Last week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this photo, taken at a law school:
On Monday, you voted on the finalists, and now it’s time to announce our caption contest winner….
Continue reading “Caption Contest Winner: Following Instructions For Dummies”
You wouldn’t think a Nobel Peace Prize winner would rile up a vocal minority, but you’d be wrong. Tomorrow, the Journal of Conflict Resolution at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law plans to honor former President Jimmy Carter with the International Advocate for Peace Award.
That seems fair, since the Nobel committee already decided he’s got the peace-y bona fides. And it’s not like they just give that award to people who blow up countries or launch drone wars or anything.
But some people are just not happy about it and they’ve taken their (largely anonymous) complaints to the Interwebs, and they found their way into the ATL inbox. I guess the Simpsons warned us that he was “history’s greatest monster.”
Continue reading “When a Law School Honors a Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Expect Protests!”
Welcome back to our series of open threads on the latest batch of U.S. News law school rankings. Last time, readers weighed in on the law schools that made up the bottom third of the traditional first tier. Alas, thanks to the way employment statistics are now weighed in the U.S. News methodology, some law schools were knocked off of their prestigious pedestals, and law students are calling for their deans’ heads now that they’ve descended downwards into previously uncharted territory: the traditional second tier.
Today, we’ll take a look at those law schools, as well as their new rankings rivals — the schools that have traditionally been known to dwell in this part of the U.S. News list. You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. Your next stop, the Second Tier Zone….
Continue reading “Open Thread: 2014 U.S. News Law School Rankings (53 – 68)”
Apologies to the Saul Steinberg Foundation.
New York City is the logical starting point for this occasional series highlighting law schools in specific locales. New Yorkers’ self-regard is bloated enough to believe they are at the Center of the Universe and that everything that happens there is naturally interesting to everyone, everywhere. The ATL Insider Survey asks, among other things, current law students to rate how their schools are doing in terms of academics, career counseling, financial aid advising, practical/clinical training, and social life.
After the jump, check out how the students at Columbia, NYU, NYLS, Hofstra, Fordham, St. John’s, CUNY, Seton Hall, Rutgers-Newark, and Brooklyn rate their institutions. Somehow we don’t have sufficient survey responses from Pace or Touro….
UPDATE (5:45 p.m.): Apologies to Cardozo Law School. You were mistakenly left out of the initial version of this post and we have revised it to include you.
Continue reading “Who Are the Happiest Law Students in New York City?”
The year is quickly drawing to a close, but we have unfinished business to conduct here at Above the Law. Come on, people, we still have to crown our Lawyer of the Year for 2012.
Thank you to everyone who responded to our call for nominations, in the comments or via email. We’ve narrowed down the nominees to a field of nine (although you’ll see only eight options in the poll because one is a joint nomination). As in past years, the contenders run the gamut from distinguished to despicable.
And the nominees are….
Continue reading “Above the Law’s 2012 Lawyer of the Year Competition: The Finalists!”
There is so much to fix in modern legal education. Are student-edited law journals really so bad?
– Brian Farkas, editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, writing in defense of student-edited law journals in light of critiques published over the years in online and print media like Inside Higher Ed, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Legal Affairs magazine.
October brought a lot of tricks for the legal community, but there were some treats, too. From death-defying deeds of dumbness to dastardly weather disasters, last month seemed to have it all as far as we’re concerned.
Which attorney allegedly dropped a joint in front of cops in a courthouse? Which attorney allegedly got so wasted that she threw herself in the garbage? And which lawyer was so sexy that he won money for it?
Check out our nominees for October’s Lawyer of the Month….
Warning: for law degrees only, not lawyers.
After a late night out on the town, many of us have probably come up with ill-conceived plans that seemed like great ideas at the time. For example, I recently concocted a plan to move to a remote island to escape my soul-crushing student loan debt, and even started packing a suitcase. But then I fell asleep. Upon awakening from my drunken stupor slumber, I realized just how absurd that plan was. Come on, I can’t afford plane tickets.
But what if you never had the chance to sleep it off? What if you thought that your harebrained plan would actually work?
That may have been what happened this weekend to a recent Cardozo Law School graduate who was unable to get into her Chelsea apartment in New York. She cooked up a plan so convoluted, so MacGyver-esque, that 1Ls the world over would cringe if it ever appeared on a torts exam. This lawyer thought it would get her back into the comfort of her own home, but instead, she only succeeded in landing herself in the hospital — with significant damage to one of her limbs.
We suppose this must be what happens to newly minted lawyers who are used to receiving walking instructions from their law schools….
Continue reading “A Recent Cardozo Law Grad Gets Trashed — Literally”
Now that classes are back in session, I really hope some professor at Cardozo Law School pulls Benula Bensam aside and tells her that her keeping the story about her passing notes to Judge Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) alive is probably not helping her chances of securing a legal job.
You’ll remember Bensam as the student who got reprimanded for passing notes to Judge Rakoff during the Rajat Gupta trial. She went on to sue federal prosecutors and marshals for a number of claims arising out of largely standard courthouse security protocols. As we’ve previously discussed, upon leaving the courthouse Bensam wanted her cell phone back and had problems getting it.
Judge Andrew L. Carter (S.D.N.Y.) kicked most of Bensam’s case today, but he did give her leave to file an amended complaint on one issue.
For her sake, I hope she doesn’t take it…
It’s time to announce the winner of July’s Lawyer of the Month competition. Last month, we had a potpourri of lawyers allegedly behaving badly for readers to choose from. In the end, there was one clear winner, who stole more than 50 percent of the total vote.
Let’s find out who took home the honorific of Lawyer of the Month — and while we’re at it, let’s pray that she doesn’t sue us. Noticing a trend here, readers? Our LOTM winners sure are overly litigious….
Continue reading “July Lawyer of the Month: Girls Just Wanna Have ‘Fun’”
What does it mean to be “newly admitted?” To us, it means endless possibilities!
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Our Live Bridge the Gap weekends satisfy the entire year of New York Newly-Admitted CLE Credits in only two days!
After physically attending a full weekend, you will receive:
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Date: Saturday, June 8 and Sunday, June 9, 2013
Time: 9:00 a.m. – 4:35 p.m. (EST)
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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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
Keep reading »
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