan-based executive search firm Harris Allied says these first-impression traits are the most critical for employers to prepare for as they all can be evaluated by a recruiter or hiring manager within the first 30 seconds of meeting a candidate.
“A manager can read you the moment you walk in the door,” she says; from the clothes you wear to the way you stand to the grip of your first hand-shake, presenting yourself as a confident, energetic professional is about as basic as career advice gets.
“We remind every candidate of the most granular advice,” she says. The most successful applicant is the one who walks into every interview with her hand outstretched for a handshake, has done her homework on the interviewer and company and is dressed to fit effortlessly into the culture of the workplace.
The Best Law Schools For Getting Rich ($$$ Licking chops)
The website PayScale culled its database of salary information to find out which of 98 popular law schools had the graduates who earn the most. The resulting compensation figures are all medians, where half of a school's grads make more and half less.
Profiles in Pitiful “Logic”: Luke Bierman, “Law Professor” at Northeastern University
"Conclusion: Luke Bierman is a liar. He did not cite to any hard data, to support his $elf-$erving opinion. Remember, these idiots pride themselves on “training people how to think like lawyers.” When someone does not bolster their argument with actual facts or evidence, it weakens their case. If this cretin fails to do so, with regards to his specific industry, how is he going to prepare others to practice law?"
Recession
But fifty-nine months after the start of the Great Recession, employment still lags well below pre-recession levels. In fact, the employment lag now (-3.0%) is deeper than the troughs of either of the previous recessions. At its depth, employment was off just just 1.4% for the 1990 recession; for the 2001 recession, the worst dip was 2.0%. (For the precise figures, click "View Data" on the Federal Reserve site linked above.)
Put these figures together and you'll discover that the job market has been distressed for seven of the last ten years. The 2001 recession ended by January 2002, but employment didn't recover fully until January of 2005. Then the Great Recession hit in December 2007. For payroll workers, the three good years of the last decade were 2005, 2006, and 2007. The other seven years (2003-2004, as well as 2008-2012) were lean ones.
The same is true of the market for law school graduates: ...
The Most Innovative Law School Programs
Only half of law school graduates find full time legal work within nine months of graduation
“The basic problem is that the cost of obtaining a law degree is out of proportion to the economic return a majority of students will get …” Tamanaha said. “There’s a fundamental mismatch between what students pay and as a result, what they owe in debt and the money that they earn in return.”
He pointed out that the average debt level of a graduate from a private law school is $125,000, while the median salary of the same graduate is $60,000 the first year out of school –– down from $72,000 two years ago.
According to the financial aid website Finaid.com, a graduate would have to earn approximately $115,657 annually to be able to afford to repay the loan in 20 years.
ABA: Only 55.2% of the Class of 2011 Have Full-Time Long-Term Legal Jobs
The ABA data shed considerable light on how poorly the 2011 graduates fared. We can now say with certainty that the employment picture is far worse than previously reported. Only 55.2% of all graduates were known to be employed in full-time, long-term legal jobs. A devastating 26.4% of all graduates were underemployed.
Experiencing the Future": A Conference In Boston Offers Radical Answers For The Crisis In Legal Education
Current students attend law school at a fulcrum moment--a time when nearly every institution feels crushing external and internal pressure to reform. The shifting economy has revealed cracks in a system that existed for long before the Great Recession of 2008. Legal employers in every sector are seeking better-prepared graduates. Clients are refusing to foot the bill for firms and agencies to carry out their traditional role of providing the "real world" training that theory-focused law schools do not. And alumni are angry that their law schools did not qualify them for legal employment.
Princeton Review's Best 168 Law Schools (2013 Edition)
But fifty-nine months after the start of the Great Recession, employment still lags well below pre-recession levels. In fact, the employment lag now (-3.0%) is deeper than the troughs of either of the previous recessions. At its depth, employment was off just just 1.4% for the 1990 recession; for the 2001 recession, the worst dip was 2.0%. (For the precise figures, click "View Data" on the Federal Reserve site linked above.)
Put these figures together and you'll discover that the job market has been distressed for seven of the last ten years. The 2001 recession ended by January 2002, but employment didn't recover fully until January of 2005. Then the Great Recession hit in December 2007. For payroll workers, the three good years of the last decade were 2005, 2006, and 2007. The other seven years (2003-2004, as well as 2008-2012) were lean ones.
The same is true of the market for law school graduates: ...
The Most Innovative Law School Programs
Law school programs are beginning to change, too. In 2007, the Carnegie Foundation issued a comprehensive report on the status of American legal education. It suggested that law schools are great at teaching students how to think like lawyers, but not at preparing them for the day-to-day experience of actually being lawyers. According to preLaw Magazine, some schools have begun revamping their programs to better prepare students for life after graduation. If you’re considering law school or choosing where to apply, consider these innovative programs as you make your decisions.
Only half of law school graduates find full time legal work within nine months of graduation
“The basic problem is that the cost of obtaining a law degree is out of proportion to the economic return a majority of students will get …” Tamanaha said. “There’s a fundamental mismatch between what students pay and as a result, what they owe in debt and the money that they earn in return.”
He pointed out that the average debt level of a graduate from a private law school is $125,000, while the median salary of the same graduate is $60,000 the first year out of school –– down from $72,000 two years ago.
According to the financial aid website Finaid.com, a graduate would have to earn approximately $115,657 annually to be able to afford to repay the loan in 20 years.
ABA: Only 55.2% of the Class of 2011 Have Full-Time Long-Term Legal Jobs
The ABA data shed considerable light on how poorly the 2011 graduates fared. We can now say with certainty that the employment picture is far worse than previously reported. Only 55.2% of all graduates were known to be employed in full-time, long-term legal jobs. A devastating 26.4% of all graduates were underemployed.
Experiencing the Future": A Conference In Boston Offers Radical Answers For The Crisis In Legal Education
Current students attend law school at a fulcrum moment--a time when nearly every institution feels crushing external and internal pressure to reform. The shifting economy has revealed cracks in a system that existed for long before the Great Recession of 2008. Legal employers in every sector are seeking better-prepared graduates. Clients are refusing to foot the bill for firms and agencies to carry out their traditional role of providing the "real world" training that theory-focused law schools do not. And alumni are angry that their law schools did not qualify them for legal employment.
Princeton Review's Best 168 Law Schools (2013 Edition)
The Princeton Review has published the 2013 edition of The Best 168 Law Schools:
We surveyed more than 18,000 drunk students at 168 law schools, in addition to collecting data from school administrators, to create 11 ranking lists:
TOP 70 LAW FACULTIES IN SCHOLARLY IMPACT, 2007-2011
We surveyed more than 18,000 drunk students at 168 law schools, in addition to collecting data from school administrators, to create 11 ranking lists:
TOP 70 LAW FACULTIES IN SCHOLARLY IMPACT, 2007-2011
Find the law schools that best prepare graduates for a successful career. Our research team interviewed nearly 400 drunk hiring partners, interviewers and recruiters.
Low Wage Sectors Drive Employment Growth (Can Robot Lawyers Survive in the Future?)
This report showed a continuation of a trend I find to be unhealthy: The outside contribution of low wage sectors to the NFP report.
Leisure and hospitality, health care and social assistance, retail and temporary jobs — all low wage sectors — have been responsible for over half (51%) of the private sector job growth the last year.
25 Finalists Named to Most Influential in Legal Education (Nepotism and Bias?)
This report showed a continuation of a trend I find to be unhealthy: The outside contribution of low wage sectors to the NFP report.
Leisure and hospitality, health care and social assistance, retail and temporary jobs — all low wage sectors — have been responsible for over half (51%) of the private sector job growth the last year.
25 Finalists Named to Most Influential in Legal Education (Nepotism and Bias?)
The magazine requested nominations from every law school in the nation, and received more than 85. It’s editorial team narrowed the list down to 50 and then asked 350 people in legal education, including, every law school dean, to rate each nominee based on how much they influenced them in the past 12 months. The finalists will be published in order or influence in the January issue of National Jurist.
The Problem With Law School (very poorly written story, but still on-track)
If a student debt-finances the entire cost of their legal education at Dean Mitchell's school today, she will owe a cool quarter of a million dollars by the time her first payment is due. Forty-six-point-three percent of the school's class of 2011 had full-time professional jobs (legal or not) lasting at least one year; 20 percent of the class made at least $70,000. Not even 10 percent of the class made more than the average amount borrowed ($98,900), let alone the actual debt figures after interest accumulates during school and opportunity costs. As these facts seep into the marketplace, it is no wonder Case Western's enrollment is down 35 percent over the last two years. (Isn't it interesting that law school deans look exactly like con artist shills that hype stocks on wall street; your cash is their oxygen).
Students and Recent Graduates Speak Out About Dean Mitchell’s Defense of Law School
Has any one of these law deans ever just emailed a recent graduate and said “sorry”? You know, just a simple, “I’m sorry things haven’t worked out for you to this point, please know that we’re doing everything we can here at the law school to make sure you have the alumni career services you need to find success.” Does that ever happen? Or is it all, “It’s not my job to get you a job”?
In any event, Mitchell didn’t just make the Case Western community angry. We received notes from all sorts of students and graduates. And some people didn’t just email Above the Law, they also emailed Mitchell directly. Here was one well written letter sent to Mitchell from a Columbia Law student: ...
Are Attractive Financial AidBait & Switch Teaser Rates Offers Too Good To Be Truthful? Is Your Financial Aid Officer Potentially Full Of Horse Pig Cow Moose Manure?
Death of "Big Law School'? (3 years ago -- before The Austerity Model/Fiscal Cliff)
Law teaching is likely to become a lot less genteel too. Without law firm largesse, law schools will no longer be insulated from many of the pressures felt by other academic units on campus. Expect greater use of adjunct faculty and graduate students to teach (with VAPs morphing from their original role as professor training to filling curricular holes in a faculty in a cheap, "temporary" way).
Expect a greater push by administrations for faculty to fund part of their salary with grants. This means greater power to the few grant-making organizations that focus on law (like the Kaufman foundation) to shape legal discourse. Industry groups may also fund research to a greater extent with all the attendant potential for intellectual compromise. Will law schools look increasingly hierarchical like labs in the hard sciences or universities inEurope Greece. Ask a junior researcher in a science lab on campus what their professional life is like.
Smart Rank? (Calibrating the model)
The smart rank combines traditional law school rankings with statistical data to determine an overall indication of the school's quality.
UC Irvine law school posts 90% bar exam pass rate (The adjusted model??)
UCI's inaugural law class of 60 students all received full-tuition scholarships. One student dropped out, and five others for various reasons did not graduate in May and/or have not taken the bar exam yet, Chemerinsky said.
Three additional members of UCI's inaugural class passed the bar exam in other states, two in New York and one in Pennsylvania.
The founders of UCI's law school set the bar high from the outset, with a goal to rank among the top 20 law schools nationwide. The acceptance rate for UCI's inaugural class in 2009 was 4 percent, the lowest in the nation.
Law school enrollment continues its decline (WTF is wrong with the model?)
Approximately 8,000 fewer first-year law students showed up nationwide this year compared to two years ago, when enrollment reached an all-time high, according to the American Bar Association. This year's numbers represent a 15 percent decline since then and a 9 percent decline since last year.
The ABA released preliminary enrollment numbers from its annual law school questionnaire—an unusual move that leaders said was prompted by intense interest in admissions trends.
The ABA typically collects a wealth of admissions and enrollment data from accredited law schools in October and releases its finding in the spring. Barry Currier, the ABA's interim consultant for legal education, cautioned that the final enrollment figures could change. But the dramatic drop-off was in line with predictions by legal educators who have been tracking the number of applicants, which fell by 14 percent last year, according to the Law School Admission Council.
THE GO-TO LAW SCHOOLS
The U.S. economy began to rebound in 2011, but that was not enough to convince firms to ramp up associate hiring. Most schools sent smaller percentages of their 2011 classes into first-year associate jobs ...
I’m In the Bottom 25% of My Class
Q: I am currently a 1L at a Tier 1 law school. I finishing my first semester and am very disappointed in how I did. My grades will not be respectable. I am determined to improve my grades, but given the exceptional nature of the students I am competing with, I am concerned that I may never climb out of the “lower 25%” basement that I will soon find myself in. So my question is twofold:
First, for those students who graduate from a Tier 1 law school and fall in the lower 25% of their class, can these individuals still obtain jobs at decent law firms in the summers and ultimately upon graduating? Basically, what happens to these people?
The Financial Aid Game
The needs-based calculation may be predictable, but it's not simple. There are different methods for determining a family's EFC. One, the "federal methodology," determines eligibility for federal Pell Grants and Stafford student loans. It is also used by public colleges and most private ones to determine how much need-based "institutional aid" a family will get--basically, how much of a price break a school will give you. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the form used to determine a student's need under the federal methodology.
Another formula, called the "institutional methodology," is used by about 300 pricier private colleges to determine need for their institutional grants and scholarships. These schools require families to fill out both the federal form and a so-called CSS Profile, which asks additional questions and calculates contributions somewhat differently. It's sort of like filling out your 1040 income tax form only to find that you must then fill out form 6251 to calculate the alternative minimum tax.
Has the CSS Profile ever estimated a lower EFC than the FAFSA?
Law School Is Worth the Money (very poorly written story, but still on-track)
The overwrought atmosphere has created irrationalities that prevent talented students from realizing their ambitions. Last spring we accepted an excellent student with a generous financial-aid package that left her with the need to borrow only $5,000 a year. She told us that she thought it would be “irresponsible” to borrow the money. She didn’t attend any law school. I think that was extremely shortsighted, but this prevailing attitude discourages bright students from attending law school.
The Problem With Law School (very poorly written story, but still on-track)
If a student debt-finances the entire cost of their legal education at Dean Mitchell's school today, she will owe a cool quarter of a million dollars by the time her first payment is due. Forty-six-point-three percent of the school's class of 2011 had full-time professional jobs (legal or not) lasting at least one year; 20 percent of the class made at least $70,000. Not even 10 percent of the class made more than the average amount borrowed ($98,900), let alone the actual debt figures after interest accumulates during school and opportunity costs. As these facts seep into the marketplace, it is no wonder Case Western's enrollment is down 35 percent over the last two years. (Isn't it interesting that law school deans look exactly like con artist shills that hype stocks on wall street; your cash is their oxygen).
Students and Recent Graduates Speak Out About Dean Mitchell’s Defense of Law School
Has any one of these law deans ever just emailed a recent graduate and said “sorry”? You know, just a simple, “I’m sorry things haven’t worked out for you to this point, please know that we’re doing everything we can here at the law school to make sure you have the alumni career services you need to find success.” Does that ever happen? Or is it all, “It’s not my job to get you a job”?
In any event, Mitchell didn’t just make the Case Western community angry. We received notes from all sorts of students and graduates. And some people didn’t just email Above the Law, they also emailed Mitchell directly. Here was one well written letter sent to Mitchell from a Columbia Law student: ...
Are Attractive Financial Aid
Death of "Big Law School'? (3 years ago -- before The Austerity Model/Fiscal Cliff)
Law teaching is likely to become a lot less genteel too. Without law firm largesse, law schools will no longer be insulated from many of the pressures felt by other academic units on campus. Expect greater use of adjunct faculty and graduate students to teach (with VAPs morphing from their original role as professor training to filling curricular holes in a faculty in a cheap, "temporary" way).
Expect a greater push by administrations for faculty to fund part of their salary with grants. This means greater power to the few grant-making organizations that focus on law (like the Kaufman foundation) to shape legal discourse. Industry groups may also fund research to a greater extent with all the attendant potential for intellectual compromise. Will law schools look increasingly hierarchical like labs in the hard sciences or universities in
Smart Rank? (Calibrating the model)
The smart rank combines traditional law school rankings with statistical data to determine an overall indication of the school's quality.
UC Irvine law school posts 90% bar exam pass rate (The adjusted model??)
UCI's inaugural law class of 60 students all received full-tuition scholarships. One student dropped out, and five others for various reasons did not graduate in May and/or have not taken the bar exam yet, Chemerinsky said.
Three additional members of UCI's inaugural class passed the bar exam in other states, two in New York and one in Pennsylvania.
The founders of UCI's law school set the bar high from the outset, with a goal to rank among the top 20 law schools nationwide. The acceptance rate for UCI's inaugural class in 2009 was 4 percent, the lowest in the nation.
Law school enrollment continues its decline (WTF is wrong with the model?)
Approximately 8,000 fewer first-year law students showed up nationwide this year compared to two years ago, when enrollment reached an all-time high, according to the American Bar Association. This year's numbers represent a 15 percent decline since then and a 9 percent decline since last year.
The ABA released preliminary enrollment numbers from its annual law school questionnaire—an unusual move that leaders said was prompted by intense interest in admissions trends.
The ABA typically collects a wealth of admissions and enrollment data from accredited law schools in October and releases its finding in the spring. Barry Currier, the ABA's interim consultant for legal education, cautioned that the final enrollment figures could change. But the dramatic drop-off was in line with predictions by legal educators who have been tracking the number of applicants, which fell by 14 percent last year, according to the Law School Admission Council.
THE GO-TO LAW SCHOOLS
The U.S. economy began to rebound in 2011, but that was not enough to convince firms to ramp up associate hiring. Most schools sent smaller percentages of their 2011 classes into first-year associate jobs ...
U.S. News - Best Lawyers® "Best Law Firms"In each of the 80 practice areas ranked nationally, one law firm received the “Law Firm of the Year” designation. “Law Firm of the Year” designations are based on law firms' overall performance in a given practice area and represent a significant showing in the 2013 U.S. News - Best Lawyers® "Best Law Firms" research.
E.g: As the 73rd largest law firm in the U.S., Baker Donelson gives clients access to a team of more than 570 attorneys and public policy advisors representing more than 30 practice areas, all seamlessly connected across 15 offices to serve virtually any legal need.
I’m In the Bottom 25% of My Class
Q: I am currently a 1L at a Tier 1 law school. I finishing my first semester and am very disappointed in how I did. My grades will not be respectable. I am determined to improve my grades, but given the exceptional nature of the students I am competing with, I am concerned that I may never climb out of the “lower 25%” basement that I will soon find myself in. So my question is twofold:
First, for those students who graduate from a Tier 1 law school and fall in the lower 25% of their class, can these individuals still obtain jobs at decent law firms in the summers and ultimately upon graduating? Basically, what happens to these people?
The Financial Aid Game
The needs-based calculation may be predictable, but it's not simple. There are different methods for determining a family's EFC. One, the "federal methodology," determines eligibility for federal Pell Grants and Stafford student loans. It is also used by public colleges and most private ones to determine how much need-based "institutional aid" a family will get--basically, how much of a price break a school will give you. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the form used to determine a student's need under the federal methodology.
Another formula, called the "institutional methodology," is used by about 300 pricier private colleges to determine need for their institutional grants and scholarships. These schools require families to fill out both the federal form and a so-called CSS Profile, which asks additional questions and calculates contributions somewhat differently. It's sort of like filling out your 1040 income tax form only to find that you must then fill out form 6251 to calculate the alternative minimum tax.
Has the CSS Profile ever estimated a lower EFC than the FAFSA?
Private grade school tuition and/or high medical expenses are usually the two big factors that can drive a lower EFC via the Institutional Method (IM) of calculating EFC that CSS Schools use. Another area that can drive you to a lower EFC determined by the Institutional Method (vs FAFSA) is the way asset protection allowance is determined. This could leave you with a lower EFC via the IM method, particularly for families with several children and parents that are relatively young.
The University of Washington School of Law is proud to announce the William H. Gates Public Service Law Program. Created in honor of William H. Gates Sr., a prominent Washington state attorney and public servant, this program awards five scholarships on an annual basis to first year students entering the UW School of Law J.D. program. Each Gates PSL scholarship award will cover tuition, books, other normal fees imposed for University and UW School of Law enrollment, costs of room and board and incidental expenses. Acceptance of a Gates PSL scholarship represents a commitment on the part of each recipient ("Scholar") to work in public service for five years following graduation.
Student Loan Debt Rising, and Often Not Being Paid Back
Outstanding student loan balances totaled $956 billion as of the end of September, rising $42 billion from the previous quarter. About half of that increase is actually newly issued debt, and the other half comes from defaulted student loans that have been newly updated on credit reports this quarter.
The New York Fed calculates that 11 percent of student loans are now at least 90 days delinquent, with this rate now officially passing the “serious delinquency” rate for credit card debt for the first time.
That milestone may be misleading, though. The report says in a footnote that “these delinquency rates for student loans are likely to understate actual delinquency rates because almost half of these loans are currently in deferment or in grace periods and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle,” adding, “This implies that among loans in the repayment cycle delinquency rates are roughly twice as high.”
==> THE EFC FORMULA, 2010-2011 (Resource?)
The college-cost calamityUniversities hope that vast investments will help them attract the best staff and students, draw in research grants and donations, and ultimately boost their ranking in league tables, drawing in yet more talent and money. They have also increased the proportion of outlays gobbled up by (con-artist parasite) administrators (see chart 2).
To pay for all this, universities have been enrolling more students and jacking up their fees. The average cost of college per student has risen by three times the rate of inflation since 1983. The cost of tuition alone has soared from 23% of median annual earnings in 2001 to 38% in 2010. Such increases plainly cannot continue.
Student debt has reportedly reached a record $1 trillion.
To pay for all this, universities have been enrolling more students and jacking up their fees. The average cost of college per student has risen by three times the rate of inflation since 1983. The cost of tuition alone has soared from 23% of median annual earnings in 2001 to 38% in 2010. Such increases plainly cannot continue.
Student debt has reportedly reached a record $1 trillion.
Student Loan Debt Rising, and Often Not Being Paid Back
Outstanding student loan balances totaled $956 billion as of the end of September, rising $42 billion from the previous quarter. About half of that increase is actually newly issued debt, and the other half comes from defaulted student loans that have been newly updated on credit reports this quarter.
The New York Fed calculates that 11 percent of student loans are now at least 90 days delinquent, with this rate now officially passing the “serious delinquency” rate for credit card debt for the first time.
That milestone may be misleading, though. The report says in a footnote that “these delinquency rates for student loans are likely to understate actual delinquency rates because almost half of these loans are currently in deferment or in grace periods and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle,” adding, “This implies that among loans in the repayment cycle delinquency rates are roughly twice as high.”
==> THE EFC FORMULA, 2010-2011 (Resource?)
So, if you are looking for significant need-based financial aid on your way into law school, you are now less likely to be successful. To earn financial aid grants and help defray the high costs of legal education today, you should instead focus on securing merit-based awards. Here are two things you can do: ...
Low Income Protection Plan
There are loan repayment assistance programs (LRAPs) at other law schools that may offer more generous benefits to specific individuals. However, other law schools do this at the expense of lowest-income participants, or by covering only certain types of jobs, or requiring that recipients who do not remain in an eligible job for several years must repay their benefits, or requiring that recipients repay their loans on an extended term that can cost much more in the long run. When looking at LRAP programs, it is always important to read the fine print and understand how to compare LRAP programs!
What Law Schools Don't Tell Parents About Financial Aid
Need-based aid: Applicants looking for need-based aid from law schools are generally required to include their parents' financial information, but every law school makes its own rules about whether parental data is mandatory—and if so, how it is weighted in the final aid calculation.
The Myth of the Unaffordable: Avenues to Financing a Law School Education
While an estimated minimum debt of $100,000 upon grad- uation may not appear to indicate that law schools offer broad financial aid programs, the most comprehensive help is actually available after graduation. Most top- and middle- tier law schools have adopted their own version of a loan forgiveness program or loan repayment assistance program (see “Useful Links”). The basic motivation of loan forgiveness programs is to support those law school graduates who work in comparatively low-paying jobs in the public interest sector or government service to repay their loans.
Do Law Schools Have Responsibilities to Law Students? Are False & Misleading Employment Statistics in glossy brochures Mail Fraud? Should RICO Be Used Against Law Schools (for defrauding The U.S. Department of Education)? Who Cares?
* Illinois judge tosses lawsuit against DePaul University
The graduates who sued DePaul took issue with the fact that the school's employment statistics had advertised that between 88 and 98 percent of graduates were employed after graduating. But the students said in court papers that the school didn't tell them that many of those jobs weren't full-time legal positions.
In Cohen's dismissal of the lawsuit, he made a point that (his buddies over at) DePaul didn't owe the graduates a fiduciary duty to disclose accurate employment statistics, which is required in order to allege fraudulent concealment.
"There is no Illinois authority finding that a fiduciary relationship exists between a student and an educational institution," Cohen wrote.
* Also See: 6.2 Professional Obligations
Many of us assume obligations when we assume professional roles. As a philosophy professor at a state university, I have obligations to my colleagues, my students, and the taxpayers of the state of Iowa. Physicians and therapists have obligations to their patients, police officers to the citizens of their jurisdictions, ministers and priests to their flocks, etc. Are these obligations mere obligations of role without moral implications, or are they genuinely moral special obligations?
* Also Ponder: There is More to Fraud Than the Inducement
The first element of a fraud claim that must be established is that of misrepresentation. Typically, that misrepresentation comes in the form of a false statement. It may, also, come in the form of concealment or non-disclosure of facts. Concealment or non-disclosure of material facts may exist where there is evidence of a deliberate decision not to disclose a material fact and knowledge by that party that the other party is acting on the assumption that the fact does not exist.
Random embarrassing tidbits: See United States v. Dowling, 739 F.2d 1445, 1450 (9th Cir. 1984) (holding that nondisclosure may form the basis of a scheme to defraud only where there is a fiduciary or explicit statutory duty to disclose and further noting that “[t]o hold otherwise . . . would have the potential of bringing almost any illegal act within the province of the mail fraud statute”), rev’d on other grounds, 473 U.S. 207 (1985).
Conspiracy to Violate the Mail Fraud or Wire Fraud Statute
As in any conspiracy, it is sufficient that the defendant knowingly joined the conspiracy in which wire fraud or mail fraud was a foreseeable act in furtherance of the conspiracy. United States v. Leahy, 82 F.3d 624 (5th Cir. 1996) (citing United States v. Basey, 816 F.2d 980, 997 (5th Cir. 1987) (holding that once a defendant's knowing participation in a conspiracy has been established, "the defendant is deemed guilty of substantive acts committed in furtherance of the conspiracy by any of his criminal partners")).
There are loan repayment assistance programs (LRAPs) at other law schools that may offer more generous benefits to specific individuals. However, other law schools do this at the expense of lowest-income participants, or by covering only certain types of jobs, or requiring that recipients who do not remain in an eligible job for several years must repay their benefits, or requiring that recipients repay their loans on an extended term that can cost much more in the long run. When looking at LRAP programs, it is always important to read the fine print and understand how to compare LRAP programs!
What Law Schools Don't Tell Parents About Financial Aid
Need-based aid: Applicants looking for need-based aid from law schools are generally required to include their parents' financial information, but every law school makes its own rules about whether parental data is mandatory—and if so, how it is weighted in the final aid calculation.
The Myth of the Unaffordable: Avenues to Financing a Law School Education
While an estimated minimum debt of $100,000 upon grad- uation may not appear to indicate that law schools offer broad financial aid programs, the most comprehensive help is actually available after graduation. Most top- and middle- tier law schools have adopted their own version of a loan forgiveness program or loan repayment assistance program (see “Useful Links”). The basic motivation of loan forgiveness programs is to support those law school graduates who work in comparatively low-paying jobs in the public interest sector or government service to repay their loans.
Do Law Schools Have Responsibilities to Law Students? Are False & Misleading Employment Statistics in glossy brochures Mail Fraud? Should RICO Be Used Against Law Schools (for defrauding The U.S. Department of Education)? Who Cares?
* Illinois judge tosses lawsuit against DePaul University
The graduates who sued DePaul took issue with the fact that the school's employment statistics had advertised that between 88 and 98 percent of graduates were employed after graduating. But the students said in court papers that the school didn't tell them that many of those jobs weren't full-time legal positions.
In Cohen's dismissal of the lawsuit, he made a point that (his buddies over at) DePaul didn't owe the graduates a fiduciary duty to disclose accurate employment statistics, which is required in order to allege fraudulent concealment.
"There is no Illinois authority finding that a fiduciary relationship exists between a student and an educational institution," Cohen wrote.
* Also See: 6.2 Professional Obligations
Many of us assume obligations when we assume professional roles. As a philosophy professor at a state university, I have obligations to my colleagues, my students, and the taxpayers of the state of Iowa. Physicians and therapists have obligations to their patients, police officers to the citizens of their jurisdictions, ministers and priests to their flocks, etc. Are these obligations mere obligations of role without moral implications, or are they genuinely moral special obligations?
* Also Ponder: There is More to Fraud Than the Inducement
The first element of a fraud claim that must be established is that of misrepresentation. Typically, that misrepresentation comes in the form of a false statement. It may, also, come in the form of concealment or non-disclosure of facts. Concealment or non-disclosure of material facts may exist where there is evidence of a deliberate decision not to disclose a material fact and knowledge by that party that the other party is acting on the assumption that the fact does not exist.
Random embarrassing tidbits: See United States v. Dowling, 739 F.2d 1445, 1450 (9th Cir. 1984) (holding that nondisclosure may form the basis of a scheme to defraud only where there is a fiduciary or explicit statutory duty to disclose and further noting that “[t]o hold otherwise . . . would have the potential of bringing almost any illegal act within the province of the mail fraud statute”), rev’d on other grounds, 473 U.S. 207 (1985).
Conspiracy to Violate the Mail Fraud or Wire Fraud Statute
As in any conspiracy, it is sufficient that the defendant knowingly joined the conspiracy in which wire fraud or mail fraud was a foreseeable act in furtherance of the conspiracy. United States v. Leahy, 82 F.3d 624 (5th Cir. 1996) (citing United States v. Basey, 816 F.2d 980, 997 (5th Cir. 1987) (holding that once a defendant's knowing participation in a conspiracy has been established, "the defendant is deemed guilty of substantive acts committed in furtherance of the conspiracy by any of his criminal partners")).
Best Law Schools For Partying & Hotel-like Luxuries (In Process R&D, with new exciting updates on the oldest and most out-dated facilities, oldest staff, worst teachers, worst graduation rates, lowest LSAT's, highest drop-out rates and various oddities, like unemployment rates and random connections that seem to fit):
Join one of the premier health and fitness clubs in Chicago. Northwestern provides discounted membership at the River East Club (operated by LA Fitness) for the following Northwestern community members based on the Chicago campus:
Annual membership costs: $189/each for full-time NU students or spouses/partners
The Georgetown University Law Center Sport & Fitness Center is an adult facility for the recreational use of Georgetown University Law Center students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Membership eligibility is determined by the individual's primary affiliation with Georgetown University Law Center.
* The New Math of Legal Education
Despite these hefty price increases, legal education today is virtually identical to the legal education of 1987. Most law students spend most of their time in classrooms, discussing cases with professors and their classmates. Beyond the innovations in computers since 1987, there are no new technologies, no new expensive laboratories, and no exotic equipment needed to operate a law school. Today’s students may take notes on laptops instead of yellow legal pads, but otherwise a law classroom today with its chalk, blackboards, and books looks almost identical to one in 1987 or, for that matter, 1957.
How are students paying for today’s higher tuition bills? Many of them are borrowing a great deal of money. The average amount of law school debt owed at graduation soared 431 percent between 1987 and 2005, from $16,000 to $85,000.
* After Tenure: Post-Tenure Law Professors in the U.S. (un-employment correlation??)
The majority of respondents fell between 40 and 69 years of age, with 39.8% of the sample falling between 50 and 59 years of age.
Gender: While the tenured U.S. professoriate is slowly shifting to reflect the entry of women, only 25% of the senior professors in this study were women. (Between 2002-2003, when this study was conducted, and 2007-2008, the numbers rose 3 percentage points to 28%.) Women professors reported some differences in work experience as compared with men. Fewer tenured women reported feeling respected by their colleagues.
Backgrounds: Predictably, most tenured law professors did very well in law school. Judging from these professors’ parents’ educational levels, law teachers tend to come from relatively privileged and royal backgrounds. (Is that nepotism, favoritism or just the Good Ol' Boys club)?
ªº!: Note: ... in 1975-1976, the characteristics of law faculty were similar to that of the legal profession in general: 96% of professors were white, 93% were male, and 66% were between the ages of 30 and 50 (Fossum 1980).
** HMN Editorial Thought: It took 26 years for all-white, all-male law schools to allow an additional 18% of female cohorts an opportunity to teach law -- to students that were predominantly rich white males. Thus, now that 28% of tenured U.S. professoriates are women, is it possible to correlate that employment trends for recent female law graduates will continue to be excessively challenging and discriminatory for decades ...
* The 11 Law Schools With The Worst Employment Rates
Just 85.6 percent of law students who earned a law degree in 2011 were employed nine months later. It's the lowest rate of employment since 1994.
For those graduates lucky enough to find themselves employed, only 55 percent of them secured "full-time, long-term jobs" that require a law degree.
* ==> Rank, Fourth Tier Scat Pile: Whittier Law School (Last Year's Scat Pile Award)
* Gulags: the 10 worst ABA-accredited law schools
The Daily Caller ranking of the worst law schools simply tracks schools based on how many times they appear in the very bottom in eight categories related to admissions data, bar passage, employment data, cost, and U.S. News peer ranking. All data is purely objective, except for the peer rating.
Whittier, Appalachian and La Verne essentially tied for the uncoveted bottom spot, but Whittier “won” the tiebreaker, thanks to a pitiful 17.1 percent employment score. In addition Whittier’s 61 percent under-employment score is the highest among all ABA-approved schools.
* Georgetown University Law Center
I also don't like to see applications that are casually and sloppily put together. Those often come from some of ourbest wealthy applicants (with ADD), who's Moms just throw something together and click submit without really giving it a lot of thought.
Georgetown’s gym is a frequent recipient of praise, and for good reason. One student detailed the workout facility:
The fitness center on campus is great. There are plenty of cardio machines (treadmills, ellipticals, bikes, stairmasters), lots of free weights, lots of weight machines, and the few classes I've taken have been a really good workout (and free!). There's also an indoor pool (just like a fancy hotel) and a basketball court (just like high school), as well as jacuzzis in both the men's and women's locker rooms (just like a fancy hotel). There's also a towel service free of charge. I live on campus and it's extremely easy to fit a workout in whenever I have a chunk of free time since the fitness center is so close.
The rest of the school’s facilities are modern and impressive as well. One applicant even described Georgetown’s facilities as “overwhelming.” If you’re looking for an up-to-date law school with lots of modern amenities and hotel-like services, Georgetown is a great choice.
* 79-Year-Old Graduates From Law School, Begins Career in Elder Law
* Greenwood attorney is world's youngest judge
Among the records for longest carpet of flowers laid and the world’s shortest cat you’ll soon find the name of a Johnson County attorney.
Marc L. Griffin was recently named by the Guinness World Records as the world’s youngest judge for the time he served as a township justice of the peace in Johnson County in the mid-1970s. At an age when most teens read comic books and magazines, Griffin spent time reading Indiana statutory law. He always wanted to be an attorney, so it seemed like a good thing to read. It was while reading the code that he learned more about the justice of the peace position.
* 18-Year-Old Kathleen Holtz Passes the California Bar
On Friday night at 6 p.m., Holtz found out that she passed — the first time around. Once sworn in and admitted to the Calfornia bar, she’ll be the youngest lawyer in the Golden State, and quite possibly the nation. Holtz started at Cal State L.A. at age 10 and entered UCLA Law at 15, earning a spot on the law review.
Law School Lotto & The Odds Of Getting Hit By Lightning
Slow-thinking Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College, Continues To Ignore Reality and jump into the pit of sharks; is this because of Attention Deficit Disorder, or Stupidity?
Colleges are aggressively recruiting students, regardless of their financial circumstances. In admissions offices across the country, professional marketing companies and talented alumni are being enlisted to devise catchy slogans, build enticing Web sites — and essentially outpitch the competition.
Affordability, or at least promising that the finances will work out, is increasingly a piece of the pitch.
Almost all (law) colleges promote the money they give away in financial aid, though generally only the most elite schools — like Oberlin in Ohio — are able to provide enough in grants and scholarships to significantly keep student debt down.
College marketing firms encourage school officials to focus on the value of the education rather than the cost. For example, an article on the cover of Enrollment Management, a newsletter aimed at college admissions officials, urged writers of admissions materials to “avoid bad words like ‘cost,’ ‘pay’ (try ‘and you get all this for...’), ‘contract’ and ‘buy’ in your piece and avoid the conflicting feelings they generate.”
“There are direct marketing ‘words’ that can make or break your piece,” the article, published in 2009, added.
A bit of evidence about the state of entry level large firm hiring
Caveat: This kind of post has very little relevance to people who attend or are thinking about attending the 80% to 85% of ABA law schools who don't ever send much more than 10% of their class to large firms, even in the best of times. Legal academia as a whole pays far too much attention to large firm hiring statistics.
On the other hand, around 80% to 90% of law students are now spending sums of money to get law degrees that would make economic sense only if they were to get large firm jobs. (Put the math in these two short paragraphs together and you have the law school mess in a nutshell) …
Think law school’s expensive? You don’t know the half of it – Outrageous! (Just a Reminder)
As part of the comprehensive database of law school employment statistics it launched this week, the organization has projected the total cost of law school loans for students who will graduate in 2015 and 2016 — that is, the ones who will start law school this year or next. The former will owe an average of $195,265 and the latter will owe an average $200,595.
“My jaw dropped when I ran the numbers,” McEntee said.
He added a few caveats. The calculations are based on the assumption that students will borrow the full tuition amount in the form of federal loans, even though many students receive some scholarship money. They also assume that students at public law schools pay out-of state-tuition levels, which generally are higher than in-state rates.
Report: Students want more federal loan guidance
Fourty (40?) percent of respondents who said they took out federal loans reported they did not receive any online or in-person counseling about the federal loan process, by the National Economic Research Associates.
Healey Whitsett, a senior analyst at the economic consulting firm NERA, co-authored the report, titled "Lost without a map: a survey about students navigating the financial aid office." She said large number of students not receiving financial aid guidance is “the main takeaway” of the report, since colleges are mandated by law to issue some form of counseling or education for students with federal loans.
The report included a survey aimed at “high-debt borrowers,” or those who report receiving higher than average grant aid. The report focused on 13,000 respondents who are current students or recent college graduates. Respondents were asked about the information and education they received when they took out federal loans for financial aid. The survey respondents included students on mailing lists related to student loan interest, Whitsett said.
Law Enforcement Community Members Urge Obama, Holder To Respect State Marijuana Legalization Laws Or Else ...
"We have sponsored legislation at the federal level to remove criminal penalties for the use of marijuana because of our belief in individual freedom," Frank and Paul wrote in a letter to Obama. "We recognize that this has not yet become national policy, but we believe there are many strong reasons for your administration to allow the states of Colorado and Washington to set the policies they believe appropriate in this regard, without the federal government overriding the choices made by the voters of these states."
If the Obama administration does decide to crackdown on legalized marijuana in Colorado -- where more people voted for marijuana legalization than for the president's reelection -- the administration could face some serious political fallout with much of the same population of the Centennial State that handed him Colorado on election night.
Fiscal Cliff Threatens Research Funding, Education Grants, Leaving College Presidents Worried
Some of the top research universities get a majority of their research funding from the federal government. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, reported that 69 percent of the institution's campus research expenditures were sponsored by federal funding in its 2012 fiscal year. Ivy League institutions, like Yale, Harvard, Brown and Dartmouth, get 20 to 25 percent of their revenue through federal money, the Yale Daily News reported.
Chicago Campus Fitness and Recreation (What about cable and food?)
Join one of the premier health and fitness clubs in Chicago. Northwestern provides discounted membership at the River East Club (operated by LA Fitness) for the following Northwestern community members based on the Chicago campus:
Annual membership costs: $189/each for full-time NU students or spouses/partners
* The New Math of Legal Education
Despite these hefty price increases, legal education today is virtually identical to the legal education of 1987. Most law students spend most of their time in classrooms, discussing cases with professors and their classmates. Beyond the innovations in computers since 1987, there are no new technologies, no new expensive laboratories, and no exotic equipment needed to operate a law school. Today’s students may take notes on laptops instead of yellow legal pads, but otherwise a law classroom today with its chalk, blackboards, and books looks almost identical to one in 1987 or, for that matter, 1957.
How are students paying for today’s higher tuition bills? Many of them are borrowing a great deal of money. The average amount of law school debt owed at graduation soared 431 percent between 1987 and 2005, from $16,000 to $85,000.
* After Tenure: Post-Tenure Law Professors in the U.S. (un-employment correlation??)
The majority of respondents fell between 40 and 69 years of age, with 39.8% of the sample falling between 50 and 59 years of age.
Gender: While the tenured U.S. professoriate is slowly shifting to reflect the entry of women, only 25% of the senior professors in this study were women. (Between 2002-2003, when this study was conducted, and 2007-2008, the numbers rose 3 percentage points to 28%.) Women professors reported some differences in work experience as compared with men. Fewer tenured women reported feeling respected by their colleagues.
Backgrounds: Predictably, most tenured law professors did very well in law school. Judging from these professors’ parents’ educational levels, law teachers tend to come from relatively privileged and royal backgrounds. (Is that nepotism, favoritism or just the Good Ol' Boys club)?
ªº!: Note: ... in 1975-1976, the characteristics of law faculty were similar to that of the legal profession in general: 96% of professors were white, 93% were male, and 66% were between the ages of 30 and 50 (Fossum 1980).
** HMN Editorial Thought: It took 26 years for all-white, all-male law schools to allow an additional 18% of female cohorts an opportunity to teach law -- to students that were predominantly rich white males. Thus, now that 28% of tenured U.S. professoriates are women, is it possible to correlate that employment trends for recent female law graduates will continue to be excessively challenging and discriminatory for decades ...
* The 11 Law Schools With The Worst Employment Rates
Just 85.6 percent of law students who earned a law degree in 2011 were employed nine months later. It's the lowest rate of employment since 1994.
For those graduates lucky enough to find themselves employed, only 55 percent of them secured "full-time, long-term jobs" that require a law degree.
* ==> Rank, Fourth Tier Scat Pile: Whittier Law School (Last Year's Scat Pile Award)
* Gulags: the 10 worst ABA-accredited law schools
The Daily Caller ranking of the worst law schools simply tracks schools based on how many times they appear in the very bottom in eight categories related to admissions data, bar passage, employment data, cost, and U.S. News peer ranking. All data is purely objective, except for the peer rating.
Whittier, Appalachian and La Verne essentially tied for the uncoveted bottom spot, but Whittier “won” the tiebreaker, thanks to a pitiful 17.1 percent employment score. In addition Whittier’s 61 percent under-employment score is the highest among all ABA-approved schools.
* Georgetown University Law Center
I also don't like to see applications that are casually and sloppily put together. Those often come from some of our
Georgetown’s gym is a frequent recipient of praise, and for good reason. One student detailed the workout facility:
The fitness center on campus is great. There are plenty of cardio machines (treadmills, ellipticals, bikes, stairmasters), lots of free weights, lots of weight machines, and the few classes I've taken have been a really good workout (and free!). There's also an indoor pool (just like a fancy hotel) and a basketball court (just like high school), as well as jacuzzis in both the men's and women's locker rooms (just like a fancy hotel). There's also a towel service free of charge. I live on campus and it's extremely easy to fit a workout in whenever I have a chunk of free time since the fitness center is so close.
The rest of the school’s facilities are modern and impressive as well. One applicant even described Georgetown’s facilities as “overwhelming.” If you’re looking for an up-to-date law school with lots of modern amenities and hotel-like services, Georgetown is a great choice.
* 79-Year-Old Graduates From Law School, Begins Career in Elder Law
At an age when work is a distant memory for most people, Alice Thomas is embarking on a career in elder law. In December 2009, Thomas graduated from Pacific McGeorge School of Law at age 79. She was older than all but one of her professors, not to mention her classmates, and is one of the oldest people ever to earn a law degree from an American Bar Association-accredited school.
Thomas, who formerly had a long career doing office work in the construction industry, now begins the grueling process of studying for either the Nevada or California bar exam. She probably won't find out whether she passed until well past her 80th birthday in July. In addition, she has to begin paying back $70,000 in student loans.
Among the records for longest carpet of flowers laid and the world’s shortest cat you’ll soon find the name of a Johnson County attorney.
Marc L. Griffin was recently named by the Guinness World Records as the world’s youngest judge for the time he served as a township justice of the peace in Johnson County in the mid-1970s. At an age when most teens read comic books and magazines, Griffin spent time reading Indiana statutory law. He always wanted to be an attorney, so it seemed like a good thing to read. It was while reading the code that he learned more about the justice of the peace position.
* 18-Year-Old Kathleen Holtz Passes the California Bar
On Friday night at 6 p.m., Holtz found out that she passed — the first time around. Once sworn in and admitted to the Calfornia bar, she’ll be the youngest lawyer in the Golden State, and quite possibly the nation. Holtz started at Cal State L.A. at age 10 and entered UCLA Law at 15, earning a spot on the law review.
We use administrative data on national college entrance mathematics examination scores and a longitudinal survey of high school seniors that provide various STEM outcomes (mathematics and science interest and self-efficacy, expectations of a four-year college attendance and a STEM college major during the high school senior year, and actual attendance at a four-year college and choice of a STEM major two years after high school). We find significantly positive effects of all-boys schools consistently across different STEM outcomes, whereas the positive effect of all-girls schools is only found for mathematics scores.
Law School Lotto & The Odds Of Getting Hit By Lightning
Slow-thinking Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College, Continues To Ignore Reality and jump into the pit of sharks; is this because of Attention Deficit Disorder, or Stupidity?
Colleges are aggressively recruiting students, regardless of their financial circumstances. In admissions offices across the country, professional marketing companies and talented alumni are being enlisted to devise catchy slogans, build enticing Web sites — and essentially outpitch the competition.
Affordability, or at least promising that the finances will work out, is increasingly a piece of the pitch.
Almost all (law) colleges promote the money they give away in financial aid, though generally only the most elite schools — like Oberlin in Ohio — are able to provide enough in grants and scholarships to significantly keep student debt down.
College marketing firms encourage school officials to focus on the value of the education rather than the cost. For example, an article on the cover of Enrollment Management, a newsletter aimed at college admissions officials, urged writers of admissions materials to “avoid bad words like ‘cost,’ ‘pay’ (try ‘and you get all this for...’), ‘contract’ and ‘buy’ in your piece and avoid the conflicting feelings they generate.”
“There are direct marketing ‘words’ that can make or break your piece,” the article, published in 2009, added.
A bit of evidence about the state of entry level large firm hiring
Caveat: This kind of post has very little relevance to people who attend or are thinking about attending the 80% to 85% of ABA law schools who don't ever send much more than 10% of their class to large firms, even in the best of times. Legal academia as a whole pays far too much attention to large firm hiring statistics.
On the other hand, around 80% to 90% of law students are now spending sums of money to get law degrees that would make economic sense only if they were to get large firm jobs. (Put the math in these two short paragraphs together and you have the law school mess in a nutshell) …
Think law school’s expensive? You don’t know the half of it – Outrageous! (Just a Reminder)
As part of the comprehensive database of law school employment statistics it launched this week, the organization has projected the total cost of law school loans for students who will graduate in 2015 and 2016 — that is, the ones who will start law school this year or next. The former will owe an average of $195,265 and the latter will owe an average $200,595.
“My jaw dropped when I ran the numbers,” McEntee said.
He added a few caveats. The calculations are based on the assumption that students will borrow the full tuition amount in the form of federal loans, even though many students receive some scholarship money. They also assume that students at public law schools pay out-of state-tuition levels, which generally are higher than in-state rates.
Report: Students want more federal loan guidance
Fourty (40?) percent of respondents who said they took out federal loans reported they did not receive any online or in-person counseling about the federal loan process, by the National Economic Research Associates.
Healey Whitsett, a senior analyst at the economic consulting firm NERA, co-authored the report, titled "Lost without a map: a survey about students navigating the financial aid office." She said large number of students not receiving financial aid guidance is “the main takeaway” of the report, since colleges are mandated by law to issue some form of counseling or education for students with federal loans.
The report included a survey aimed at “high-debt borrowers,” or those who report receiving higher than average grant aid. The report focused on 13,000 respondents who are current students or recent college graduates. Respondents were asked about the information and education they received when they took out federal loans for financial aid. The survey respondents included students on mailing lists related to student loan interest, Whitsett said.
Law Enforcement Community Members Urge Obama, Holder To Respect State Marijuana Legalization Laws Or Else ...
"We have sponsored legislation at the federal level to remove criminal penalties for the use of marijuana because of our belief in individual freedom," Frank and Paul wrote in a letter to Obama. "We recognize that this has not yet become national policy, but we believe there are many strong reasons for your administration to allow the states of Colorado and Washington to set the policies they believe appropriate in this regard, without the federal government overriding the choices made by the voters of these states."
If the Obama administration does decide to crackdown on legalized marijuana in Colorado -- where more people voted for marijuana legalization than for the president's reelection -- the administration could face some serious political fallout with much of the same population of the Centennial State that handed him Colorado on election night.
Fiscal Cliff Threatens Research Funding, Education Grants, Leaving College Presidents Worried
Some of the top research universities get a majority of their research funding from the federal government. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, reported that 69 percent of the institution's campus research expenditures were sponsored by federal funding in its 2012 fiscal year. Ivy League institutions, like Yale, Harvard, Brown and Dartmouth, get 20 to 25 percent of their revenue through federal money, the Yale Daily News reported.
Looming financial aid cuts in-the-works
“Congress and the White House, whether they are controlled by Republicans or Democrats, will need to work to keep student aid focused on students, and make further investments to meet the growing need of low- and middle-income students and families looking to improve their lives.”
While the Pell Grant program would be protected during this fiscal year, other federal financial aid programs would be cut about 8%, according to a report released in mid-September by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. These programs include federal work-study and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant. (Cuts would be made to higher education access programs, including TRiO and GEAR UP programs.) The cuts would go into effect July 1, 2013. The American Opportunity Tax Credit, which provides a credit of up to $2,500 per year, is also set to expire in December and has not yet been extended.
Some LSAT Tea-Leaf Reading & Some Student Debt Stuff in The News
A while back I expressed dismay at the lower-than-expected drop in LSATs in June 2012. The October numbers are in, and the decline renews! Sometimes I like being proven wrong. Obviously, LSATs aren’t the same as applicants, but: no LSATs, no applicants. We also have no idea how many people are first-time takers vs. repeaters.
Britain favoured execution over Nuremberg trials for Nazi leaders (Pike's Precedent?)
The British eventually agreed to the war crimes trials despite the misgivings of some senior government officials who believed the decision to prosecute the surviving Nazi leadership for waging a war of aggression would set a dangerous precedent. They also feared the prosecutions would be on a par with the high-profile show trials in Stalin's Russia.
"Personally I think the whole procedure is quite dreadful. The DPP had recommended that a fact-finding committee should come to the conclusion that certain people should be bumped off and that others should receive varying terms of imprisonment, that this should be put to the House of Commons and that the authority should be given to any military body finding these individuals in their area to arrest them and inflict whatever punishment had been decided on. This was a much clearer proposition and would not bring the law into disrepute.
DA Reisig Declines to File Charges Against UCD Police in Pepper Spray Case
The DA's office, he writes, concludes "that the use of force in this case was not unlawful."
In their conclusion, the DA writes, "Lieutenant Pike's pepper spraying of the seated protesters has been seen by and has outraged millions of viewers throughout the world. Based on the thirty seconds of video that most people have seen the pepper spraying may look like unreasonable force."
The DA instead argues, "Whether or not the force was unreasonable and criminal cannot be judged solely on that brief moment in time. The conflict that resulted in the pepper spraying had been evolving for several days before November 18, 2011, and must be examined in the light of the totality of the circumstances."
"In evaluating the totality of the circumstances under a reasonable doubt standard, we have considered and given substantial weight to the opinions and conclusions set forth in the Kroll Report," the DA writes. "In light of this additional evidence, and viewing the incident through the totality of the circumstances, there is insufficient evidence to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the use of force involved in the November 18, 2011, pepper spraying was unlawful and therefore warrants the filing of criminal charges."
Student Loan Hurdles for Members of Military
Many service members, for instance, simply defer their loans or obtain a forbearance, which lets them skip monthly payments while on active duty. But they may not always understand that on some types of loans, interest may still accrue, often resulting in ballooning loan balances. And they may not be told about possible alternatives that can lower their monthly payments to more affordable levels.
One parent of a service member told the bureau that his son’s three loans totaled just over $61,000 when his son graduated. But the servicer now says the total is almost $85,000, because of a five-month deferral of payments during military service.
One borrower told the bureau that his loan servicer automatically put his loans into forbearance without his permission. “I did not ask for my account to be placed in forbearance and as a result of this action, it is currently accumulating interest,” he wrote.
Programs like “income-based repayment” may allow service members with federal loans to reduce their monthly payments while on active duty. Then, if they remain in the service for 10 years and make 120 on-time payments, they can take advantage of the “public service loan forgiveness” program, which forgives the remaining balance.
Beware of the Black Hole
The College Board estimates that 10.3 million post-secondary students borrowed Stafford Loans and 9.1 million students received Pell Grants during the 2010-11 academic year.
Most recently the Federal Reserve Bank of New York revealed in their Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit that the delinquency rate for student loans has continued to increase from a current 8.9 percent rate, with student loan debt increasing from $10 billion to $914 billion.
In a last minute Congressional decision, the federal government approved in July to keep the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loan at 3.4 percent for one more year, a change to a law that had the interest originally doubling to 6.8. Though now, the interest-free grace period for repayment after graduation is gone. In other words you can choose to extend repayment for six months, but interest is going to grow the entire time.
What Does the Future Hold for American Legal Education?
During the question-and-answer session, some conference attendees worried about whether this system would adequately train lawyers. McGinnis pointed out that many other countries, such as Great Britain and other Commonwealth nations, have law as an undergraduate degree, and there’s no evidence that these countries are facing some crisis in the quality of legal services. He once again emphasized that his proposal has the virtue of allowing for a greater variety of lawyers and lawyering (since people could still get traditional J.D. degrees if they like). Making a comparison to cars, he observed that “not every lawyer needs to be a Bentley”; sometimes a less fancy vehicle can get the job done just as well.
One interesting query from the Q-and-A: given the glut of lawyers we already have, why do we still see so many Americans unable to afford legal services? Why hasn’t the cost of legal services for ordinary Americans come down dramatically, thanks to the large number of unemployed and underemployed lawyers out there?
STATE BAR ANNOUNCES RESULTS FOR JULY 2012 CALIFORNIA BAR EXAMINATION
The three-day General Bar Examination is given twice a year in February and July. The exam consists of three sections: a multiple-choice Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), six essay questions and two performance tests that are designed to assess an applicant's ability to apply general legal knowledge to practical tasks. The mean scaled MBE score in California was 1459 compared with the national average of 1434.
In addition, the Committee announced that 152 (34.9 percent) of the 435 lawyers who took the Attorneys' Examination passed. Out of the total taking the Attorneys’ Examination, 25 were disciplined lawyers who took the examination as a condition of reinstatement; one (1) disciplined lawyer passed.
Richard Sander is a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law whose research argues that affirmative action hurts minorities because they often struggle to keep up academically. (Justice Clarence Thomas has expressed a similar view — that affirmative action promotes tokenism.) Sander predicted that Kennedy would push for greater transparency about how schools weigh applicants' race. The "holistic review" of applicants endorsed in Grutter has "encouraged universities to hide the ball on admissions practices," he said. If law schools were subject to greater transparency, race would play less of a role in admission decisions, he said.
In fact, the extent to which race plays a role in law school admissions is not entirely clear. Despite the pending Supreme Court case, affirmative action remains a sensitive topic; a number of admissions deans declined requests to discuss how race factors into admissions or how they might adjust to a ban on affirmative action.
The Inheritance of Education & Stupidity
Economix posted a graph showing a strong positive correlation between SAT score and parental income. Greg Mankiw pointed out that the effect is unlikely to be purely causal because there may be an omitted variable bias, IQ for example. Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias both attack Mankiw and point to graphs showing that income matters for college completion and enrollment, respectively, holding various achievement scores constant. Brad DeLong crunches the numbers on IQ and income correlation to estimate that half the effect is due to IQ and half to something else.
All this is good but none if it gets at the heart of the matter because there are a lot of way that heredity/genes could explain the income/education correlation; IQ is only one possible mechanism, personality (e.g. conscientiousness) is another possibility.
The type of evidence that we need to resolve this question is adoption studies. Fortunately, such studies have been done and indeed I have presented the data before in my post Nature, Nurture and Income. Let's do so again.
Converting Rich Kids LSAT scores to Poor Kids IQ’s ??? (Changing the odds)
I decided to use a linear regression analysis to convert LSAT scores to IQ’s. I found five data points from five high-IQ societies that accept LSAT scores. The International Society for Philosophical Inquiry accepts a 178 LSAT score, which corresponds to a 146 IQ. The Poetic Genius Society accepts a 174 LSAT score, which corresponds to a 139 IQ. Intertel accepts a 172 LSAT Score, which corresponds to a 135 IQ; and Mensa America accepts a LSAT score that is in the 95th percentile, which is historically a 167 LSAT Score corresponding to a 130 IQ. I’m assuming a 15 SD for all IQ scores. The LSAT average is historically between 150-151. I’ll choose 151 to be generous. Inductivist calculated that the average college graduate’s IQ is a 105. So the last data point is a 151 LSAT score corresponding to a 105 IQ.
Are Law Schools Just As Dysfuntional As Community Colleges? (rhetorical question?)
Why is America falling short? To name only a few of the many reasons: inadequate academic preparation, poorly designed and delivered remediation, broken credit transfer policies, confusing financial aid programs, a culture that rewards enrollment instead of completion, and a system too often out of touch with the needs of the today’s college student.
Departure Memo of the Day: Parenting Gets The Best Of One Biglaw Associate
I’ve read this departure email three times this morning, all while a sleeping six-week-old snores up at me. It’s a departure memo where a Biglaw associate kind of admits that she can no longer juggle the demands of parenthood and the demands of being a Biglaw lawyer. In a way, it’s heartbreaking. I don’t know this woman, and I don’t know what her hopes and dreams are or might have been, but it shouldn’t be so damn hard — in the richest country on Earth — to have a big-time job and be a loving parent. The struggles highlighted by this woman make me sad as a new parent myself.
The Legal Field Attracts Psychopaths, Author Says; Not That There Is Anything Wrong with That
It’s a matter of degree, author Kevin Dutton argues in the book. At the high end of the scale are serial killers like Ted Bundy. But some psychopathic traits can pave the way to success and help people deal with the stresses of living, Dutton says. His “Seven Deadly Wins” are ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness and action.
Dutton says some professions attract people with psychopathic tendencies, and lawyers are second on the list. The Post quotes one successful lawyer who spoke to Dutton. “Deep inside me there’s a serial killer lurking somewhere,” the lawyer says. “But I keep him amused with cocaine, Formula One, booty calls, and coruscating cross-examination.”
Law School Litigation Update: Will New York’s Chief Judge Be Able To Fix The Legal Academy’s ‘Systemic Failure’?
Not only did Kurzon single out Cooley Law School to show Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman the depths of despair that recent law school graduates are currently faced with, but he also took the opportunity to call out the American Bar Association for failing to properly regulate law schools. In fact, because Kurzon claims that the ABA has “failed in its job,” he’s called on Lippman to revisit the state’s constitutional right to regulate the admission of attorneys — a duty that is typically delegated to the ABA.
Kurzon and other inquiring minds would like to know the answer to this question: when is enough enough? One has to wonder what the point is in requiring recent law school graduates to perform pro bono work when they’re so enslaved to their debts that they themselves would likely qualify to receive free legal services. From Kurzon’s letter to Chief Judge Lippman of the New York Court of Appeals ...
Breaking: 15 more ABA-approved law schools to be sued
With these lawsuits, nearly 10% of all ABA-approved law schools across eight states will be accused of tortiously misrepresenting job placement statistics and violating state consumer protection laws. As with the previous complaints, the relief sought will include tuition reimbursement, punitive damages, and injunctive relief such as mandatory auditing of employment data and cessation of false advertising tactics.
The Crisis of the American Law School
The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile for more than 30 years now the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector accounted for 2.01% of the nation’s GDP: by 2009 that figure had shrunk to 1.37% -- a 32% decrease. These two trends are not mutually sustainable. If the cost of becoming a lawyer continues to rise while the economic advantage conferred by a law degree continues to fall then eventually both the market for new lawyers and for admission to law school will crash. In the early years of the 21st century, this abstract theoretical observation has begun to be confirmed by concrete events. The ongoing contraction in the employment market for new lawyers has combined with the continuing increase in the cost of legal education to produce what has begun to be recognized as a genuine crisis for both law schools and the legal profession.
A Way Forward: Transparency at American Law Schools
Transparency has serious costs and is not something to seek for its own sake. We recall a colleague who, upon reading a news article on the subject of greater disclosure, jokingly opined whether it was theoretically possible for a school to become so transparent that it would actually become invisible.
Given the recent explosion of debate among faculty members following what began as an anonymous charge of their complicity in the so-called “law school scam,” we expect the conversation to be fairly robust with respect to the opinions of academia. However, it is important to recognize that career services and admissions teams should play a critical role in measuring, assigning, and eventually adapting to the changing nature of legal education. Internal efforts to reallocate funds need to take into consideration the varying roles of faculty and staff, but also need to examine what is truly needed for the efficient education of future lawyers. This requires looking outside of the school’s walls and into our constantly evolving profession. Should law schools wish to repair the broken trust relationship, this process begins with the adoption of disclosure policies that inform, rather than solely reduce misleading information, such that the market for law degrees can fundamentally change.
Watchdog (Once Again) Finds Nepotism at Justice Department
The Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Thursday that eight current or former officials at one of its divisions steered jobs to children and other relatives, violating laws and regulations that forbid nepotism.
Similar allegations of improper hiring practices at the department’s Justice Management Division, which oversees administrative and back-office staff, have been the subject of repeated investigation by the department’s inspector general. Reports in 2004 and 2008 also found instances of family members being promoted or hired in violation of the law. And each time officials promised to make lasting changes to hiring practices -- but shit rolls down hill and no one cares.
Economic Segregation in American Law Schools (Swept Under Rug ?)
Using a large national data base (the After the JD Study), Sander finds that just 2 percent of students at the top 20 law schools come from the bottom socioeconomic quarter of the population while more than three-quarters come from the richest socioeconomic quartile. Astoundingly, Sander writes “roughly half the students at these schools come from the top tenth of the SES distribution, while only about one-tenth of the students come from the bottom half.”
Oh Poop
In 2011, 3,375 out of the 43,001 graduates whose job status was recorded by NALP were reported to get jobs via OCI. This is a smaller number than the 4,756 graduates who were reported to get jobs with law firms of more than 100 attorneys, although some unknown percentage of the larger figure were hired into non-partner track positions that certainly weren't acquired via OCI.
Ask the author: Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. on Mismatch
Question: Putting the question of mismatch aside, you also argue that if the goal of our education system is equality of opportunity for all students, it would be much more effective to redirect the resources used to recruit minority students, many of whom come from affluent families, towards recruiting more economically disadvantaged students who are more academically prepared to thrive, and would therefore be a closer “match,” than some of the students who currently receive preferences
Criminal Defense Lawyers Are the Nicest Lawyers
Criminal lawyers negotiate more cooperatively and focus on problem-solving more than lawyers in other areas of practice. Professor Andrea Schneider of Marquette University Law School surveyed 2,500 lawyers in Chicagoand Milwaukee and asked them to describe their most recent negotiating opponent (pdf).
Fashionista Lawyer Sues Forever 21 Over Alleged ‘Penny-Skimming Scheme’
A fashionista lawyer who returned black denim shorts to Forever 21 but received a penny less than what she paid is suing the retailer on behalf of fellow customers who “number in the thousands, spread over several states.”
Carolyn Kellman . . . paid $14.46 for the shorts at the Forever 21 store in the Dolphin Mall on May 12, the complaint filed by Kevin Love of Criden & Love in South Miami said.
More Than a Quarter of Law School Graduates Feel Unprepared for Bar Exam
A new Kaplan Bar Review survey of more than 700 law school graduates from the class of 2012 shows that a majority value the time they spent in school. About 37% of these individuals said they would give their law school education an "A" grade, while 53% would give it a "B."
However, despite how much these students praised their law school education, about 28% said their graduate courses did not prepare them to pass the bar exam, which is crucial for new Juris Doctor (JD) holders.
Scenes from the class struggle (Worth Pondering???)
A particularly interesting section of Brian Tamanaha's new book details the many ways in which less well-off law students end up subsidizing the education and eventually the careers of their better-off classmates. This is a function of the many ways the current structure of legal education in America reinforces and indeed intensifies class stratification. Consider:
Over the past couple of decades, law school financial aid has shifted almost entirely from a need-based to a "merit"-based model. With the notable exception of the three top schools (Yale, Harvard, and Stanford), the vast majority of scholarship and grant money -- a total of about one billion dollars per year -- is given out on the basis of an increasingly intense scramble to secure students with higher GPA and (especially) LSAT scores than a school's key market competitors.
If the middle class kid goes to Chicago, she will be subsidizing the educations of everyone who is paying less than full tuition (almost all reduced tuition at law schools is a product of cross-subsidization rather than endowed scholarships per se). And, perversely enough, a large proportion of those subsidized students will come from much higher SES brackets than she does, because of the innumerable ways in which a high SES background makes it far more likely that one will end up with a very high LSAT score 23 years after one's birth in our increasingly stratified plutocracy...
North Dakota Law Dean Says U.S. News Info on Clerkships Is Wrong (Old & Interesting)
“Congress and the White House, whether they are controlled by Republicans or Democrats, will need to work to keep student aid focused on students, and make further investments to meet the growing need of low- and middle-income students and families looking to improve their lives.”
While the Pell Grant program would be protected during this fiscal year, other federal financial aid programs would be cut about 8%, according to a report released in mid-September by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. These programs include federal work-study and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant. (Cuts would be made to higher education access programs, including TRiO and GEAR UP programs.) The cuts would go into effect July 1, 2013. The American Opportunity Tax Credit, which provides a credit of up to $2,500 per year, is also set to expire in December and has not yet been extended.
Some LSAT Tea-Leaf Reading & Some Student Debt Stuff in The News
A while back I expressed dismay at the lower-than-expected drop in LSATs in June 2012. The October numbers are in, and the decline renews! Sometimes I like being proven wrong. Obviously, LSATs aren’t the same as applicants, but: no LSATs, no applicants. We also have no idea how many people are first-time takers vs. repeaters.
Britain favoured execution over Nuremberg trials for Nazi leaders (Pike's Precedent?)
The British eventually agreed to the war crimes trials despite the misgivings of some senior government officials who believed the decision to prosecute the surviving Nazi leadership for waging a war of aggression would set a dangerous precedent. They also feared the prosecutions would be on a par with the high-profile show trials in Stalin's Russia.
"Personally I think the whole procedure is quite dreadful. The DPP had recommended that a fact-finding committee should come to the conclusion that certain people should be bumped off and that others should receive varying terms of imprisonment, that this should be put to the House of Commons and that the authority should be given to any military body finding these individuals in their area to arrest them and inflict whatever punishment had been decided on. This was a much clearer proposition and would not bring the law into disrepute.
DA Reisig Declines to File Charges Against UCD Police in Pepper Spray Case
The DA's office, he writes, concludes "that the use of force in this case was not unlawful."
In their conclusion, the DA writes, "Lieutenant Pike's pepper spraying of the seated protesters has been seen by and has outraged millions of viewers throughout the world. Based on the thirty seconds of video that most people have seen the pepper spraying may look like unreasonable force."
The DA instead argues, "Whether or not the force was unreasonable and criminal cannot be judged solely on that brief moment in time. The conflict that resulted in the pepper spraying had been evolving for several days before November 18, 2011, and must be examined in the light of the totality of the circumstances."
"In evaluating the totality of the circumstances under a reasonable doubt standard, we have considered and given substantial weight to the opinions and conclusions set forth in the Kroll Report," the DA writes. "In light of this additional evidence, and viewing the incident through the totality of the circumstances, there is insufficient evidence to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the use of force involved in the November 18, 2011, pepper spraying was unlawful and therefore warrants the filing of criminal charges."
Student Loan Hurdles for Members of Military
Many service members, for instance, simply defer their loans or obtain a forbearance, which lets them skip monthly payments while on active duty. But they may not always understand that on some types of loans, interest may still accrue, often resulting in ballooning loan balances. And they may not be told about possible alternatives that can lower their monthly payments to more affordable levels.
One parent of a service member told the bureau that his son’s three loans totaled just over $61,000 when his son graduated. But the servicer now says the total is almost $85,000, because of a five-month deferral of payments during military service.
One borrower told the bureau that his loan servicer automatically put his loans into forbearance without his permission. “I did not ask for my account to be placed in forbearance and as a result of this action, it is currently accumulating interest,” he wrote.
Programs like “income-based repayment” may allow service members with federal loans to reduce their monthly payments while on active duty. Then, if they remain in the service for 10 years and make 120 on-time payments, they can take advantage of the “public service loan forgiveness” program, which forgives the remaining balance.
Beware of the Black Hole
The College Board estimates that 10.3 million post-secondary students borrowed Stafford Loans and 9.1 million students received Pell Grants during the 2010-11 academic year.
Most recently the Federal Reserve Bank of New York revealed in their Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit that the delinquency rate for student loans has continued to increase from a current 8.9 percent rate, with student loan debt increasing from $10 billion to $914 billion.
In a last minute Congressional decision, the federal government approved in July to keep the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loan at 3.4 percent for one more year, a change to a law that had the interest originally doubling to 6.8. Though now, the interest-free grace period for repayment after graduation is gone. In other words you can choose to extend repayment for six months, but interest is going to grow the entire time.
What Does the Future Hold for American Legal Education?
During the question-and-answer session, some conference attendees worried about whether this system would adequately train lawyers. McGinnis pointed out that many other countries, such as Great Britain and other Commonwealth nations, have law as an undergraduate degree, and there’s no evidence that these countries are facing some crisis in the quality of legal services. He once again emphasized that his proposal has the virtue of allowing for a greater variety of lawyers and lawyering (since people could still get traditional J.D. degrees if they like). Making a comparison to cars, he observed that “not every lawyer needs to be a Bentley”; sometimes a less fancy vehicle can get the job done just as well.
One interesting query from the Q-and-A: given the glut of lawyers we already have, why do we still see so many Americans unable to afford legal services? Why hasn’t the cost of legal services for ordinary Americans come down dramatically, thanks to the large number of unemployed and underemployed lawyers out there?
STATE BAR ANNOUNCES RESULTS FOR JULY 2012 CALIFORNIA BAR EXAMINATION
The three-day General Bar Examination is given twice a year in February and July. The exam consists of three sections: a multiple-choice Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), six essay questions and two performance tests that are designed to assess an applicant's ability to apply general legal knowledge to practical tasks. The mean scaled MBE score in California was 1459 compared with the national average of 1434.
In addition, the Committee announced that 152 (34.9 percent) of the 435 lawyers who took the Attorneys' Examination passed. Out of the total taking the Attorneys’ Examination, 25 were disciplined lawyers who took the examination as a condition of reinstatement; one (1) disciplined lawyer passed.
Richard Sander is a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law whose research argues that affirmative action hurts minorities because they often struggle to keep up academically. (Justice Clarence Thomas has expressed a similar view — that affirmative action promotes tokenism.) Sander predicted that Kennedy would push for greater transparency about how schools weigh applicants' race. The "holistic review" of applicants endorsed in Grutter has "encouraged universities to hide the ball on admissions practices," he said. If law schools were subject to greater transparency, race would play less of a role in admission decisions, he said.
In fact, the extent to which race plays a role in law school admissions is not entirely clear. Despite the pending Supreme Court case, affirmative action remains a sensitive topic; a number of admissions deans declined requests to discuss how race factors into admissions or how they might adjust to a ban on affirmative action.
The Inheritance of Education & Stupidity
Economix posted a graph showing a strong positive correlation between SAT score and parental income. Greg Mankiw pointed out that the effect is unlikely to be purely causal because there may be an omitted variable bias, IQ for example. Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias both attack Mankiw and point to graphs showing that income matters for college completion and enrollment, respectively, holding various achievement scores constant. Brad DeLong crunches the numbers on IQ and income correlation to estimate that half the effect is due to IQ and half to something else.
All this is good but none if it gets at the heart of the matter because there are a lot of way that heredity/genes could explain the income/education correlation; IQ is only one possible mechanism, personality (e.g. conscientiousness) is another possibility.
The type of evidence that we need to resolve this question is adoption studies. Fortunately, such studies have been done and indeed I have presented the data before in my post Nature, Nurture and Income. Let's do so again.
Converting Rich Kids LSAT scores to Poor Kids IQ’s ??? (Changing the odds)
I decided to use a linear regression analysis to convert LSAT scores to IQ’s. I found five data points from five high-IQ societies that accept LSAT scores. The International Society for Philosophical Inquiry accepts a 178 LSAT score, which corresponds to a 146 IQ. The Poetic Genius Society accepts a 174 LSAT score, which corresponds to a 139 IQ. Intertel accepts a 172 LSAT Score, which corresponds to a 135 IQ; and Mensa America accepts a LSAT score that is in the 95th percentile, which is historically a 167 LSAT Score corresponding to a 130 IQ. I’m assuming a 15 SD for all IQ scores. The LSAT average is historically between 150-151. I’ll choose 151 to be generous. Inductivist calculated that the average college graduate’s IQ is a 105. So the last data point is a 151 LSAT score corresponding to a 105 IQ.
Are Law Schools Just As Dysfuntional As Community Colleges? (rhetorical question?)
Why is America falling short? To name only a few of the many reasons: inadequate academic preparation, poorly designed and delivered remediation, broken credit transfer policies, confusing financial aid programs, a culture that rewards enrollment instead of completion, and a system too often out of touch with the needs of the today’s college student.
Departure Memo of the Day: Parenting Gets The Best Of One Biglaw Associate
I’ve read this departure email three times this morning, all while a sleeping six-week-old snores up at me. It’s a departure memo where a Biglaw associate kind of admits that she can no longer juggle the demands of parenthood and the demands of being a Biglaw lawyer. In a way, it’s heartbreaking. I don’t know this woman, and I don’t know what her hopes and dreams are or might have been, but it shouldn’t be so damn hard — in the richest country on Earth — to have a big-time job and be a loving parent. The struggles highlighted by this woman make me sad as a new parent myself.
The Legal Field Attracts Psychopaths, Author Says; Not That There Is Anything Wrong with That
It’s a matter of degree, author Kevin Dutton argues in the book. At the high end of the scale are serial killers like Ted Bundy. But some psychopathic traits can pave the way to success and help people deal with the stresses of living, Dutton says. His “Seven Deadly Wins” are ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness and action.
Dutton says some professions attract people with psychopathic tendencies, and lawyers are second on the list. The Post quotes one successful lawyer who spoke to Dutton. “Deep inside me there’s a serial killer lurking somewhere,” the lawyer says. “But I keep him amused with cocaine, Formula One, booty calls, and coruscating cross-examination.”
Law School Litigation Update: Will New York’s Chief Judge Be Able To Fix The Legal Academy’s ‘Systemic Failure’?
Not only did Kurzon single out Cooley Law School to show Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman the depths of despair that recent law school graduates are currently faced with, but he also took the opportunity to call out the American Bar Association for failing to properly regulate law schools. In fact, because Kurzon claims that the ABA has “failed in its job,” he’s called on Lippman to revisit the state’s constitutional right to regulate the admission of attorneys — a duty that is typically delegated to the ABA.
Kurzon and other inquiring minds would like to know the answer to this question: when is enough enough? One has to wonder what the point is in requiring recent law school graduates to perform pro bono work when they’re so enslaved to their debts that they themselves would likely qualify to receive free legal services. From Kurzon’s letter to Chief Judge Lippman of the New York Court of Appeals ...
Breaking: 15 more ABA-approved law schools to be sued
With these lawsuits, nearly 10% of all ABA-approved law schools across eight states will be accused of tortiously misrepresenting job placement statistics and violating state consumer protection laws. As with the previous complaints, the relief sought will include tuition reimbursement, punitive damages, and injunctive relief such as mandatory auditing of employment data and cessation of false advertising tactics.
The Crisis of the American Law School
The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile for more than 30 years now the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector accounted for 2.01% of the nation’s GDP: by 2009 that figure had shrunk to 1.37% -- a 32% decrease. These two trends are not mutually sustainable. If the cost of becoming a lawyer continues to rise while the economic advantage conferred by a law degree continues to fall then eventually both the market for new lawyers and for admission to law school will crash. In the early years of the 21st century, this abstract theoretical observation has begun to be confirmed by concrete events. The ongoing contraction in the employment market for new lawyers has combined with the continuing increase in the cost of legal education to produce what has begun to be recognized as a genuine crisis for both law schools and the legal profession.
A Way Forward: Transparency at American Law Schools
Transparency has serious costs and is not something to seek for its own sake. We recall a colleague who, upon reading a news article on the subject of greater disclosure, jokingly opined whether it was theoretically possible for a school to become so transparent that it would actually become invisible.
Given the recent explosion of debate among faculty members following what began as an anonymous charge of their complicity in the so-called “law school scam,” we expect the conversation to be fairly robust with respect to the opinions of academia. However, it is important to recognize that career services and admissions teams should play a critical role in measuring, assigning, and eventually adapting to the changing nature of legal education. Internal efforts to reallocate funds need to take into consideration the varying roles of faculty and staff, but also need to examine what is truly needed for the efficient education of future lawyers. This requires looking outside of the school’s walls and into our constantly evolving profession. Should law schools wish to repair the broken trust relationship, this process begins with the adoption of disclosure policies that inform, rather than solely reduce misleading information, such that the market for law degrees can fundamentally change.
Watchdog (Once Again) Finds Nepotism at Justice Department
The Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Thursday that eight current or former officials at one of its divisions steered jobs to children and other relatives, violating laws and regulations that forbid nepotism.
Similar allegations of improper hiring practices at the department’s Justice Management Division, which oversees administrative and back-office staff, have been the subject of repeated investigation by the department’s inspector general. Reports in 2004 and 2008 also found instances of family members being promoted or hired in violation of the law. And each time officials promised to make lasting changes to hiring practices -- but shit rolls down hill and no one cares.
Economic Segregation in American Law Schools (Swept Under Rug ?)
Using a large national data base (the After the JD Study), Sander finds that just 2 percent of students at the top 20 law schools come from the bottom socioeconomic quarter of the population while more than three-quarters come from the richest socioeconomic quartile. Astoundingly, Sander writes “roughly half the students at these schools come from the top tenth of the SES distribution, while only about one-tenth of the students come from the bottom half.”
Oh Poop
In 2011, 3,375 out of the 43,001 graduates whose job status was recorded by NALP were reported to get jobs via OCI. This is a smaller number than the 4,756 graduates who were reported to get jobs with law firms of more than 100 attorneys, although some unknown percentage of the larger figure were hired into non-partner track positions that certainly weren't acquired via OCI.
Ask the author: Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. on Mismatch
Question: Putting the question of mismatch aside, you also argue that if the goal of our education system is equality of opportunity for all students, it would be much more effective to redirect the resources used to recruit minority students, many of whom come from affluent families, towards recruiting more economically disadvantaged students who are more academically prepared to thrive, and would therefore be a closer “match,” than some of the students who currently receive preferences
Criminal Defense Lawyers Are the Nicest Lawyers
Criminal lawyers negotiate more cooperatively and focus on problem-solving more than lawyers in other areas of practice. Professor Andrea Schneider of Marquette University Law School surveyed 2,500 lawyers in Chicagoand Milwaukee and asked them to describe their most recent negotiating opponent (pdf).
Fashionista Lawyer Sues Forever 21 Over Alleged ‘Penny-Skimming Scheme’
A fashionista lawyer who returned black denim shorts to Forever 21 but received a penny less than what she paid is suing the retailer on behalf of fellow customers who “number in the thousands, spread over several states.”
Carolyn Kellman . . . paid $14.46 for the shorts at the Forever 21 store in the Dolphin Mall on May 12, the complaint filed by Kevin Love of Criden & Love in South Miami said.
More Than a Quarter of Law School Graduates Feel Unprepared for Bar Exam
A new Kaplan Bar Review survey of more than 700 law school graduates from the class of 2012 shows that a majority value the time they spent in school. About 37% of these individuals said they would give their law school education an "A" grade, while 53% would give it a "B."
However, despite how much these students praised their law school education, about 28% said their graduate courses did not prepare them to pass the bar exam, which is crucial for new Juris Doctor (JD) holders.
Scenes from the class struggle (Worth Pondering???)
A particularly interesting section of Brian Tamanaha's new book details the many ways in which less well-off law students end up subsidizing the education and eventually the careers of their better-off classmates. This is a function of the many ways the current structure of legal education in America reinforces and indeed intensifies class stratification. Consider:
Over the past couple of decades, law school financial aid has shifted almost entirely from a need-based to a "merit"-based model. With the notable exception of the three top schools (Yale, Harvard, and Stanford), the vast majority of scholarship and grant money -- a total of about one billion dollars per year -- is given out on the basis of an increasingly intense scramble to secure students with higher GPA and (especially) LSAT scores than a school's key market competitors.
If the middle class kid goes to Chicago, she will be subsidizing the educations of everyone who is paying less than full tuition (almost all reduced tuition at law schools is a product of cross-subsidization rather than endowed scholarships per se). And, perversely enough, a large proportion of those subsidized students will come from much higher SES brackets than she does, because of the innumerable ways in which a high SES background makes it far more likely that one will end up with a very high LSAT score 23 years after one's birth in our increasingly stratified plutocracy...
North Dakota Law Dean Says U.S. News Info on Clerkships Is Wrong (Old & Interesting)
Actually, the law school did not place any students in Article III clerkships in 2007, Rand said. The 28 percent figure for all judicial clerkships is correct, however, “and not an anomaly at all.”
North Dakota was not the only surprise on the U.S. News list of top judicial clerkship feeder law schools. The University of Wyoming was No. 5 and the University of St. Thomas at No. 6. All are tier 3 law schools on U.S. News’ overall list.
“I don’t know exactly what happened with the misinformation being reported in the U.S. News survey,” Rand told the ABA Journal. “I understand that we weren’t the only school that had misinformation reported.” Rand said she learned of other errors when she called U.S. News.
==> Legal Education Statistics from ABA-Approved Law Schools
Financial aid for the first lady
Don Betterton, who led the Undergraduate Financial Aid Office for 32 years from 1974 to 2006, described the University’s financial aid program as “on the generous side” even before the no-loan financial aid policy was implemented in 2001.
During Obama’s senior year, tuition, room and board cost $15,408, according to University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua. However, 43 percent of students were on some type of financial aid and did not pay full fare; the average student on financial aid received an aid package of $9,176.
This package included the student loans that Obama frequently references, along with work-study awards and grants. As a result, the average student left the University with $8,450 in student debt, according to Mbugua.
The Three Biggest Lies in College Admission
Today, more and more college admission officers want – and need – to know whether the kid can pay full-freight. And if there is a choice between two virtually-identical applicants – one who needs financial aid and one who doesn’t – the fat envelope is going to go to the kid who can pay full tuition.
Some very good schools – such as Wesleyan – are coming forward and admitting that they can’t afford to be 100% need-blind. “More than a handful of schools are not being honest however,” states Muska. “So kudos to them. Families need this transparency from colleges.”
Similarly, some of the most selective colleges are quietly moving away from their “no loans” financial aid policy. Pre-2007 many of the nation’s wealthiest and most selective colleges said that they would eliminate loans from the financial aid packages they gave students. Today, there is a family income level that must be met before a no-loan financial aid package is offered.
North Dakota was not the only surprise on the U.S. News list of top judicial clerkship feeder law schools. The University of Wyoming was No. 5 and the University of St. Thomas at No. 6. All are tier 3 law schools on U.S. News’ overall list.
“I don’t know exactly what happened with the misinformation being reported in the U.S. News survey,” Rand told the ABA Journal. “I understand that we weren’t the only school that had misinformation reported.” Rand said she learned of other errors when she called U.S. News.
==> Legal Education Statistics from ABA-Approved Law Schools
Financial aid for the first lady
Don Betterton, who led the Undergraduate Financial Aid Office for 32 years from 1974 to 2006, described the University’s financial aid program as “on the generous side” even before the no-loan financial aid policy was implemented in 2001.
During Obama’s senior year, tuition, room and board cost $15,408, according to University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua. However, 43 percent of students were on some type of financial aid and did not pay full fare; the average student on financial aid received an aid package of $9,176.
This package included the student loans that Obama frequently references, along with work-study awards and grants. As a result, the average student left the University with $8,450 in student debt, according to Mbugua.
The Three Biggest Lies in College Admission
Today, more and more college admission officers want – and need – to know whether the kid can pay full-freight. And if there is a choice between two virtually-identical applicants – one who needs financial aid and one who doesn’t – the fat envelope is going to go to the kid who can pay full tuition.
Some very good schools – such as Wesleyan – are coming forward and admitting that they can’t afford to be 100% need-blind. “More than a handful of schools are not being honest however,” states Muska. “So kudos to them. Families need this transparency from colleges.”
Similarly, some of the most selective colleges are quietly moving away from their “no loans” financial aid policy. Pre-2007 many of the nation’s wealthiest and most selective colleges said that they would eliminate loans from the financial aid packages they gave students. Today, there is a family income level that must be met before a no-loan financial aid package is offered.
Cornell University recently announced that no-loan financial aid would only be available to families earning under $60,000 a year. Similarly, Dartmouth and Williams announced that their no-loan policy would be limited to students at the lowest end of the income-distribution scale.
The Impact of Scholarship Programs on the Culture of Law School
As noted above, the Non-Competitive Law School and the Competitive Law School each hope and want to get as many students at the top of the applicant pool while also trying to assure that the middle and bottom of its entering class also is as competitive as possible (to have a more compressed distribution between the top and bottom of its class). To do this, each will need to distribute scholarship assistance fairly widely across the profile of entering students (without simply giving every student the average award of $6,000).
Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win
How hard could a 3.0 be? Really hard, it turned out. That might have been obvious if Golden Gate published a statistic that law schools are loath to share: the number of first-year students who lose their merit scholarships. That figure is not in the literature sent to prospective Golden Gate students or on its Web site.
But it’s a number worth knowing. At Golden Gate and other law schools nationwide, students are graded on a curve, which carefully rations the number of A’s and B’s, as well as C’s and D’s, awarded each semester. That all but ensures that a certain number of students — at Golden Gate, it could be in the realm of 70 students this year — will lose their scholarships and wind up paying full tuition in their second and third years.
Are Law School ‘Merit Scholarships’ A Big Racket?
[Loyola-Chicago Dean David] Yellen said that the ABA’s draft accreditation standard likely would look much like Law School Transparency’s proposal — schools would be required to post scholarship retention information on their Web sites or in scholarship offer letters. The committee does not intend to address how merit scholarships are offered or allocated.
“I think this is a significant problem, in terms of maintaining an ethical system,” Yellen said. “Schools get people to come with these scholarship, knowing that a percentage of them will lose that financial support. It’s a funny way to do business.”
ABA backs off making law schools report graduates’ salaries
After about an hour of discussion, the council gave initial approval to the committee’s recommended rewriting of Standard 509 and Rule 16. Schools would be required to publicly disclose on their Web sites their admissions data; tuition rates and fees; enrollment data; faculty size; curricular offerings; library resources and facilities; employment data; and bar passage rates. They would have to disclose the number of graduates who factor into any published salary figure.
The standard itself does not spell out what details the schools must report; rather, they were included on a supplemental chart developed by the standards review committee. Schools would also have to report the number of graduates employed in jobs that require bar passage; jobs in which a juris doctor degree is preferred; professional and nonprofessional jobs; and the numbers of graduates pursuing further education and unemployed.
Del. high court to Chancery chief: Keep world views to yourself 11/07
While Wednesday's ruling was per curiam, or the work of the whole court, it may have its roots in a simmering dispute between Strine and Supreme Court Chief Justice Myron Steele.
Steele took issue with the section of Strine's opinion on fiduciary duties during a hearing on the Auriga Capital case in September. "Why did he go to this whole diatribe, for lack of a better word, of about how ignorant people are who think other than he does about whether the default position is (that) fiduciary duties apply or (do) not apply?" Steele said at the time.
As well as his colorful opinions, Strine is also known for his courtroom digressions, which have ranged from discussions of incentives driving investor bankers to the NBC television show "America's Got Talent" and the mysteries of the Catholic faith.
The Impact of Scholarship Programs on the Culture of Law School
As noted above, the Non-Competitive Law School and the Competitive Law School each hope and want to get as many students at the top of the applicant pool while also trying to assure that the middle and bottom of its entering class also is as competitive as possible (to have a more compressed distribution between the top and bottom of its class). To do this, each will need to distribute scholarship assistance fairly widely across the profile of entering students (without simply giving every student the average award of $6,000).
Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win
How hard could a 3.0 be? Really hard, it turned out. That might have been obvious if Golden Gate published a statistic that law schools are loath to share: the number of first-year students who lose their merit scholarships. That figure is not in the literature sent to prospective Golden Gate students or on its Web site.
But it’s a number worth knowing. At Golden Gate and other law schools nationwide, students are graded on a curve, which carefully rations the number of A’s and B’s, as well as C’s and D’s, awarded each semester. That all but ensures that a certain number of students — at Golden Gate, it could be in the realm of 70 students this year — will lose their scholarships and wind up paying full tuition in their second and third years.
Are Law School ‘Merit Scholarships’ A Big Racket?
[Loyola-Chicago Dean David] Yellen said that the ABA’s draft accreditation standard likely would look much like Law School Transparency’s proposal — schools would be required to post scholarship retention information on their Web sites or in scholarship offer letters. The committee does not intend to address how merit scholarships are offered or allocated.
“I think this is a significant problem, in terms of maintaining an ethical system,” Yellen said. “Schools get people to come with these scholarship, knowing that a percentage of them will lose that financial support. It’s a funny way to do business.”
ABA backs off making law schools report graduates’ salaries
After about an hour of discussion, the council gave initial approval to the committee’s recommended rewriting of Standard 509 and Rule 16. Schools would be required to publicly disclose on their Web sites their admissions data; tuition rates and fees; enrollment data; faculty size; curricular offerings; library resources and facilities; employment data; and bar passage rates. They would have to disclose the number of graduates who factor into any published salary figure.
The standard itself does not spell out what details the schools must report; rather, they were included on a supplemental chart developed by the standards review committee. Schools would also have to report the number of graduates employed in jobs that require bar passage; jobs in which a juris doctor degree is preferred; professional and nonprofessional jobs; and the numbers of graduates pursuing further education and unemployed.
Del. high court to Chancery chief: Keep world views to yourself 11/07
While Wednesday's ruling was per curiam, or the work of the whole court, it may have its roots in a simmering dispute between Strine and Supreme Court Chief Justice Myron Steele.
Steele took issue with the section of Strine's opinion on fiduciary duties during a hearing on the Auriga Capital case in September. "Why did he go to this whole diatribe, for lack of a better word, of about how ignorant people are who think other than he does about whether the default position is (that) fiduciary duties apply or (do) not apply?" Steele said at the time.
As well as his colorful opinions, Strine is also known for his courtroom digressions, which have ranged from discussions of incentives driving investor bankers to the NBC television show "America's Got Talent" and the mysteries of the Catholic faith.
Why the U.S. Has a Worse Youth Unemployment Problem than Europe 11/5
The most marginalized group of young people are those who not only don’t have a job but are no longer in school, either. In the jargon of economists, these are the so-called NEETs, youngsters not in employment, education or training.
Their numbers have been rising everywhere, but they are especially prevalent in the U.S. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, which has the best data on the subject, 14.8% of young Americans qualified as NEETs in the first quarter of 2011 (the most recent period available), up from 12.1% in the same period in 2007. In the E.U. as a whole, the figure was 13.2%, up from 11.5% in 2007.
The Field of Law Continues to Take Hits 11/05
The American Bar Association reports that only 55.2 percent of 2011 grads were working in a legal profession. On top of that, 26.4 percent of all law grads are underemployed (working in a non-law position or in a part-time job). [Most are argumentative part-time waitresses]
Most data out there supports the idea that the more education you have, the better paid you will (eventually) be. Job prospects should be plentiful -- and salaries should be higher -- once you make the investment in your schooling. But evidence is mounting that law schools in particular are cooking the books on just how successful their graduates are at finding work. This lulls prospective students into a false sense of economic security. A report from earlier this year by Law School Transparency showed that law schools routinely mislead incoming students about post-graduate employment levels, sometimes intentionally:
● Just 49 percent of schools provide salary information alongside their employment claims, and of those that do, 78 percent list it in an allegedly misleading fashion.
● Only 17 percent of schools specify how many of their graduates are working full-time versus part-time.
● Schools will often post salary information without disclosing that only a fraction of the graduating class responded to a salary survey.
Washington Post Hops On The ‘Do Law Students Know How Stupid They Are’ Bandwagon
Jesus Christ, $77,000 for law school? Remember back when UC Irvine was free?
As I said, everybody should know that paying full freight for anything but the best law schools is taking your financial life in your own hands. Biglaw isn’t going back to the way it was in 2006. It doesn’t have to. We haven’t seen a raise to the associate salary scale in five years, and I don’t think we’re going to see one next year. If you don’t know that the cost of legal education has outstripped the value of legal education, you are too stupid to operate Google.
LST Score Reports (Recent)
The Score Reports help prospective students make informed law school application and enrollment decisions using job outcome data. Our collection of geographic, school, and other reports have been designed to focus applicants on schools with observable relationships to specific locations and job types.
Asian-Americans in the Argument 11/3
But the University of Texas is also an unusual institution to accuse of race-based selections because of the idiosyncrasies of the system it adopted in the late 1990s. Shortly after a federal appeals court forbade Texas's public universities from using race in admissions decisions, the university employed a clever formula: Texans, like most of the country, live in largely segregated communities, so the university accepts the top graduates of every high school. (It's called the Top 10 Percent Law, but the cutoffs can vary slightly each year.)
In a 2003 case involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court decided that race could be used minimally in college admissions to create a diverse environment. Texas then adjusted its policy to increase diversity further. And it is that policy that Ms. Fisher is challenging. The university takes in the first 75 percent of its admitted class by the top 10 percent rule and then submits the final quarter to a holistic evaluation. That means other issues, including race and ethnicity (and musical and athletic ability and essays), are taken into consideration.
July bar exam results for New York released
NEW YORK, Nov 2 (Reuters) - A record number of law school graduates took the New York bar exam in July, the state's Board of Law Examiners said Friday, with 67.6 percent of candidates passing the test.
All told, 11,734 prospective lawyers sat for the two-day exam, which was administered July 24 and 25. The previous record was 11,557, set in July 2010. The overall pass rate was slightly lower than for the July 2011 test, when the rate was 69.2 percent.
Persons Taking and Passing the 2011 Bar Examination (National Conference of Bar Examiners Statistics)
Will law school students have jobs after they graduate? 10/31
In 2011, more than 44,000 students graduated from the 200-odd U.S. law schools accredited by the American Bar Association. Nine months after graduation, only a bit more than half had found full-time jobs as lawyers.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts 73,600 new lawyer jobs from 2010 to 2020. But just three years into that decade, about 132,757 new lawyers have hit the job market.
Data from the National Association of Legal Career Professionals indicate that since 2010, about 75,000 new law grads have found full-time jobs as lawyers.
So, in theory, all of the BLS-forecasted job openings through 2020 have already been filled, and 59,157 new lawyers are still looking for “real” law jobs.
Legal Jobs Report: October 11/2
The most marginalized group of young people are those who not only don’t have a job but are no longer in school, either. In the jargon of economists, these are the so-called NEETs, youngsters not in employment, education or training.
Their numbers have been rising everywhere, but they are especially prevalent in the U.S. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, which has the best data on the subject, 14.8% of young Americans qualified as NEETs in the first quarter of 2011 (the most recent period available), up from 12.1% in the same period in 2007. In the E.U. as a whole, the figure was 13.2%, up from 11.5% in 2007.
The Field of Law Continues to Take Hits 11/05
The American Bar Association reports that only 55.2 percent of 2011 grads were working in a legal profession. On top of that, 26.4 percent of all law grads are underemployed (working in a non-law position or in a part-time job). [Most are argumentative part-time waitresses]
Most data out there supports the idea that the more education you have, the better paid you will (eventually) be. Job prospects should be plentiful -- and salaries should be higher -- once you make the investment in your schooling. But evidence is mounting that law schools in particular are cooking the books on just how successful their graduates are at finding work. This lulls prospective students into a false sense of economic security. A report from earlier this year by Law School Transparency showed that law schools routinely mislead incoming students about post-graduate employment levels, sometimes intentionally:
● Just 49 percent of schools provide salary information alongside their employment claims, and of those that do, 78 percent list it in an allegedly misleading fashion.
● Only 17 percent of schools specify how many of their graduates are working full-time versus part-time.
● Schools will often post salary information without disclosing that only a fraction of the graduating class responded to a salary survey.
Washington Post Hops On The ‘Do Law Students Know How Stupid They Are’ Bandwagon
Jesus Christ, $77,000 for law school? Remember back when UC Irvine was free?
As I said, everybody should know that paying full freight for anything but the best law schools is taking your financial life in your own hands. Biglaw isn’t going back to the way it was in 2006. It doesn’t have to. We haven’t seen a raise to the associate salary scale in five years, and I don’t think we’re going to see one next year. If you don’t know that the cost of legal education has outstripped the value of legal education, you are too stupid to operate Google.
LST Score Reports (Recent)
The Score Reports help prospective students make informed law school application and enrollment decisions using job outcome data. Our collection of geographic, school, and other reports have been designed to focus applicants on schools with observable relationships to specific locations and job types.
Asian-Americans in the Argument 11/3
But the University of Texas is also an unusual institution to accuse of race-based selections because of the idiosyncrasies of the system it adopted in the late 1990s. Shortly after a federal appeals court forbade Texas's public universities from using race in admissions decisions, the university employed a clever formula: Texans, like most of the country, live in largely segregated communities, so the university accepts the top graduates of every high school. (It's called the Top 10 Percent Law, but the cutoffs can vary slightly each year.)
In a 2003 case involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court decided that race could be used minimally in college admissions to create a diverse environment. Texas then adjusted its policy to increase diversity further. And it is that policy that Ms. Fisher is challenging. The university takes in the first 75 percent of its admitted class by the top 10 percent rule and then submits the final quarter to a holistic evaluation. That means other issues, including race and ethnicity (and musical and athletic ability and essays), are taken into consideration.
July bar exam results for New York released
NEW YORK, Nov 2 (Reuters) - A record number of law school graduates took the New York bar exam in July, the state's Board of Law Examiners said Friday, with 67.6 percent of candidates passing the test.
All told, 11,734 prospective lawyers sat for the two-day exam, which was administered July 24 and 25. The previous record was 11,557, set in July 2010. The overall pass rate was slightly lower than for the July 2011 test, when the rate was 69.2 percent.
Persons Taking and Passing the 2011 Bar Examination (National Conference of Bar Examiners Statistics)
Will law school students have jobs after they graduate? 10/31
In 2011, more than 44,000 students graduated from the 200-odd U.S. law schools accredited by the American Bar Association. Nine months after graduation, only a bit more than half had found full-time jobs as lawyers.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts 73,600 new lawyer jobs from 2010 to 2020. But just three years into that decade, about 132,757 new lawyers have hit the job market.
Data from the National Association of Legal Career Professionals indicate that since 2010, about 75,000 new law grads have found full-time jobs as lawyers.
So, in theory, all of the BLS-forecasted job openings through 2020 have already been filled, and 59,157 new lawyers are still looking for “real” law jobs.
Legal Jobs Report: October 11/2
The legal services sector grew by a meager 600 jobs in October, according to the Labor Department. The sector accounts for about 1.12 million jobs and hasn’t seen any big swings this year. Legal jobs increased by 6,600 since October 2011.
Law School Responds to Allegations It Falsified Jobs Stats (Recent)
Thomas Jefferson School of Law responded Thursday to allegations that it lied about how many of its students were employed nine months after graduation in order to to boost its reputation. The allegations surfaced in one of more than a dozen lawsuits around the country that accuse schools of advertising misleading statistics showing a high percentage of their graduates landed jobs.
The Worst Career Decision You'll Ever Make
The news for would-be attorneys keeps getting worse. According to analysis from the Wall Street Journal released yesterday, only 55% of class of 2011 law school grads were employed full-time as lawyers nine months after graduation. The other 45% may be unemployed, working at Starbucks or starting their own law school hate blogs. Couple this with declining starting salaries (they fell $9000 between 2009 and 2010) and the fact that 85% of law school grads are facing an average debt load of $98 500 and you can see why law school as a career path has taken a public lambasting in recent years.
Law students, the choice is yours: head to Texas to try and land a $185,000-a-year high-stakes litigation gig, or opt for public interest law, where you’ll probably earn less than half that after toiling away for 15 years on civil rights or women’s issues.
Lots of cheerful news on the legal compensation front today! Never mind that median BigLaw salaries for first-year associates have slumped to 2007 levels ($145,000), according to numbers out last month from the National Association for Law Placement.
Down in Dallas, litigation boutique Bickel & Brewer is boosting its first-year pay by $10,000–to a princely $185,000–according to Texas Lawyer’s Tex Parte blog. The downside: only eight students got offered jobs.
Law School Responds to Allegations It Falsified Jobs Stats (Recent)
Thomas Jefferson School of Law responded Thursday to allegations that it lied about how many of its students were employed nine months after graduation in order to to boost its reputation. The allegations surfaced in one of more than a dozen lawsuits around the country that accuse schools of advertising misleading statistics showing a high percentage of their graduates landed jobs.
The Worst Career Decision You'll Ever Make
The news for would-be attorneys keeps getting worse. According to analysis from the Wall Street Journal released yesterday, only 55% of class of 2011 law school grads were employed full-time as lawyers nine months after graduation. The other 45% may be unemployed, working at Starbucks or starting their own law school hate blogs. Couple this with declining starting salaries (they fell $9000 between 2009 and 2010) and the fact that 85% of law school grads are facing an average debt load of $98 500 and you can see why law school as a career path has taken a public lambasting in recent years.
Gap between college tuition and consumer income is at record levels (Recent)
This is another market distortion created by the US government (similar to the housing market) by providing an almost unlimited amount of credit and pricing it below market. It allowed schools to raise tuition without the demand constraint that would normally exist in a market. As a result the US consumer student loan burden is now higher than either auto or credit card debt (see discussion). And now we are also seeing a rise in delinquencies (see post).
Heat is on for law school test 10/22
Council administrators acknowledge that they are under more pressure than ever over accommodations, and that their screening procedures are more rigorous than nearly all other standardized test givers. However, they deny that their process — aimed, they insist, at protecting their test's integrity and making it fair to all — violates anyone's rights. Moreover, accommodation requests deserve scrutiny because the LSAT plays an such an outsized role in law school admissions, said general counsel Joan Van Tol. "As the stakes get higher, the degree of rigor in review gets higher as well," she said.
Measuring Outcomes (Somewhat Recent)
The ultimate question remains, “How do you know that a graduate of a particular law school is going to be a good (or bad) lawyer?” An easy prediction is based on the bar exam. Someone who fails it multiple times has issues with their knowledge of the law or, as likely, perseverance in preparing for or undertaking stressful events. Any of these would seem to call their future as a competent attorney into question. But passing the bar, in itself, tests little of the new attorney’s abilities and allows people to enter into the practice of law who will prove incompetent.
Unfortunately, although relatively easily calculated, post-law school placement rates are not a good measurement. It seems as every legal employer assumes that a graduate of a U.S. News highly ranked law school will be a good lawyer. See Henderson & Zahorsky, The Pedigree Problem. Unlike an open marketplace where a better product can overtake a larger, but inferior one, the law school ranking system places so much reliance on self-reinforcing statistics, that better education fails to be measured.
Harvard Law School announces expansion of J.D. admissions interview process (Recent)
Harvard Law School announced today that it will move to videoconferencing technology to conduct interviews of candidates for admission to its J.D. program. The school’s Admissions Office will also offer interview opportunities to more applicants than in the past, said Assistant Dean and Chief Admissions Officer Jessica Soban.
IRAC Your Way to an “A” (Recent)
For most law school exams, your essay outline will be organized in IRAC fashion: Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. Determining what the issue is can be difficult, so one way to figure it out is simply to rephrase the call of the question.
Dear Prudence: My Husband Is Contemplating Ruining Our Lives By Going To Law School
These people are both CPAs and make a decent living, and yet LSH’s spouse is all too eager to leave his job to take on additional student debt while his wife pays off a mortgage and supports their two young children. This sounds like a major husbanding fail to me. Fortunately, Prudence didn’t wait too long to give LSH a hard dose of reality: “Your husband must have been spending so much time poring over other people’s books that he’s neglected to read about the prospects for new law school graduates.” Prudence then advised that since they understand numbers, they should probably break out some spreadsheets and do a cost-benefit analysis.
That’s probably something that Jim Leipold of NALP wishes more prospective law students would do instead of believing what’s being fed to them by law school career services officers around the country. In October’s NALP Bulletin, Leipold noted that the administrators behind the $4 billion law school industry would prefer he lie through his teeth about the job market. After all, isn’t that what they’ve been doing for years?
N.Y.U. Law Plans Overhaul of Students’ Third Year 10/16
“There are perennial complaints about the third year of law school being a waste of time,” said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a law professor at Washington University and the author of the recently published book “Failing Law Schools” (University of Chicago Press). “It is important that an elite law school like N.Y.U. is making these changes because the top schools set the model for the rest of legal academia.”
N.Y.U. Law is the latest law school to alter its academic program significantly. Stanford Law School recently completed comprehensive changes to its third-year curriculum, with a focus on allowing students to pursue joint degrees. Washington and Lee University School of Law scrapped its traditional third-year curriculum in 2009, replacing it with a mix of clinics and outside internships.
“There is a growing disconnect between what law schools are offering and what the marketplace is demanding in the 21st century,” said Evan R. Chesler, the presiding partner of the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore and a trustee of N.Y.U. Law. “The changes we’re rolling out seek to address that.”
Paralegal Sues over $100 Cake-Baking Prize, Claims Flier Promised Twice the Amount 10/15
State Rep. Jake Wheatley acknowledges the flier promised $200, but said contestants were told they would not receive the entire amount if there were too few entries. “The whole concept was supposed to be a 50/50 raffle,” he told the Tribune. “There was a $10 entry fee and if all slots were paid for, we’d match that $100 with another $100.”
This market belongs to you and me 10/15
Harvard funded 33 full-time, "long-term" (at least one year) jobs for its 2011 graduates--that's 5.7% of its graduating class. This is a new program: the positions did not exist for 2009 and 2010 graduates.
Outcomes at the top 15 schools don't affect just those schools' graduates; they reflect broader market trends and create ripple effects of their own. If bottom-quarter salaries have fallen so far at Penn, and if Virginia grads are taking jobs that pay $27,000, what do you think is happening at other schools?
Five stages of grief 10/13/12
The ranked schools on this top-ten list range from No. 39 to No. 135 on the U.S. News rankings, while the rest — almost half of them — are unranked. Perhaps the students at the unranked schools know that if they’re not completely cutthroat, they’ll wind up working retail.
==> Some higher education experts, like Kevin Carey of Education Sector, have argued that U.S. News and World Report's college rankings system is merely a list of criteria that mirrors the superficial characteristics of elite colleges and universities. According to Carey, "[The] U.S. News ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine's rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity." He suggests that there are more important characteristics parents and students should research to select colleges, such as how well students are learning and how likely students are to earn a degree.
Megan: So let's start with the contraction of the market for lawyers: do we know what's causing it? And why did it take people so long to notice?
Paul: It's being caused by technology and outsourcing. Machines can now do many things that lawyers did formerly, such as e-discovery. In addition, corporations have found that much work which used to be performed by lawyers can be performed quite adequately by much cheaper sources of labor -- paralegals, compliance officers, and even people in India.
As for why it took so long to notice, law is a very hierarchical profession, and there's a great deal of stigma that attaches to failure. So as long as the contraction wasn't evident to people in the highest reaches of the profession, such as law professors at prestigious schools and partners at top firms, it remained largely invisible at the level of public discourse.
Megan: There's a bit divide between the graduates of Harvard, and the graduates of, say, Thomas Cooley
Paul: Yes indeed, but the waterline has now risen so high that large portions of the classes at top ten law schools are struggling, so now there's a "crisis."
The Economics of Law School 9/24/12
The average tuition and expenses for a veterinary degree at a private school has doubled in the last 10 years to over $200,000, well above the typical cost of law school. Yet their pay remains moribund at an average of $66,469 — much less than lawyers.
It may not be simple enough to just pin the blame on the costs of law school education. For 2011 law school graduates, as of nine months after graduation, only 65.4 percent were employed in jobs requiring passage of the bar. And law schools should learn to be more innovative, as other types of graduate programs are doing.
Law schools have also hurt themselves badly by failing to fully disclose certain statistics, including their employment rates. It is clear that the number of lawyers in the United States will fall as fewer people apply to law school. But this trend will probably shrink enrollment, not decrease the number of schools over all.
These Data Will Fundamentally Reshape the Legal Education Industry 6/26/12
In a few short years, [the ABA's new employment] data are going to fundamental(ly) reshape our industry. The changes will make the industry better and stronger, but the journey to this better place is going to painful and disorienting for all law schools—that’s right, even the elite national law schools will be affected.
This is another market distortion created by the US government (similar to the housing market) by providing an almost unlimited amount of credit and pricing it below market. It allowed schools to raise tuition without the demand constraint that would normally exist in a market. As a result the US consumer student loan burden is now higher than either auto or credit card debt (see discussion). And now we are also seeing a rise in delinquencies (see post).
Heat is on for law school test 10/22
Council administrators acknowledge that they are under more pressure than ever over accommodations, and that their screening procedures are more rigorous than nearly all other standardized test givers. However, they deny that their process — aimed, they insist, at protecting their test's integrity and making it fair to all — violates anyone's rights. Moreover, accommodation requests deserve scrutiny because the LSAT plays an such an outsized role in law school admissions, said general counsel Joan Van Tol. "As the stakes get higher, the degree of rigor in review gets higher as well," she said.
Measuring Outcomes (Somewhat Recent)
The ultimate question remains, “How do you know that a graduate of a particular law school is going to be a good (or bad) lawyer?” An easy prediction is based on the bar exam. Someone who fails it multiple times has issues with their knowledge of the law or, as likely, perseverance in preparing for or undertaking stressful events. Any of these would seem to call their future as a competent attorney into question. But passing the bar, in itself, tests little of the new attorney’s abilities and allows people to enter into the practice of law who will prove incompetent.
Unfortunately, although relatively easily calculated, post-law school placement rates are not a good measurement. It seems as every legal employer assumes that a graduate of a U.S. News highly ranked law school will be a good lawyer. See Henderson & Zahorsky, The Pedigree Problem. Unlike an open marketplace where a better product can overtake a larger, but inferior one, the law school ranking system places so much reliance on self-reinforcing statistics, that better education fails to be measured.
Harvard Law School announces expansion of J.D. admissions interview process (Recent)
Harvard Law School announced today that it will move to videoconferencing technology to conduct interviews of candidates for admission to its J.D. program. The school’s Admissions Office will also offer interview opportunities to more applicants than in the past, said Assistant Dean and Chief Admissions Officer Jessica Soban.
IRAC Your Way to an “A” (Recent)
For most law school exams, your essay outline will be organized in IRAC fashion: Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. Determining what the issue is can be difficult, so one way to figure it out is simply to rephrase the call of the question.
Dear Prudence: My Husband Is Contemplating Ruining Our Lives By Going To Law School
These people are both CPAs and make a decent living, and yet LSH’s spouse is all too eager to leave his job to take on additional student debt while his wife pays off a mortgage and supports their two young children. This sounds like a major husbanding fail to me. Fortunately, Prudence didn’t wait too long to give LSH a hard dose of reality: “Your husband must have been spending so much time poring over other people’s books that he’s neglected to read about the prospects for new law school graduates.” Prudence then advised that since they understand numbers, they should probably break out some spreadsheets and do a cost-benefit analysis.
That’s probably something that Jim Leipold of NALP wishes more prospective law students would do instead of believing what’s being fed to them by law school career services officers around the country. In October’s NALP Bulletin, Leipold noted that the administrators behind the $4 billion law school industry would prefer he lie through his teeth about the job market. After all, isn’t that what they’ve been doing for years?
N.Y.U. Law Plans Overhaul of Students’ Third Year 10/16
“There are perennial complaints about the third year of law school being a waste of time,” said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a law professor at Washington University and the author of the recently published book “Failing Law Schools” (University of Chicago Press). “It is important that an elite law school like N.Y.U. is making these changes because the top schools set the model for the rest of legal academia.”
N.Y.U. Law is the latest law school to alter its academic program significantly. Stanford Law School recently completed comprehensive changes to its third-year curriculum, with a focus on allowing students to pursue joint degrees. Washington and Lee University School of Law scrapped its traditional third-year curriculum in 2009, replacing it with a mix of clinics and outside internships.
“There is a growing disconnect between what law schools are offering and what the marketplace is demanding in the 21st century,” said Evan R. Chesler, the presiding partner of the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore and a trustee of N.Y.U. Law. “The changes we’re rolling out seek to address that.”
Paralegal Sues over $100 Cake-Baking Prize, Claims Flier Promised Twice the Amount 10/15
State Rep. Jake Wheatley acknowledges the flier promised $200, but said contestants were told they would not receive the entire amount if there were too few entries. “The whole concept was supposed to be a 50/50 raffle,” he told the Tribune. “There was a $10 entry fee and if all slots were paid for, we’d match that $100 with another $100.”
This market belongs to you and me 10/15
Harvard funded 33 full-time, "long-term" (at least one year) jobs for its 2011 graduates--that's 5.7% of its graduating class. This is a new program: the positions did not exist for 2009 and 2010 graduates.
Outcomes at the top 15 schools don't affect just those schools' graduates; they reflect broader market trends and create ripple effects of their own. If bottom-quarter salaries have fallen so far at Penn, and if Virginia grads are taking jobs that pay $27,000, what do you think is happening at other schools?
Five stages of grief 10/13/12
About 4,878 members of the Class of 2009 secured salaries of $160,000; that's 11.1% of that year's graduates. In 2011, just 2,608 graduates obtained that entry-level salary--only 5.9% of the full class. Top BigLaw salaries are almost as rare as giant pandas.
Interesting Bloomberg Law video interview on the coming pricing crisis for BigLaw 10/13
Princeton Review Rankings Part Deux: The Toughest Law Schools To Get Into 10/11/12Interesting Bloomberg Law video interview on the coming pricing crisis for BigLaw 10/13
One of the most telling observations offered by Mr. MacEwen is that 25 years ago, the typical AmLaw 100 partner earned eleven times the salary of the average American worker. Today. that differential has increased by a factor of twenty five. As Mr. MacEwen says, such growth is simply unsustainable and thus an industry wide price restructuring is inevitable.
Princeton Review Publishes 2013 Edition of Best 168 Law Schools (Recent)
According to Princeton Review’s 2013 rankings, the top schools category-wise are as follows: Columbia University tops ‘Best Career Prospects,’ Stanford University offers the ‘Best Classroom Experience,’ University of Hawaii at Manoa tops the ‘Best Environment for Minority Students,’ University of Virginia offers the ‘Best Quality of Life,’ Northeastern University has the ‘Most Liberal Students,’ Ave Maria School of Law has the ‘Most Conservative Students,’ Baylor University boasts the ‘Most Competitive Students,’ the crown for the ‘Most Diverse Faculty’ goes to Southern University, while University of the District of Columbia is the ‘Most Chosen By Older Students.’ Yale University remains the ‘Toughest to Get Into,’ while Duke University has the claim to the ‘Best Professors.’
Princeton Review Publishes 2013 Edition of Best 168 Law Schools (Recent)
According to Princeton Review’s 2013 rankings, the top schools category-wise are as follows: Columbia University tops ‘Best Career Prospects,’ Stanford University offers the ‘Best Classroom Experience,’ University of Hawaii at Manoa tops the ‘Best Environment for Minority Students,’ University of Virginia offers the ‘Best Quality of Life,’ Northeastern University has the ‘Most Liberal Students,’ Ave Maria School of Law has the ‘Most Conservative Students,’ Baylor University boasts the ‘Most Competitive Students,’ the crown for the ‘Most Diverse Faculty’ goes to Southern University, while University of the District of Columbia is the ‘Most Chosen By Older Students.’ Yale University remains the ‘Toughest to Get Into,’ while Duke University has the claim to the ‘Best Professors.’
The ranked schools on this top-ten list range from No. 39 to No. 135 on the U.S. News rankings, while the rest — almost half of them — are unranked. Perhaps the students at the unranked schools know that if they’re not completely cutthroat, they’ll wind up working retail.
==> Some higher education experts, like Kevin Carey of Education Sector, have argued that U.S. News and World Report's college rankings system is merely a list of criteria that mirrors the superficial characteristics of elite colleges and universities. According to Carey, "[The] U.S. News ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine's rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity." He suggests that there are more important characteristics parents and students should research to select colleges, such as how well students are learning and how likely students are to earn a degree.
IBR for everyone 10/10/12
What does this mean for debt levels? Note that people who graduated from private law schools in 2011 who took out any loans during law school took out an average of $125,000 in such loans. This means their average law school debt in the fall of 2011, when their first payments came due, was about $142,500 (The higher total is because interest accrues during law school. Interest accrual totals are going up starting this year because as of this summer the government will no longer pay interest during law school on the first $8,500 in Stafford loans a student takes out each year. This change by itself will tack another $4,000 onto the average student's debt total).
==> So you’ve read about the Income-Based Repayment Plan and you want to learn more?
Moneylaw: Look at the law school data 10/3
Of course, anyone evaluating a ranking system should examine the specific factors within the metric to see how it measures and weighs what she values. For example, the National Jurist ranking is based on average student debt, tuition, cost of living, two-year bar passage average (comparing that to the state's average) and weighted employment rate. These all seem like reasonable factors, but individuals should drill down on some of them more than others. For example, a high average debt that is a function of limited student aid offered by a school is very different from a high average debt caused by a student base that is disproportionately lower income. The latter might be the case at, say, a historically black college, and should not be considered a negative, while the former should be of concern, particularly if the student is interested in (and likely to get) a scholarship—be it merit-, need- or diversity-based. My school did well on this factor, and particularly well on tuition.
Meet the High Priest of Runaway College Inflation 9/29/12
Since Trachtenberg took over in 1988, he had boosted the school's endowment from $250 million to $1 billion and built many state-of-the-art facilities, such as computer and research labs. The profusion of comforts didn't just stimulate students' minds; it also fulfilled their every whim--a change that drew a more selective, more intelligent group of applicants and sent the admission rate plummeting from 75 percent to 37 percent. "It was a very soothing, very beautiful experience and gave me a great sense of satisfaction about my tenure as president," Trachtenberg wrote in his memoir, Big Man on Campus.
Trachtenberg's students funded this triumph. When he became president, they paid $25,000 (in today's dollars) in tuition, room, and board to attend; by the time he retired, they paid $51,000. Trachtenberg made George Washington the most expensive school in the nation. The burst of cash powered his agenda, but the freshmen who borrowed to enroll--46 percent of the class--during his final year graduated with an average of $28,000 of debt.
==> So you’ve read about the Income-Based Repayment Plan and you want to learn more?
Moneylaw: Look at the law school data 10/3
Of course, anyone evaluating a ranking system should examine the specific factors within the metric to see how it measures and weighs what she values. For example, the National Jurist ranking is based on average student debt, tuition, cost of living, two-year bar passage average (comparing that to the state's average) and weighted employment rate. These all seem like reasonable factors, but individuals should drill down on some of them more than others. For example, a high average debt that is a function of limited student aid offered by a school is very different from a high average debt caused by a student base that is disproportionately lower income. The latter might be the case at, say, a historically black college, and should not be considered a negative, while the former should be of concern, particularly if the student is interested in (and likely to get) a scholarship—be it merit-, need- or diversity-based. My school did well on this factor, and particularly well on tuition.
Meet the High Priest of Runaway College Inflation 9/29/12
Since Trachtenberg took over in 1988, he had boosted the school's endowment from $250 million to $1 billion and built many state-of-the-art facilities, such as computer and research labs. The profusion of comforts didn't just stimulate students' minds; it also fulfilled their every whim--a change that drew a more selective, more intelligent group of applicants and sent the admission rate plummeting from 75 percent to 37 percent. "It was a very soothing, very beautiful experience and gave me a great sense of satisfaction about my tenure as president," Trachtenberg wrote in his memoir, Big Man on Campus.
Trachtenberg's students funded this triumph. When he became president, they paid $25,000 (in today's dollars) in tuition, room, and board to attend; by the time he retired, they paid $51,000. Trachtenberg made George Washington the most expensive school in the nation. The burst of cash powered his agenda, but the freshmen who borrowed to enroll--46 percent of the class--during his final year graduated with an average of $28,000 of debt.
Paul: It's being caused by technology and outsourcing. Machines can now do many things that lawyers did formerly, such as e-discovery. In addition, corporations have found that much work which used to be performed by lawyers can be performed quite adequately by much cheaper sources of labor -- paralegals, compliance officers, and even people in India.
As for why it took so long to notice, law is a very hierarchical profession, and there's a great deal of stigma that attaches to failure. So as long as the contraction wasn't evident to people in the highest reaches of the profession, such as law professors at prestigious schools and partners at top firms, it remained largely invisible at the level of public discourse.
Megan: There's a bit divide between the graduates of Harvard, and the graduates of, say, Thomas Cooley
Paul: Yes indeed, but the waterline has now risen so high that large portions of the classes at top ten law schools are struggling, so now there's a "crisis."
The Economics of Law School 9/24/12
The average tuition and expenses for a veterinary degree at a private school has doubled in the last 10 years to over $200,000, well above the typical cost of law school. Yet their pay remains moribund at an average of $66,469 — much less than lawyers.
It may not be simple enough to just pin the blame on the costs of law school education. For 2011 law school graduates, as of nine months after graduation, only 65.4 percent were employed in jobs requiring passage of the bar. And law schools should learn to be more innovative, as other types of graduate programs are doing.
Law schools have also hurt themselves badly by failing to fully disclose certain statistics, including their employment rates. It is clear that the number of lawyers in the United States will fall as fewer people apply to law school. But this trend will probably shrink enrollment, not decrease the number of schools over all.
These Data Will Fundamentally Reshape the Legal Education Industry 6/26/12
In a few short years, [the ABA's new employment] data are going to fundamental(ly) reshape our industry. The changes will make the industry better and stronger, but the journey to this better place is going to painful and disorienting for all law schools—that’s right, even the elite national law schools will be affected.
We’ve been down this road before, but society still seems to think that female lawyers and law students don’t know the basics of fashion.
