Cornell Law School

Non-Sequiturs: 06.08.12

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There's no legal angle to this picture, and this picture is not involved in any of the blurbs.

* How many cops does it take to kill a man? [Simple Justice]

* Professor Paul Campos has been having fun with the NALP numbers. Well, fun for him, and for me. Less fun for anybody unlucky enough to have been part of the class of 2011. [Inside the Law School Scam]

* And if you don’t like to read, here’s some video about how bad the job market is for the class of 2011. ARE YOU LISTENING, PROSPECTIVE LAW STUDENTS? CAN YOU TAKE IN AND PROCESS INFORMATION? [Bloomberg Law]

* How come my anonymous readers don’t drop $25 million on me? I’d name a whole wing of my new house after them. And give them a T-shirt. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]

* In the recession, we cling to what we have instead of striking out into the unknown. In related news: if you leave your law job, there’ll be a stampede of people happy to take your spot. [What About Clients?]

* I don’t even think you should be allowed to defend yourself pro se. [Underdog]

* Southwestern Law’s Dean Bryant Garth is stepping down. One of these days, somebody will let me run a law school. [Southwestern Law School]

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Introducing the Law School Llama

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We’ve covered law school therapy dogs before, and the ATL staff seems a bit divided on the issue. David Lat commended Yale Law School for Monty the rent-a-stress-puppy.

On the other hand, Elie Mystal rained on the cute parade with liability concerns and other no-fun naysaying.

But today, a T14 law school is adding another animal into the finals stress relief mix. Introducing the law school llamas….

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Law School Lunch Drama Continues — From Coast To Coast

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It has been a while since we covered the rash of law school lunch thievery that had been causing much suffering and afternoon hunger pangs for students across the country. But that doesn’t mean the cafeteria drama has been contained. Over the last month, we have continued receiving tips from law schools across the country about Hansen’s soda heartbreak and the adventures of a refrigerator warrior.

Today, we have a round-up of the most recent law school lunch wars, courtesy of UC Davis Law, Cornell Law School, Iowa Law, and the University of Cincinnati College of Law…

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Quote of the Day: Will a T14 Law Degree Ward Off Unemployment?

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I would read these horror stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post about how law firms were no longer guaranteeing jobs. But I always knew I was going to go to one of the top 14 law schools, where employment statistics have remained pretty strong. Most of the bad numbers are coming from the worse-ranked schools.

– Emily Cusick, a senior at Cornell University and president of the pre-law fraternity Kappa Alpha Pi, commenting to the Cornell Daily Sun on doom-and-gloom stories about the legal job market.

(Additional interesting tidbits from the Sun article, including statistics about the declining number of law school applications, after the jump.)

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Morning Docket: 11.23.11

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* The American Bar Association can’t handle law schools, yet Obama trusts them to vet potential judicial nominees. Well, seems like they’re doing a bang-up job with that, too. [New York Times]

* First the New Jersey bar exam results, and now more MF Global drama. Angry investors want to know if a lawsuit will help Jon Corzine remember where he put the missing $600M. [Bloomberg]

* Law school debt increased by $475M between 2008 and 2010. Grab a raincoat, because this bubble’s going to burst soon, and it’s not going to be pretty (except for Cooley Law; they’ll be rich). [Am Law Daily]

* And on that note, what on earth was Cornell Law thinking? Did they fail to realize that their Cooley rankings would plummet if they decimated their library square footage? [Cornell Daily Sun]

* UC Berkeley: “We never like to hurt our students.” Yeah, apparently that’s what the police are for. Occupy Berkeley protesters are suing the school over police brutality allegations. [Huffington Post]

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Cornell Indirectly Acknowledges the Uselessness of Its Law Degree

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Here is Cornell University trying to convince its own graduate students to come back to school and get yet another degree.

Yeah, I know, they are being that bold. It’s like saying, “Okay, OKAY, I know that car we sold you blew up in your face and you lost your hands. But you have got to check out our brand new prosthetic hands.”

Arguably, this is just Cornell’s aggressive new ad campaign for its business school, but they should at least be more discreet. The JD candidates in the class of 2014 don’t even know they’re being bamboozled yet….

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You Have No Scars On Your Face, And You Cannot Handle Pressure

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This is a guy who doens't lose his cool.

It’s two weeks before the bar, so you know what that means; total freaking panic. Ah yeah: dogs and cats living together, pants on the ground, don’t feed the one-man wolfpack after midnight kind of hysteria.

For people who will eventually fail the bar, this is the time that they start choking hard enough to merit a tryout with the U.S. Women’s Soccer team. You know the people out there studying with one hand around their throat. They’re the ones who are still making boneheaded mistakes on evidence questions, but are going to waste an entire day over the next two weeks on commercial paper.

Of course, if you are a first time Bar taker, it might be hard to know if the pressure is getting to you. So here’s a hint, and I’m going to break out the Jeff Foxworthy voice to get it across: if you are threatening to dismember people with plastic cutlery, you might be about to fail the bar…

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Open Thread: 2012 U.S. News Law School Rankings (7 – 14)

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Welcome Texas!

As you are all know, the University of Texas School of Law has moved into the “top 14″ in this year’s U.S. News law school rankings. It’s a bit of cheat for U.S. News: Texas is technically tied for 14th, which means that the magazine has actually managed to cram 15 schools into its top 14. I’d complain more, but I’m a fan of a Big (We Can’t Count To) Ten school.

While we all know that Texas is in the top 14, very few of you remember the significance of the top 14 in the first place. The top 14 isn’t as arbitrary as it sounds. Since U.S. News started publishing these law school rankings, no school that ranked in the inaugural top 14 has ever been ranked outside of the top 14, and no school that did not rank in the top 14 that first year has ever cracked that list. Until now.

The top 14 has been a way to distinguish elite institutions that are nearly interchangeable with one another from really good law schools that are just a cut below. When viewed that way, Texas’s inclusion was probably long overdue.

Let’s take a look at some of the other movement in this rarefied group of law schools….

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Best Law Schools for Getting a Biglaw Job (2011)

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Why is he smiling? He landed a job at a top law firm.

If your goal in life, or at least your near-term career objective, is to land a job at a large law firm, which law schools would best suit your needs? When it comes to minting Biglaw associates and partners, not all law schools are created equal.

The National Law Journal has just come out with its annual survey of which schools the NLJ 250 law firms relied on most heavily when filling their first-year associate classes. The results are interesting — and also a little depressing.

We’ll start with the depressing part: hiring of top law school graduates continued to decline. As noted by Leigh Jones of the NLJ, “Hiring of graduates of the top law schools by the nation’s largest law firms slid by 10% during 2010 compared with 2009…. In 2010, the top 50 schools sent 3,822, or 27.3%, of their juris doctor graduates to NLJ 250 firms, compared with 30.3% of their 2009 graduating classes. The top 50 schools produced 13,989 graduates during 2010.”

Let’s look at the top 10 law schools, ranked by the percentage of their 2010 graduates who landed jobs at NLJ 250 firms (i.e., “Biglaw”)….

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Just Read ATL for Six Weeks Instead of Doing Cornell’s ‘Pre-Law Summer’; We Won’t Charge You Five Large

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I don’t know how long they’ve been doing this, but I’ve just learned that Cornell offers a “Pre-Law Summer” program aimed at undergraduates who want to know more about becoming a lawyer. Cornell is charging almost $5,000 ($4,970 to be exact) for an “intensive, six-week program taught in New York City.” The program promises to give students an “unparalleled chance to develop an accurate picture of the realities, rewards, and challenges of being a lawyer today.”

(Oh, did I mention that the price tag doesn’t include housing or food in New York City for six weeks? I should have mentioned that.)

You know, I’m not even going to blame Cornell. If you have college students (or parents of college students) who are desperate to give you $5,000, you take it. In related news, if anybody wants to pay me $5,000 to watch me eat a sandwich, you know where to reach me.

But here at Above the Law, we believe in equal access. For all of the people who don’t have $5,000 for the “Pre-Law Summer,” we’re going to give you all the information you could have gotten from the program in one post, in the middle of February, for free!

Don’t say we never did anything for ya….

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