Georgetown Law School

The Truth Will Set You Free?
A Broke, Adulterous, Disgraced Georgetown Law Marine Issues a Public Confession on Facebook

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It’s a Scarlet Letter tale for the digital age. A Georgetown law student’s life has completely unraveled. His way of dealing with losing his wife, his mistress, his supposed baby, his military assignment, and good standing at Georgetown Law School? A public confession on Facebook.

He posted the note with the details of his sad, sordid story on his Facebook wall this week. It begins:

For the world to know:

I was an awful husband. Instead of being honest with my wife about the real problems we faced, I chose to band-aide my pain by seeking comfort in the arms of another woman. The single worst moral failing of my entire life, that I will never atone for and never live down. There is no excuse for my behavior and I deserve every stone that any of you choose to throw.

Anyone who’s ever seen Fatal Attraction or any of the derivative films it has spawned knows that seeking comfort in the arms of another woman will only lead to very bad things. We’ve redacted the names of those involved; we’ll call this candid law student “BAD, BAD BULLDOG.” He decided to share in detail how his dalliance with BULLDOG TEMPTRESS sent his life into a tailspin.

One or more of his Facebook friends — so impressed by the public pillory — copied the note into an email and forwarded it on, thus inviting others to join in the stone-throwing. This has resulted in widespread distribution at the school, and the email’s landing in our inbox.

There are many lessons to be learned here. Two big ones: (1) Don’t cheat on your wife, and (2) If your mistress tells you she’s pregnant, make sure you see the test with the pink line with your own eyes…

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A Broke, Adulterous, Disgraced Georgetown Law Marine Issues a Public Confession on Facebook“

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Georgetown Law Lamentation on NPR

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The mainstream media is on to the fact that life kind of sucks for the law school class of 2010. The Wall Street Journal brought your troubles to the attention of the general public earlier this month, and we encouraged you to send the article to your family and friends to explain how screwed you are. But the Wall Street Journal is a subscription-only publication, so maybe your loved ones couldn’t access it.

Now, luckily, National Public Radio has tackled the issue of tough times for law grads. Five Georgetown then-3Ls, now alumni, shared their dismal prospects with NPR on All Things Considered last week. Now those family and friends who either don’t subscribe to the WSJ or are illiterate can also have the opportunity to hear about how screwed you are. Pass it on: Economy Seems Bleak For Graduating Law Students.

Why you gotta hedge, NPR? We think it’s fair to say it IS bleak. Host Robert Siegel asked the five grads how many jobs they had applied for. “I’ve sent out at least 150 résumés and cover letters,” responded one female Georgetown 2010 grad, who scored a government job. “Hundreds,” said another, who is still jobless.

Judging from this little sample, Georgetown will not have a 93.5% employed-upon-graduation rate this year: Two have jobs, three do not. So, what are their plans?

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Summer Associate of the Day: Kaavya Viswanathan (Aka the Alleged Harvard Plagiarist)

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Remember Kaavya Viswanathan? She’s the Harvard graduate who, while still in high school, landed a two-book deal worth a reported $500,000. The first book, a young adult / chick-lit novel entitled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, was published in April 2006, during Viswanathan’s sophomore year at Harvard.

And then things fell apart. To quote the blog Sepia Mutiny, “Kaavya Viswanathan got rich, got caught, and got ruined.” Shortly after the publication of Opal Mehta, the Harvard Crimson reported that various passages in the book appeared “strikingly similar” to portions of two young adult novels by Megan McCafferty.

Viswanathan was widely accused of plagiarizing — not just from McCafferty, but from Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot and Salman Rushdie. Her subsequent fall from grace, including the cancellation of her book and movie deals, made national and even international headlines (due to coverage back in her native India). She claimed that the similarities between her book and prior published works were unintentional, but given the number and extent of the apparently borrowed passages, some were incredulous. (For samples, see Wikipedia.)

After graduating from Harvard College in 2008, she went on to Georgetown Law, where she’s a member of the GULC class of 2011. Her arrival at Georgetown made Newsweek in February 2009:

Viswanathan is a first-year law student at Georgetown University, where Stephen Glass earned a J.D. after being fired from The New Republic for fabricating a series of articles….

How’d she manage to get accepted? Applicants can submit supplemental essays to explain themselves to the admissions committee, says Dean of Admissions Andrew Cornblatt. “It’s impossible to get amnesia about what we may have heard,” he says. “But in all cases we treat them just like any other applicant.”

It seems Georgetown isn’t the only institution treating Viswanathan “just like any other applicant.” Despite the tough fall recruiting season and her controversial past, Viswanathan, who just finished her 2L year, has landed a coveted summer associate position at a top law firm — one of Biglaw’s biggest and best names, in fact….

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Open Thread: 2011 U.S. News Law School Rankings (6 – 15)

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Let’s continue our march through the U.S. News law school rankings. Today we finish up the traditional top-14 — and we’ll throw in the schools tied for 15th, because we’re pretty sick of hearing UT and UCLA students whine. To refresh your memory, here’s the next group of schools:

6. NYU
7. Berkeley
7. Penn
9. Michigan
10. UVA
11. Duke
11. Northwestern
13. Cornell
14. Georgetown
15. UCLA
15. Texas

All joking aside, dropping to #6 is really not that big of a deal. NYU Law students will be fine — check out how the kicked it on the basketball court just after the rankings came out…

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Externship Fight Takes Center Stage at Georgetown University Law Center

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If you followed my reports from the Future of Legal Education conference, you’ll note that “experiential learning” was a big buzzword among those contemplating how to make their students more desirable to potential employers. Many law school deans and faculty touted their school’s experiential course offerings, ranging from traditional clinical courses to for-credit externships.

Many law students — especially ones staring at the terrible market for recent graduates — feel that these programs will help them get jobs. Why wouldn’t they? Traditional legal education doesn’t seem to be helping them, yet their law schools keep jacking up tuition.

This month, students at Georgetown University Law Center decided that GULC’s for-credit externship opportunities were not on par with the offerings at other peer institutions. The GULC Student Bar Association put together a proposal for the faculty that called for more resources to be put into the school’s experiential courses. The SBA also wanted more school credit given for externships. The proposal seems to be in keeping with what employers claim they want from law school graduates: better practical training, better understanding of client services, better legal problem solving. Isn’t that the wave of the future?

No, according to a very vocal minority of Georgetown faculty. The proposal touched off a serious debate on campus. And some professors have gotten into the fracas with heavy-hitting arguments against the proposal…

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Update on the Georgetown Law Grad Who Sold his J.D. on Craigslist

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Somebody bought this degree off Craigslist

What do you think the resale value on your law degree is? Earlier this year, a San Francisco lawyer put his degree up for sale on Craigslist and found out.

The Georgetown grad was miserable working for a large law firm in Silicon Valley. So he quit and posted his degree in the Craigslist “For Sale” section for “the bargain basement price of $59,250″ — the current value of his student loan balance — or best offer. He hoped to get rid of the piece of paper with “the amazing ability to keep you from doing what you really want to do in life, all in the name of purported prestige and financial success.”

Back in March, the best offer had come from a documentary filmmaker who offered to give the miserable lawyer $50 to “piss on the diploma and then set it on fire.”

That would have been a serious markdown on the $100,000 degree. We checked back in with him this week and found out that a slightly better offer came along…

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The Supreme Spouses

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Supreme Court 6 Above the Law blog.JPGIn our recent caption contest, there were quite a few captions that alluded to the members of the Supreme Court being in bed with conservatives. As we reported this morning, Clarence Thomas is most definitely in bed with a conservative. Ginni Thomas is the President and CEO of the newly launched 501(c)(4), Liberty Central Inc., with the mission statement to “serve the big tent of the conservative movement.”
Since the judiciary prefers the appearance of nonpartisanship, the Los Angeles Times found her Tea Party-inspired group worth covering:

“I think the American public expects the justices to be out of politics,” said University of Texas law school professor Lucas A. “Scot” Powe, a court historian.
He said the expectations for spouses are far less clear. “I really don’t know because we’ve never seen it,” Powe said. Under judicial rules, judges must curb political activity, but a spouse is free to engage.

Not shockingly, Clarence Thomas has nothing to say about this. Eugene Volokh points out that Ginni Thomas is far from the first politically-engaged judicial spouse:

Of course, Justice Thomas is not the only judge to have had a spouse in a prominent political role. Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt’s wife, Ramona Ripston, has just stepped down from being head of the Southern California ACLU. Third Circuit Judge Jane Roth’s husband was a U.S. Senator; Third Circuit Judge Marjorie Rendell’s husband is a governor. So I’m not sure that there’s really a judicial norm that judge’s spouses should stay out of politics, whether partisan politics, advocacy group politics, or public interest litigation (itself a form of politics, at least when done effectively).

All this talk of justices’ second halves made us think it was time for a rundown of the other Supreme spouses. The Honorable Husbands and Wives, and their careers, after the jump.

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Everybody Learns A Lesson from Georgetown Professor Peter Tague

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Peter Tague Georgetown Law professor.jpgOn Thursday morning, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University Law Center started his class with some startling news. He told his first-year law students that Supreme Court Justice John Roberts was planning to retire due to health concerns. He told his students that he could not reveal his sources but that the information was credible.
Some argue that the internet should not be allowed in law school classrooms. What transpired in Professor Peter Tague’s classroom lends support to that argument. His students proceeded to send out the surprising news via email and/or chat and/or tweet. Somehow it made its way to Radar Online, and soon the blogosphere went into a frenzy over the news.
But the news was spurious. Midway through his lecture on the credibility and reliability of informants, Professor Tague revealed that the Roberts rumor was false and that he was illustrating how someone a lawyer might ordinarily think was a credible source — like a law school professor — could disseminate inaccurate information. An important lesson in law: trust should be based on multiple sources.
It’s an important lesson in journalism as well. And the blogosphere learned it the hard way yesterday. Radar Online published an “exclusive” story that Roberts would be retiring “at any time.”
We did not initially report it here, after checking with our sources and encountering extreme skepticism. But it spread like wildfire through the blogosphere, so we “broke the news” that Roberts was still chief justice. A couple of hours later, we broke real news, of how the rumors got started.
We did not criticize Professor Tague in our story, but we’ve been contacted by his current and former students who wish to defend him. He certainly succeeded in teaching them — and many news organizations — a lesson, but he must also have learned about the dangers of pedagogical pranks in the Internet age…

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Anatomy of a Rumor: The Story Behind Chief Justice John Roberts’s ‘Retirement’

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john roberts.jpgEveryone is wondering: Where did that erroneous rumor of an imminent retirement by Chief Justice John Roberts come from? The gossip spread like wildfire, triggering thousands of texts, blog posts, and emails — a few hundred of them to the ATL tips line — before Radar, which first published the rumor, retracted its report.

We were skeptical, which is one reason why we didn’t write about the gossip as quickly as some other outlets. We reached out to the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office after we heard the rumor, and we didn’t want to write about it until we heard back from the PIO (or at least gave them a little time to respond).

Of course, we have many Supreme Court sources other than the official ones — and they reacted with extreme skepticism when we ran the Radar report by them. One of our SCOTUS experts actually laughed out loud after we (sheepishly) asked, “Have you heard anything about a possible Roberts retirement?” This source noted that JGR would sooner die — literally — than give Obama the chance to appoint his successor.

Like many a promising legal career, the Roberts resignation rumor traces its origins to a 1L class at Georgetown University Law Center….

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Law Student of the Day: Mike Sacks

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mike sacks first one.jpgGeorgetown 3L Mike Sacks had a mission this semester. He wanted to be first in line for every major argument at the Supreme Court. He’s been documenting his adventures on his blog First One @ One First.
This is made easier for him because he has no morning classes and lives on Capitol Hill, a few minutes away from the High Court. He should also have camping experience from his undergrad days at Duke, but unlike me, he somehow avoided spending time in Krzyzewskiville.
Maybe if he had paid his dues tenting out for basketball games, he would have succeeded in his mission. But no. Some Californians derailed him this week, as documented by the New York Times.

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