ATL March Madness: Best Law School Scandal
It's time to get voting in ATL's annual March Madness bracket!
If you’ve already voted on the first region, click over to the second region here.
It’s March once again, which means it’s time for Above the Law’s annual bracket challenge. Every year, we put together a little competition to keep lawyers and law students engaged after their actual March Madness bracket is busted like a prosecutor accused of sampling the contraband. So while the rest of your friends struggle to decide if Arkansas-Little Rock has what it takes to pull off the 5-12 upset, you can control your own destiny by voting for your option.
This year we have 32 of Above the Law’s best tales of embarrassing law school shenanigans seeded into four loosely related “regions.” Will your favorite story of a misbehaving professor or a douchetastic gunner make the field? Find out over the next couple days.
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Today, we unveil the first two regions of this year’s competition — tomorrow we will unveil the other half of the bracket. Up first, we have the “On The Basis Of…” region featuring some of our greatest race and sex scandals. Voting is open until Sunday, March 20, at 11:59 p.m. EST.
Without further ado, here’s the first region:
1. Cam Girl Pleasures Herself In A Top Law School’s Library
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Back in 2012, pornographic princess Cameron Knight decided that the Cornell Law Library was the best place to film a 43-minute video of herself masturbating and massaging her breasts. The post itself is highly NSFW. Res ipsa loquitur:
8. Law School Sends Memo About Inappropriate Student Cleavage, Hooker Heels
How many times do women in the law need to be told not to dress like streetwalkers? Apparently students at Loyola Law-Los Angeles were caught wearing necklines that were way too low and stiletto heels that were way too high, prompting the school’s externship director to sent out a memo letting them know that they shouldn’t dress like the job they want is underneath a partner’s desk or a judge’s robes.
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Which do you want to see in the next round: a naked porn star or hooker heels? Wait, that didn’t sound right…
What's The Better Law School Scandal
- (1) Cam Girl - Cornell (80%, 379 Votes)
- (8) Cleavage & Hooker Heels - Loyola (20%, 97 Votes)
Total Voters: 476
Loading ...2. Hot Models Get Busy in Brooklyn Law Library
The bracket description oversells this a bit because in all the pictures these models were cavorting amid the stacks in their skivvies, but someone was naked at some point during their wardrobe changes, so it counts. Diesel Jeans asked Brooklyn Law School if they could shoot an ad campaign in the school’s library. Apparently Brooklyn didn’t consider that Diesel makes more than just jeans when they signed up. That’s when this stuff happens:
There are more shots like that in the original article if you need to more thoroughly KeyCite this scandal.
7. Harvard Law School Takes A Scythe To Its Wheat Crest
This whole affair came to light after legal history professor Daniel Coquillette really dug into the law school’s past and discovered that the school’s crest — in use since 1936 — reflected the school’s connection with Isaac Royall, who endowed the school’s first professorship and also burned 77 slaves to death on a whim.
Students mounted a campaign to change the logo. Millennials. We’ll bet they would’ve had some sort of problem with having swastikas displayed all over their diplomas, too. Whiners.
In any event, as we put it in the original story (where Elie Mystal argues against changing the seal… probably because he owns too many Harvard boxers or something):
The controversy has become the most serious conversation about race and wheat since a black man creamed it.
Zing.
After establishing a committee to review the issue, Dean Martha Minow announced that the school would seek — and ultimately receive — permission to ditch the shield altogether.
What's The Better Law School Scandal
- (2) Naked Models - Brooklyn (54%, 250 Votes)
- (7) Slavery Crest - Harvard (46%, 212 Votes)
Total Voters: 462
Loading ...3. Columbia Con Law Debacle Creates 200-Person Class That Angers Students
This whole affair started when Professor Christina Duffy Ponsa kept ducking out of her massive Con Law section to deal with her ongoing divorce. Unfortunately, this personal matter managed to interfere with the precise handful of hours she needed to be lecturing, and the school decided to alleviate the burden on the students in the absolute worst way possible.
The school’s solution seems, at best, lazy. With around 100 students affected by Professor Ponsa’s absences, Columbia decided to just dump all of Ponsa’s students into Professor Trevor Morrison’s already huge Con Law class to create a 200-person Con Law behemoth, in which half the class had started with a different syllabus than the late arrivals.
Yes, apparently no one at Columbia is capable of taking over a basic Con Law class. As Joe Patrice notes, his Contracts professor at NYU had to take a leave mid-semester too, and you know what happened? Another professor taught his section. One more sign that NYU is just better than that cow college uptown.
(6) Justice Scalia Dies. Georgetown Law Has A Complete Meltdown
This one involved a number of posts. First off, in the immediate aftermath of Justice Scalia’s death, Dean William Treanor sent the sort of generally nice letter law deans are supposed to send out when a legal big shot dies. Professors Gary Peller and Louis Michael Seidman didn’t take it so lightly and ripped Dean Treanor for offering unearned praise to “a jurist that many of us believe was a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry, one whose intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic and formalistic.”
Fair enough. Look, Justice Scalia not only earned some of that criticism… he f**king reveled playing the heel in these social justice battles. It’s probably safe to say Scalia himself would have welcomed the Peller and Seidman letter and responded thusly.
But conservative professors Randy Barnett and Nick Rosenkranz got all butthurt that someone might think the rights of women, or gays, or black people were more important than their throbbing crushes on Scalia. Then Professor Peller whined about being defamed and everyone else on the faculty wished the whole thing would just end. The only bright spot was the Georgetown BLSA deftly pointing out how Barnett and Rosenkranz were downright insulting for acting like this was some kind of tragedy.
What's The Better Law School Scandal
- (6) Scalia Fight (Left v. Right v. BLSA) - Georgetown (69%, 312 Votes)
- (3) ConLaw Affair - Columbia (31%, 142 Votes)
Total Voters: 454
Loading ...4. Harvard Law School 3L’s Racist Email Goes National
There’s not really much more to say than a 3L wrote an email saying stuff like:
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.
And that got forwarded around to… everybody.
5. A Law Student Plays the Race Card — and Gets Busted, Big Time
A UVA Law student wrote an article about his harassment at the hands of the police “because it is important for my classmates to hear a real-life anecdote illustrating the myth of equal protection under the law.”
But by “real-life anecdote,” he meant “completely made-up yarn.”
“I wrote the article to bring attention to the topic of police misconduct,” he said in a written statement. “The events in the article did not occur.”
Oops.
What's The Better Law School Scandal
- (4) Racist Email - Harvard (59%, 264 Votes)
- (5) Faux Racism - UVA (41%, 182 Votes)
Total Voters: 446
Loading ...On to the next page to check out the second region of scandal…
