* Speaking of gays in the law, if you’re obsessing over Judge Vaughn Walker’s sexual orientation, stop it. Just stop it. [Huffington Post]
* First Rudolph Giuliani’s daughter gets busted shoplifting beauty products, and now the same thing happens with a former Miss USA. The lesson: beauty products are way too expensive. [CBS / Crimesider]
* You think legal outsourcing is only going to affect the lives of junior associates? As Larry Ribstein explains, it’s very likely that outsourcing will lead to a fundamental change in the way we regulate lawyers and law firms. [Forbes]
* The only person who can get away with acting like Judge Judy is Judge Judy. [Bad Lawyer]
* Ann Althouse thinks peep-toe shoes are just fine — and has fabulous taste in shoes herself, by the way. [Althouse]
* How come all of the top philanderers are men? That’s just sexist. [Law and More]
As we mentioned this morning, a report from researchers at Berkeley Law suggests that legal education is a field dominated by white, male, elite liberals. The National Law Journal reports:
Law schools hire more openly liberal professors than openly conservative ones, but the plum jobs at the most prestigious schools don’t appear to be going solely to the liberals.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who analyzed the ideology of recently hired law professors. Their study, “Ideological Diversity and Law School Hiring,” is the first to focus specifically on the political leanings of law professors.
Previous research concluded that law professors skew white and male, and tend to have completed their legal studies at top law schools.
There might be a liberal bias among law school professors? Shocking! Why are we just being informed of this?
But is it really as bad as the study makes it out to be? While the researchers determined that 52 of 60 professors showed a liberal slant, the report goes on to explain that the researchers couldn’t get a clear read on 60% of the 149 entry-level professors sampled.
And even if we agree that there is some liberal bias among law school professors, does the distinction matter? Is there really a “liberal” or “conservative” way to educate people about the law?
This sounds like an appropriate moment for an Above the Law debate. Editors David Lat and Elie Mystal sound off about whether law schools need to be more welcoming to conservatives. As always, we welcome your opinions in the comments….
Cornell Law School recently circulated to its students in the class of 2012 — i.e., rising 2Ls –a list of class of 2010 and 2011 members who landed jobs through the fall recruiting process. Most of these positions, not surprisingly, are at large law firms (aka “Biglaw”). The class of 2010 graduates will presumably be working for their firms in a few months (or in a year or so, if they’ve been deferred); the class of 2011 students are presumably summer associates at their firms right now.
Many law schools circulate such lists to their students. This gives rising 2Ls an opportunity to connect with graduates or fellow students and maybe learn a little bit more about law firms before fall recruiting really heats up.
The Cornell Law employment lists offer an interesting snapshot of the employment prospects for students and graduates of a top law school. The lists provide the name of the graduate or student, their law firm employer, the city they’ll be working in, and the graduate or student’s email address. We have reprinted the lists, but with names and email addresses redacted, after the jump.
Should Cornell Law students be pleased or pissed off by their school’s track record at Biglaw placement? We hear from one CLS student and then debate the question, also after the jump.
Here we go, yo: the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan, currently the U.S. Solicitor General, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
* If you’re looking for something fun to do in D.C. tonight, go to the Black Cat for Banding Together 2010: Battle of the Law Firm Bands. It’s a fun evening — and it’s for a good cause. [Gifts for the Homeless]
* For those of you who still remember days gone by here at ATL, former guest editor “SEN” just graduated from law school. Congratulations, Sharon! [Thank You Ma'am]
* Here are three strikes against the whole “judge-umpire” analogy — and a suggestion for a better baseball comparison to describe the role of Supreme Court justice. [Huffington Post]
* Geordi has a tax problem? Lay off the man, the brother can’t see right. [Going Concern]
* Roy Moore, best known as the Alabama judge who wanted the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, lost in the Republican gubernatorial primary. [BL1Y]
* An event at the NYC bar association tomorrow night will teach you practical skills that might actually help you get a job. [New York City Bar Association]
* Apparently the site you’re currently reading is a “gangsta-ass law blog.” [Rap Genius]
* Professor Orin Kerr wonders: Could Roe be indirectly responsible for the religious imbalance on the Court? [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Speaking of SCOTUS, Tom Goldstein suggested that an endorsement of Elena Kagan by Miguel Estrada (pictured) “has the potential to swing at least a half-dozen Republican votes.” Well, here you go. [PostPartisan / Washington Post]
* And speaking of SCOTUS and voting, how might the nomination of Lady Kaga affect the 2010 midterm elections? [Political Junkie / NPR]
* Could you reduce the law school experience to a six-word short story? [TaxProf Blog]
* Here are considerably more than six words about law school, in an open letter from a law school wife. [Lawyerist]
* What does Justice Sonia Sotomayor have in common with Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, and Rush Limbaugh? [The BLT: Blog of the Legal Times]
* Walter Olson is moving from the Manhattan Institute over to the Cato Institute. Good luck, Walter! [Overlawyered]
* A roundup of the past week of legal blogging that contains an interesting story about Harvard Law School — you might have heard something about it. Also, legal malpractice in Texas. [Infamy or Praise]
* Remember, she’ll always be Crimson DNA to us. [Breaking Media]
* The lawsuit filed by a woman against her daughter-in-law’s comedy act has been resolved, in favor of the young comedian. Let this be a lesson to all mothers-in-law out there. [ABA Journal]
* Nashville and the greater Middle Tennessee area were hit hard by flooding over the weekend. If you’d like to help, here’s how. [Young Lawyers Blog]
* Is there an epidemic of child pornography in the military? [Suits & Sentences]
* … If so, I’m sure some medical marijuana could clear that right up. It’s available in the nation’s capital, surely boys healing up at Landstuhl could use it too. [Underdog]
* Happy Cinco de Mayo! And remember, if you want to change Arizona’s mind about something, contact your local sports franchise. The state got its act together on Martin Luther King Day once the NFL threatened to pull the Superbowl. [Fox News]
* Calling someone a “dumb ass” is okay as far as defamation law is concerned. Learn all that and more, from Blawg Review #262. [Public Intellectual via Blawg Review]
Lat here. Today’s topic: transparency in how law schools report their graduates’ “employment outcomes” — i.e., the jobs that their graduates obtain.
When we attended admitted students’ weekend at Yale Law School — back in 1996, so almost 15 years ago — we were given detailed lists showing where the past few classes ended up working. The graduates were listed in alphabetical order, and below each person’s name was the name and address of their employer. For prospective law students, it was reassuring to see so many federal judicial clerkships and large law firms on these lists. The implicit message: if you graduate — or when you graduate, since we’re talking about YLS, not known for failing people (although it does have grades) — you will be able to secure a good job.
Alas, we understand that not all law schools are so forthcoming about where their alumni end up working (or not working, in this economy). There have been widespread allegations of law schools gaming the system, by massaging or manipulating the employment data they report to the American Bar Association and, perhaps even more importantly, to U.S. News & World Reports (for use in the magazine’s highly influential law school rankings). There have even been claims of law schools outright lying about how many of their graduates wind up employed, where they end up working, and how much they earn from these jobs.
Most observers are content just to complain about law schools not being forthcoming enough about employment information. But two enterprising law students at Vanderbilt — Kyle McEntee and Patrick Lynch, a 2L and 3L, respectively — are doing more. They’ve started a nonprofit organization, Law School Transparency, which has the goal of “encouraging and facilitating the transparent flow of law school employment information.” They’ve also written a paper, A Way Forward: Improving Transparency in Employment Reporting at American Law Schools (SSRN download), proposing a new approach to reporting of job outcomes by law schools.
More details and links — plus commentary from Elie, who feels strongly about this issue — after the jump.
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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