Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is not really retired yet. “I am more busy in retirement than before,” she told Above the Law in a recent interview. One of her myriad projects is Our Courts, a non-profit organization that develops Web-based games to teach seventh- and eighth-graders about government. We spoke with Justice O’Connor recently for our piece for the Washington Post reviewing the games.

We had hoped to actually play the games with her, but it turns out she’s not much of a gamer. Not being the computer type, she hasn’t actually played the Web-based games herself. “I watched young people play it. They have a lot of fun. They’re actively engaged. I think it’s very exciting,” she told us.

Justice O’Connor has been touring the country to promote the games. She even stopped in to chat with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. We got to catch up with her via conference call last month. We rung her up at One First Street — like some retired Biglaw partners, retired SCOTUS justices get to keep an office. After her secretary connected us, Justice O’Connor answered the phone: “Sandra Day O’Connor.”

We discovered that O’Connor is adamant about bringing an end to the election of judges in America. Read more from our interview, after the jump.

In these difficult times for the legal profession, it’s more important than ever to know all your options. So we resume our series on career alternatives for attorneys — jobs for J.D. holders that don’t involve working as a Biglaw associate or contract attorney.

In a prior post, we discussed the career alternative of entrepreneurship. If you’re tired of working for a boss, then become the boss: start your own company.

Today we focus on two lawyers who, interestingly enough, have started their own businesses in the same area: admissions consulting and academic coaching. Perhaps this is the start of a hot new trend? Cf. the cupcake craze sweeping the nation, which another lawyer is capitalizing on.

Adam Nguyen, formerly of Paul Weiss and Shearman & Sterling, is the president and CEO of Ivy Link. Jon Palmer, formerly of Schulte Roth & Zabel, is the president and founder of The Admissions Experts.

Both businesses are headquartered in New York — which makes sense, given how obsessive Manhattan parents can be about getting their offspring into elite educational institutions. NYC ≠ TTT!!!

Read more about these gents and their new enterprises, after the jump.

Last year, we wrote about retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor entering a new field: video game development. She’s spearheading a project called Our Courts, which seeks to improve civic education in middle schools. The Our Courts website officially launched in January of this year.

The first two games, “Supreme Decision” and “Do I Have A Right?”, went live this summer. The Washington Post contacted us and asked us to review them. We played Nintendo, Oregon Trail, and Carmen Sandiego growing up, and we spent a recent Friday night at Elie’s playing Rock Band, so we were willing to give the Our Courts game a go.

Check out our review of the games, along with additional reflections on civic education and public access to the courts, in this Washington Post piece: Educational? You Be the Judge.

While Lat was in D.C., he swung by the Washington Post’s offices to talk about the games. Check out his star turn in the video after the jump.

Does your alma mater contribute to the social good? Or is it just another soul-sucking institution, hell-bent on training young people to do evil things like “make money” or become lawyers?

Well, Washington Monthly has released its annual rankings of colleges and universities. But the magazine ranks the schools by their “contributions to society.” Here is the magazine’s methodology, from Tax Prof Blog:

Community Service (33.3%)

* % of Alumni in Peace Corps
* % of Students in Army/Navy ROTC
* % of Work-Study Grants Spent on Community Service Projects

Research (33.3%)

* Research Expenditures
* % of Students Earning Ph.Ds
* Number of Science & Engineering Ph.Ds Awarded
* % of Faculty Receiving Prestigious Awards
* % of Faculty in National Academies

Social Mobility (33.3%)

* % of Students Receiving Pell Grants
* Actual Graduation Rate v. Predicted Graduation Rate

Oh dear. Where to begin? First off, the community service metric is FUBAR. The army counts; but students who become, say, firefighters, are left out? Meanwhile, surely not all research expenditures contribute to society. And if all research does, then schools should get credit for graduates who go on to work for Merck.

It would physically hurt my brain to break down the myriad problems with their “social mobility” metric.

But … whatever, their bleeding hearts are in the right place. Check out the top ten and the bottom ten universities, after the jump.

This past weekend we spent some time in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the houses are big (compared to Manhattan apartments), the downtown is small, and lawyers make time for inspirational lunches with school children. Or so we read in the Charlotte Observer:

It’s not every day that an eighth-grader gets to sit down to lunch with a lawyer, but it happens once a month for nearly 80 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students.

CMS’ “Lunch with a Lawyer” program helps middle schoolers who are interested in law careers learn more about the profession by getting to know a lawyer.

The article offers a refreshing take on why people become lawyers. See your profession through the eyes of 12-year-olds, after the jump.

Oh, how times have changed. Back in May 2008, Massachusetts was contemplating an excise tax on university endowments. This proposed tax law change would have imposed a 2.5% annual assessment on Massachusetts colleges with endowments over $1 billion. (Cough cough, Harvard.)

Alas, Harvard doesn’t need any help from the government when it comes to dissipating its endowment. For the fiscal year ended in June, it’s looking at a decline in its endowment of about 30 percent.

The university — home to the legendary Harvard Law School, arguably the nation’s finest law school — isn’t taking these losses sitting down. Instead, it’s bringing in new talent to help manage its money.

Read more, and discuss, over at Dealbreaker.

He Was Wearing My Harvard Tie. Can You Believe It? [Dealbreaker]

Maybe the student loan bailout movement just received its first martyr. While people in the industry have long known that student loans cannot easily be discharged through bankruptcy, maybe a high profile case will clue the general public in on this needlessly unfair burden for those who seek post-graduate degrees.

Mark Jesperson had $350,000 in student loan debt and filed for bankruptcy. Lower courts ruled in favor of Jesperson, but then his case reached the 8th Circuit. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports:

The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the 45-year-old Grand Marais man cannot escape more than $350,000 of student debt he piled up over more than a decade.

Jesperson had hoped to discharge the debt in bankruptcy and won the first couple rounds in court. But last week a three-judge panel reversed the lower courts’ decision and said he must pay the money back.

Evidently, little league baseball players have more common sense than our federal courts. Those kids understand the concept of a “mercy rule.”

But regular readers of Above the Law know that this decision is not at all unusual. In our society, it is easier to discharge a gaggle of zombies than it is to get out from under student loans.

While the dollar amount involved is unusual, experts say the latest ruling is not. It’s extremely difficult to get rid of student loan debt, even through bankruptcy.

Jesperson’s story is particularly sad. More details after the jump.

The New York Times has a fascinating story about Robert Bowman. Bowman took the bar exam four times and racked up $400,000 in student debt on his quest towards becoming an attorney, only to be denied admittance to the bar based on character and fitness. He sounds like a cross between Don Quixote and Jimmy Berluti.

He put himself through community college, worked and borrowed heavily to help pay for college, graduate school and even law school. He took the New York bar examination not once, not twice, not three times, but four, passing it last year. Finally, he seemed to be on his way.

In January, the committee of New York lawyers that reviews applications for admission to the bar interviewed Mr. Bowman, studied his history and the debt he had amassed, and called his persistence remarkable. It recommended his approval.

But a group of five state appellate judges decided this spring that his student loans were too big and his efforts to repay them too meager for him to be a lawyer.

The thing is, the appellate panel didn’t really explain why Bowman’s debt load made him unfit to be a lawyer:

“Applicant has not made any substantial payments on the loans,” the judges wrote in a terse decision and an unusual rejection of the committee’s recommendation. “Applicant has not presently established the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law.”

Mr. Bowman, 47, appears to have crossed some unspoken line with his $400,000 in student debt and penalties, accumulated over many years.

Is $400,000 simply too much debt for a lawyer to carry? More details after the jump.

A new federal program promises student loan forgiveness for people who qualify after they’ve dutifully paid their debts for ten years. The program will also cap monthly loan payments depending on income. The act, passed in 2007, is set to become effective on July 1st. The National Law Journal reports the awesome news:

Some members of the class of 2009 will have less to complain about, however. A new federal program intended to help borrowers manage their student debt goes into effect on July 1. The legislation — called the College Cost Reduction & Access Act — will cap monthly loan payments according to income and forgive student debt balances after designated periods of time. For attorneys, the main beneficiaries will be those who go on to have long-term public interest careers. But the program will also make loan payments more affordable for all attorneys with high debt loads and relatively low incomes.

“There are a lot of things that are making it tough for new graduates, with the tight job market and the deferrals,” said Heather Jarvis, a senior program manager at Equal Justice Works, an organization that encourages attorneys to undertake public interest law careers. “But there has never been a better time to graduate, as far as student loans.”

Essentially this is the best piece of news for the class of 2009 since they got into law school in the first place. The government will forgive outstanding loans after ten years of payments for people who work in public interest and other qualifying organizations.

Obviously this program is geared towards students who take public interest jobs. Biglaw lawyers are still on their own with their debts:

This option wouldn’t make sense for graduates who take jobs at large firms paying upwards of $100,000, Jarvis said, but it might be right for the sizable segment of law school graduates who don’t earn that kind of money.

“The reality is that most law graduates don’t take those jobs and earn those salaries,” she said. “A lot of people make $60,000 or $70,000 a year. At these salaries, they would qualify for the income-based repayment plan. Debt loads are getting so high that it’s typical for someone to graduate from law school with $100,000 or more in debt. If you were going to stretch out paying your debt anyway, [income-based repayment] is a good option to consider.”

Right now, it appears that many students who can qualify for the program don’t even know it exists. More details after the jump.

The state of Minnesota is providing more evidence that law schools are completely out of whack with the current market realities. The state is doing what it can to keep undergraduate tuition low, at the expense of law students who will be drowning in so much debt they’ll need to grow gills.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports the most recent tuition proposal coming out of Minnesota:

Undergraduates catch a break in the next University of Minnesota budget that would keep their tuition increases low despite a cut in state funding.

Graduate and professional students won’t have the same luck.

The students who make up about 40 percent of the student body are the hidden victims of a bad-news budget that the Board of Regents is expected to vote on Wednesday.

By “graduate and professional students” the paper really means to say law students. The proposed tuition hike is larger for future (unemployed) lawyers than other graduate students:

While in-state undergraduate students will face 3.1 percent tuition hikes, most grad students could see a 7.5 percent increase in their bills this year. First-year medical students’ in-state rate may rise 5.2 percent, to $32,328. Newbie Minnesotan law students could pay 15.3 percent more than their counterparts did last year.

Are Minnesota state officials even nominally aware of what is going on in the legal market in their own state? Could somebody point the Board of Regents to www.abovethelaw.com after the jump?

On Monday, we warned you that student loan forgiveness programs were under attack. Today, the University of North Carolina School of Law informed students that the school could not afford to make the promised loan repayments to students in low income jobs. Here’s the email from UNC Law Dean Jack Boger:

We are writing to share news about a regrettable delay in our implementation of the new LRAP program at UNC School of Law. Unfortunately, because of the grave economic downturn that has hit the North Carolina state budget, we will not be able to go forward this spring with Loan Repayment Assistance Program funding. As you may know, various statewide freezes and other severe restrictions have been imposed this spring on all state funds, including the UNC law school account that was designated for LRAP purposes. Moreover, the state has made clear that it intends to ‘recapture’ those funds to meet its larger budgetary needs sometime before June 30, the end of this fiscal year. This will leave us without the financial means to make LRAP awards.

While we share your disappointment with this turn of events, we remain committed to the LRAP program - and will keep your application on file. We hope to be able to relaunch this program sometime during the 2009-10 fiscal year.

Thank you for your patience, and for your help in the development of this program. We also thank you for your continued support of Carolina Law.

Sincerely yours,

Jack Boger, Dean, UNC School of Law

UNC Law seems to be developing a pattern of raising people’s hopes, and then dashing them.

A student affected by this decision shares an interesting viewpoint after the jump.

While the vanguard of the student loan bailout movement pushes on (vanguard = me and this guy), the bailout army is in danger of being outflanked. The New York Times has been reporting that student loan forgiveness programs may not be on solid ground, especially at the state level:

If you want to become a public defender, Georgetown University can be a great place to get your legal education. So Heather Gatnarek expects to take on well over $100,000 of debt to get her law degree there and hopes to graduate in three years.

Here’s the problem, though. She’s relying on a new federal program that forgives part of the student loan debt for graduates who enter public service fields. And she was scared out of her mind when she read a New York Times article on Wednesday on problems in Kentucky, where significant cuts in one of its loan forgiveness programs have put thousands of indebted public school teachers and nurses in a painful financial squeeze.

This must be how Roman generals felt when Hannibal was teaching them about double envelopment.

In fairness, we all know 1Ls who come in with humble dreams of working for the public good. Usually, money talks while commitment to public service walks. But given the retrenchment of the Biglaw market, absent strong loan forgiveness programs, many students will be looking at some tough options:

“I would be completely up a creek” without a loan forgiveness program, Ms. Gatnarek said. “I don’t know what I would do. Marry someone rich, I guess. People say that I could just do corporate law for a few years, but I wouldn’t last two days.”

Is this just a problem in a few states? After the jump, the NYT tries to find out.

Two weeks ago, we reported on Syracuse College of Law changing its exam guidelines in an attempt to thwart cheaters. Fordham Law School also had some academic dishonesty issues. Fortunately, this new cheating phenomenon is not limited to New York State. The National Law Journal reports:

When a Florida Coastal School of Law student last year spotted notecards poking out of a fellow test-taker’s pocket during finals, she kept her head down and focused on the exam in front of her. “I’ve never been one to rat people out,” said the student, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Her classmate was returning from a bathroom break during a final exam, and it was pretty clear to her that cheating was afoot. Like thousands of law students each year, the Florida Coastal student and her classmates had signed an honor code on their first day of school. Law schools rely on honor codes to keep students from cheating. The codes reflect the self-policing nature of law school academic integrity regimes, and they appeal to students’ sense of fair play to keep them in line.

Cheating at Florida Coastal? Noooooooo!

What is your friendly, neighborhood American Bar Association doing about the scourge of cheating at accredited law schools? We explore after the jump.

The United Kingdom, (a/k/a: Mother England. f/k/a: The Little Island that Could), just lowered the student loan interest rate to 0%.

0%! God save the Queen:

More than 2.5 million students will pay 0% rate of interest on their loans from September, the government announced yesterday.

Hopes were raised last month that students would effectively earn money on loans after the Retail Prices Index (RPI), to which they are linked, dropped to -0.4%.

The new terms will apply to all loans taken out after 1998:

The new rate will affect those with outstanding student loans taken out after September 1998 as well as applicants for both maintenance loans and tuition fee loans in the current and next academic year.

Okay, it’s not quite a full student loan bailout, but it is a start. Let’s get into additional details after the jump.

A couple of months ago, it occurred to me that if the government didn’t start tackling the student loan issue, people would simply stop paying off their loans:

The stick is this: nobody is really going to pay you back anyway. Where do you think loan payments rank on a priority list that includes: food, shelter, anti-depressants, and résumé paper?

According to USAToday, that is precisely what is starting to happen:

Student loan defaults are at their highest rate since 1998, and likely will go higher. And though federal student loans offer some payment modification options, private loans are far more onerous, because even filing for bankruptcy rarely wipes out the debt.

Congress might tackle bankruptcy law reform again this year, but it decided as recently as last year not to allow student loans to be easily discharged through bankruptcy filings.

Just to be clear, if you are a financial idiot and you rack up thousands of dollars in credit card debt on flat screens and rims, you can get that wiped out in bankruptcy. But if you take out loans to pay for your education, and you can’t get a job because the economy has stopped, the debt will follow you to the grave.

More horror stories that the baby boomers don’t want us to talk about after the jump.

I’ll admit, I’ve never really understood the utility of cheating on a test. Even if you don’t get caught, what have you really gained from getting a couple of extra questions right? A third of a grade? A full grade? It just strikes me as ridiculously hypocritical. If you really care that much about your grades, isn’t it better to just put in the work over the course of the semester? And if you don’t care about your grades, why do you suddenly lose your nerve at the very end?

In any event, I suppose the terrible economy is making a lot of people think creatively about what their transcript will look like when it comes time to find a job. It looks like a spate of cheating scandals has erupted among some New York law schools.

The Syracuse University College of Law is so worried about the problem that it is cracking down on people with weak bladder control:

Students can now use the rest room only once during an exam, which can last four hours, because some are suspected of using cell phones or looking at papers in the bathrooms. Students with medical reasons to use the rest room more often than once per exam must provide medical documentation to a dean.

“During this exam period, we have received a significant number of reports from (first-year) students alleging academic dishonesty,” read an e-mail sent by law school deans to first-year students.

Forty years I been asking permission to piss. I can’t squeeze a drop without say-so.

While Syracuse adopts the Depends Honor Code, Fordham hasn’t decided if it will do anything at all. Details after the jump.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published a new report detailing the faculty salaries at major universities. The report is titled “On The Brink,” so right away you know that faculty are as scared as everybody else.

The report covers all faculty, so we don’t have the breakout just for law school professors. But TaxProf Blog has teased out the information on the highest paid faculty. It is probably safe to assume that law faculty are paid along the same general lines as other professors in the university system. It’s not like law professors coach basketball.

The top ten universities in terms of faculty salaries are not all that surprising:

1. Harvard: $192,600
2. Stanford: $181,900
3. Princeton: $180,300
4. Chicago: $179,500
5. Columbia: $175,200
6. Yale: $174,700
7. California Institute of Technology: $172,500
8. NYU: $170,700
9. Pennsylvania: $169,400
10. Yeshiva: $168,300

I’m sure they pay the faculty at M.I.T. in Federation Credits.

If we just look at the salaries available at public universities, there are a few surprises.

More rankings after the jump.

Dear President Obama, First Lady Obama, Treasury Secretary Geithner, Education Secretary Duncan:

Hello all. I am writing on behalf of the massive amount of educational debt that I am no longer able to pay. Like so many young Americans, I got into a much better and more expensive school than my family could afford. After being told approximately 5,000,000 times that education was the “silver bullet” that was necessary to live the “American Dream,” I decided to fund my education through various loan programs. At the time, it seemed reasonable.

After I completed my four year degree program, I sadly learned that I wasn’t qualified to do anything particularly interesting. I’m not really good with computers, so creating the web application that simulates blow jobs or farts wasn’t an option for me. Based in part on the advice of nearly every intelligent person I’ve ever met, I decided to double down on the “education” gambit and get a post-graduate degree.

Mind you, I did eventually want to do real work and earn real money for a living, so I didn’t pursue a Ph.D. Instead I opted for a professional degree. A J.D. if you must know.

Once again, I decided to go to the best school that I could get into, instead of the cheapest school I could find. Once again, I received a significant amount of federal aid to accomplish this. At the time, I knew that I was signing myself up for years in a grueling job that I wouldn’t really enjoy, but I understood that there was “no such thing as a free lunch.” I was willing to sacrifice.

But, it looks like America is not holding up her end of the bargain. Please continue reading.

Kids these days just have no respect for teachers. Third-graders hatch murder plots against them. Some students get all litigious when branded with crosses or when they suffer permanent hearing damage. I bet teachers miss the good old days when they could call their students ugly and bratty, and give them a quick kick to the rear without fear of a lawsuit.

Those days are over. From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

According to the lawsuit, [Mount Miguel High School choir teacher Heather] Hargett had picked several groups of students to deliver the singing grams and “intentionally excluded” [freshman Jade Ray]. The 14-year-old asked why, and Hargett answered that she “looked bad” and had no choir T-shirt.

Jade asked whether the T-shirt really cost $15, and Hargett told her to leave the class, the lawsuit said. When Jade asked if she was serious, Hargett said that if she couldn’t afford a T-shirt, she had to leave. The teacher called Jade a “brat” and “ugly” and kicked her, the lawsuit said. The kick landed on her buttocks, [attorney John] Gomez said.

This sounds like the kind of exaggerated story that kids tell their parents when they hate their teacher. But Jade says it happened in front of 50 other kids. If so, that is, like, totally embarrassing. It looks like a jury gets to decide if it’s $75,000 worth of embarrassment.

Student files suit vs. teacher [San Diego Union-Tribune]

Parents of an Ohio eighth grader are suing their son’s teacher, principal, and school superintendent, as well as the Mt. Vernon City School District. Apparently the teacher is among the one in eight biology teachers who don’t believe in evolution, and he espouses his religious beliefs in class. And oh yeah, he burned a cross into their son’s arm!

From the Courthouse News Service:

The John Does claim Freshwater has unconstitutionally taught his religious beliefs in his science classes for more than a decade. They claim that in 2003 Freshwater sought, and was denied permission, to teach “intelligent design,” but does it anyway. They claim his classroom is festooned with Biblical posters, that he tells his students that “although he is forced to teach from the textbooks, the teachings are wrong or not proven according to the Bible.”

The complaint [PDF] states: “On Dec. 6, 2007, Mr. Freshwater burned a cross into James Doe’s arm using an electric device manufactured by Electro-Technic Products, Inc., Model BD-10A. The manufacturer of Model BD-10A warns that the electric device has a high voltage output that should never be used to touch human skin. … Mr. Freshwater applied the electric device to the arm of at least one other eighth grade student on Dec. 6, 2007. The area burned with Model BD-10A resulted in an easily identifiable cross consisting of red welts with blistering, swelling and blanching in the surrounding area…

The complaint also states that Freshwater, as adviser of the school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes, claimed to drive Satan out of a speaker at a club meeting, told club members that “they are saved, whereas the other students playing on the playground are going to Hell,” distributed Bibles at school, gave “extra credit” to students who did work on “intelligent design,” and that school administrators knew all this but failed to discipline him for it.

Last time we checked, exorcising demons from your students wasn’t part of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Eighth Grader Says Teacher Burned A Cross Into His Flesh [Courthouse News]