Elie Mystal

Elie Mystal joined ATL in 2009 by winning the ATL Idol Contest. Prior to joining ATL, Elie wrote about politics and popular culture at City Hall News and the New York Press. Elie received a degree in Government from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He was formerly a litigator at Debevoise & Plimpton but quit the legal profession to pursue a career as an online provocateur. He's written editorials for the New York Daily News and the New York Times, and he has appeared on both MSNBC and Fox News without having to lie about his politics to either news organization.

Posts by Elie Mystal

Could Law Schools PLEASE Stop Whining About The Nine Months After Graduation Statistic? You Sound Like Babies.

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New Rule: The next law school person who wants to bitch about the unfairness of the “employed nine months after graduation” metric must offer to make loan payments for all students who don’t have a job at nine months until they find one. If law schools are going to knock up their recent graduates they should at least have to throw in some child support.

Oh, wait, NO law school dean wants to actually be on the hook for student loans from when they come due six months after graduation until… whenever this unnamed point in the future comes when students can expect to have jobs. Given that, I don’t really want to hear about how your school is so freaking “unfairly” treated because CONSUMERS of legal education need to know if they will be employed within shouting distance of when they will start having to pay back their loans.

Fine, you want a compromise? It looks like we’re moving to ten months anyway…

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Everything That Is Wrong With The Above the Law Law School Rankings

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Yesterday, we released the inaugural ATL Top 50 Law School rankings. A lot of us here worked really hard on it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of the effort.

But I haven’t made my career based on liking things. I hate things. If anybody else released a new law school rankings, I’d be critical of it. There’s no reason I should give ATL special treatment.

No rankings are perfect — ours certainly aren’t — so we should talk about the problems. And I mean the real problems, not the stupid interview answer of, “I think my biggest weakness is that sometimes I try too damn hard.”

Let’s douse these new rankings in a cold shower of haterade….

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Morning Docket: 05.02.13

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* New York lawyers now must disclose how many hours they work pro bono. How about we get a form that lets lawyers disclose how much they sleep? [New York Law Journal]

* Everything is coming up Penn! They finished fifth in our law school rankings. They won an award for their website. Even their satellite campus in Dickinson is doing well. [National Law Journal]

* Look at me, I’m Sandy Day, bloomin’ with equivocality. Don’t like the right, but didn’t stay to fight, I can’t, I’m Sandy Day. [Slate]

* Speaking of Sandy, co-ops aren’t eligible for disaster relief. [New York Times]

* The Justice Department is coming after Plan B. Sometimes, I wish we had two parties and one of them was progressive. [Washington Post]

* Brian Tamanaha comin’ yo’. Shots fired. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]

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Morning Docket: 05.01.13

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* Gun nuts want to prevent THE PENTAGON from buying too many bullets. [Talking Points Memo]

* Subway employees can be held liable for not helping police officers. I’m a legal genius. [New York Law Journal]

* Employment lawyers get catty on their way out of the door. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]

* Do top firms even have compliance departments? [Corporate Counsel]

* Colleges are cracking down on Adderall abuse. So… it only took administrators about a decade to figure out that was going on. [New York Times]

* Okay, now Obama is going to close Guantanamo. And by “close,” I think he means “finds other excuses to leave it open.” [SCOTUSblog]

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Law Revue Video Contest 2013: Honorable Mentions

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Let this post serve as a reminder to vote for your favorites in our annual Law Revue Video Contest. Voting closes tomorrow night.

In fact, tomorrow is going to be kind of a big day here on Above the Law. You are definitely going to want to check in with us tomorrow.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the law revue videos that didn’t make our cut for finalists, but were still interesting enough to be seen by the ATL audience…

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A Law Student’s Exam Time Meltdown?

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I prefer my final exam freak-out stories to be of this variety instead of a freaking remake of Quills.

You all know how much I appreciate a good final exam freak-out. Law students losing their minds under the crushing pressure of end-of-the-year exams is one of those things that makes my job fun.

But not today. Because I really don’t like fecal humor. If I’m going to talk about poo on the walls, I want to be making an elaborate, overwrought analogy about what I intend to do with the conservative opinion in Fisher. I don’t want to be talking about literal poop on an actual wall in a real law school.

Unfortunately, it looks like this semester’s top exam disassociative break involves: poop, walls, urinals, and a New York area law school…

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Does Your Law School Need A Panic Button?

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Banks need panic buttons. Jodie Foster needs a panic room. I only panic when it’s nine in the afternoon. But the thought that American law schools should have a panic button in their career services office didn’t occur to me until I attended the NALP panel on spotting mental health issue in the law school community.

The panel consisted of Hanna Stotland, a career and admissions consultant; Dr. Nada Stotland, Professor of Psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center; and William Chamberlain, Director of Career Services at DePaul Law School.

I thought I was in for a touchy-feely hour about how it’s wrong to exclude the awkward gunner in the front row from all the reindeer games. Instead it was a sobering medical breakdown of the mental illnesses that afflict 20 percent of law students — and what career services officers can do to help stop people from literally killing themselves, which happens at way more law schools than I realized.

And yeah, your CSO should probably get a panic button installed if it doesn’t have one already….

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NALP13: Entry Level Associates Need Not Apply

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Your final destination… is not a Biglaw job.

The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) has new numbers on the legal job market for recent graduates, and like it has been every year since the start of the Great Recession, those numbers are a horror show. A freaking horror show. They might as well put three recent graduates in a room with one job offer in it, handcuff the graduates to a pole, and give the offer to the one that eats through his arm first.

The other two would then get to leave the room unemployed, with some bite wounds, instead of unemployed with over $100,000 in debt, which is how people are actually leaving law school.

Do you want some good news? The lateral hiring market is hot. NALP executive director Jim Leipold called it a “feeding frenzy” for experienced associates. So if you got a job and held onto it through the 2009 layoffs, pick up your phone. It’s probably a recruiter calling. Congratulations on all your success.

If instead you were not lucky enough to be born five years earlier and have just graduated or are about to graduate, I don’t have anything for you — other than this here hacksaw. Chop, chop….

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The Lawyers Representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

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So they finally read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his rights. Good thing we have that public safety exception to the Constitution. Who can be bothered to hold fast to our most sacred rights and liberties when there might be something bad happening! Obviously, once he was read his rights Tsarnaev immediately stopped talking and the government was unable to protect us from… oh wait, that didn’t happen. Tsarnaev kept talking (or nodding, as it were), even after informed of the basic rights guaranteed to him as a U.S. citizen.

But he did communicate that he couldn’t afford a lawyer. Luckily for him, the magistrate judge who read him his rights at his hospital bedside came with federal public defender in tow.

Let’s meet the people who will do this distasteful work so the rest of us can crucify the guy while being confident he’ll get a fair trial…

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Law Revue Video Contest 2013: Dishonorable Mentions

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As law students gear up for finals, it’s finally time for us to grade the videos we received for our Fifth Annual Law Revue Video Contest.

As usual, we’ll start with the dishonorable mentions. We like setting the bar low so that when you see our finalists later this week, you can see how far they rose above the rest. Our dishonorable mentions weren’t necessarily the worst videos that were submitted; instead, they were bad in a somewhat interesting and cringe-worthy way. Their badness lent itself to discussion and analysis.

Still, we want to thank everybody who took the time to produce and submit a video. Even the bad ones were good for the ATL editorial team and the community. The trauma brings us closer together….

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