Loyola Law School

Non-Sequiturs: 12.06.10

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* Loyola of Los Angeles has launched a new faculty blog. In the latest post, Professor Cesare Romano asks: Do states have human rights? [Summary Judgments]

* And what happens if a nation-state disappears underwater — is it still a nation? [Associated Press]

* Speaking of global warming, it’s going back to SCOTUS; here’s Professor Jonathan Adler’s take on the cert grant in American Electric Power v. Connecticut. [The Volokh Conspiracy]

* Marc Randazza on the TSA: “[T]he TSA is ‘making us safe’ by letting the dumbest, most uneducated swine in the country (TSA agents) have a blanket license to feel up our kids, AND to try and make a GAME of it?” [The Legal Satyricon]

* Former Northwestern SBA president Todd Belcore — who, by the way, was exonerated of the charge against him (note the update) — is now writing for HuffPo. [Huffington Post]

* Congratulations to everyone who just passed the MPRE — you can learn your score on the MPRE website. [MPRE Services]

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Stephen Colbert Rips Loyola-L.A.’s ‘Foolproof Plan to Get Their Graduates Better Jobs’

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Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) hoped to quietly jump on the grade-inflation bandwagon in order to help make its students more competitive in the legal marketplace. The school bumped letter grades up a notch, so that a C- became a C, a B became a B+, and an A+ became an A+you’reasuperamazinggunnerrockstar.

But the quiet jump has resulted in a lot of noise. After we wrote about the school’s retroactive grade inflation, the Los Angeles Times and later the New York Times picked up on it.

And last night, Loyola had its big moment on the Colbert Report:

The upside is that Loyola-L.A. just broke through to a whole new audience of potential applicants. The downside is that we can hear the deflation of the hopes of all the Loyola law school grads who planned to wow employers with their amazing GPAs.

We reached out to Loyola about being mocked by one of America’s most influential people. A response from Dean Victor Gold, after the jump.

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Open Thread: 2011 U.S. News Law School Rankings (52 – 72)

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Welcome to the top … of the second tier. We are at the point where the value proposition of going to law school is questionable. But the “nailing attractive co-eds” possibilities remain high. Check out some of the schools ranked in this batch. If you are going to spend three years and six figures on something, you’re going to need more than illusory job prospects to keep you warm at night:

52. Pepperdine
52. Cardozo
54. Florida State
54. Yale Law School’s Hartford Campus/University of Connecticut (j/k)
56. Case Western Reserve
56. Loyola (Los Angeles)
56. Cincinnati
56. San Diego
60. Georgia State
60. University of Houston
60. Miami
60. Tennessee
64. Baylor
64. Lewis & Clark College
64. Kentucky
67. Brooklyn
67. Kansas
67. New Mexico
67. Pittsburgh
67. Villanova
72. Penn State
72. Seton Hall
72. St. John’s
72. Temple
72. Hawaii
72. Oklahoma

See what I’m saying. I bet young law students are just cutting a swath through the undergrads at Yeshiva University.

Seriously though, FSU, Miami, Rocky Top, Ha-freaking-Waii. Good times! You know, unless you want to get a job…

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Loyola Law School (L.A.) Retroactively Inflates Grades

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We reported in November that Loyola Law School of Los Angeles was thinking about artificially raising grades. In response to the terrible economy, the school has acted on the proposal. Here’s the opening line of the message from Loyola Law Dean Victor Gold:

Last week the faculty approved a proposal to modify the grading system. The change will boost by one step the letter grades assigned at each level of our mandatory curve. For example, what previously was a B- would be a B, what previously was a B would be a B+, and so forth. All other academic standards based on grades, such as the probation and disqualification thresholds, are also adjusted upwards by the same magnitude. For reasons that will be explained below, these changes are retroactive to include all grades that have been earned under the current grading system since it was adopted. This means that all grades already earned by current students will be changed. It also means that all grades going forward will be governed by the new curve. The effect of making the change retroactive will be to increase the GPA of all students by .333. The change will not alter relative class rank since the GPA of all students will be moved up by the same amount.

Loyola students are having difficulty getting jobs. In response, did the administration consider dropping tuition? Nope. Instead, they just gave everybody an extra third of a grade — retroactively, no less. That’s not just inflation; that’s a rewriting of history.

Really, are employers out there going to fall for this? Loyola hopes so….

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Loyola L.A. Law Grad Gets Savaged in the Shark Tank

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legal grind jeff hughes.jpgJeff Hughes graduated from Loyola Law School – Los Angeles in 1992. Then, like now, law jobs were hard to come by. Hughes didn’t need an LLM in entrepreneurship to come up with an interesting business idea though. He and his paralegal wife decided to start a “coffee & counsel shop” aimed at middle class customers in need of legal services. It sounds like Starbucks, except you can get a skim latte with a shot of probate law.
Improbably, this California business succeeded. Fourteen years later, the baristas are still serving up espresso and express legal services.
Perhaps frightened by the competition, Jeff and Anne Hughes decided to go on the Shark Tank to get help franchising their business of serving up cheap legal services in a coffeehouse setting.
For the uninitiated, the Shark Tank is an ABC reality show, in which entrepreneurs present ideas to a panel of venture capitalists in hopes of getting funding. As you might expect based on the name, the VCs are not cute and cuddly.
When the Hughes made their pitch for $200,000 this week, the VCs smelled blood in the water. The gruesome footage, after the jump.

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Morning Docket 09.14.09

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loyola chicago school law.gif* Loyola University law school will be named will rename its building after personal injury lawyer Philip H. Corboy. [Chicago Tribune Loyola University of Chicago (press release)]
* A Connecticut lawyer is fighting a one-man battle against improper legal services advertising. [Boston Globe]
* An end is finally in sight for the summer-long Astor trial. [Associated Press]
* Sorry, Tila Tequila. The Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman will not be charged. [New York Times]
* By the end of this week, California has to turn its inmates loose develop a plan for reducing its prison population. [Washington Post]
* Anti-bullying laws have no punch. [Associated Press]
* Kanye West. Above the law. Below the belt. [The Sun]

Loyola Law School (L.A.) Blames Name Mistake For Drop In Rankings

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Loyola logo.JPGThis year’s U.S. News Law School Rankings saw Loyola Law School (L.A.) drop from #63 to #71. Despite the back-and-forth between Above the Law and Loyola Law dean Victor Gold, the drop had nothing to do with us.
Apparently, the drop didn’t have anything to do with any legitimate factor. Brian Leiter is on the case:

This really takes the cake for carelessness on the part of U.S. News. Loyola Law School in Los Angeles dropped from 63 to 71 in the overall U.S. News ranking this past spring, and for one primary reason: its reputation score among academics dropped from 2.6 to 2.3. But that kind of drop is extraordinary: the academic reputation scores move .1 in either direction all the time, without rhyme or reason, but only once in the last eight years did another school’s peer reputation score drop that much….
So with only a 1 in 1,000 chance of this kind of movement, what else might explain the precipitous drop in academic reputation? Unfortunately, the explanation seems to be clear: U.S. News unilaterally changed the school’s name on the survey: from “Loyola Law School” to “Loyola Marymount University.” Loyola was the only school whose name was changed on last year’s survey.

This is the story that Dean Gold is going with too. More details after the jump.

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Loyola OCI Follow-Up

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Loyola logo.JPGOn Tuesday, I told you about Loyola Law School’s OCI policy of preventing students who had outstanding transfer applications from participating in Loyola’s on-campus interviewing program. I suggested that the policy was unfair:

It’s totally understandable for Loyola to want to service people who are happy to be at Loyola. But every student paying tuition should have equal access to the school’s services.

Well, that post has generated a somewhat blistering response from the Dean of Loyola Law School, Victor Gold. He sent the following message to all students today:

The website Above the Law carried a story recently about Loyola’s policy concerning transfer students’ participating in on campus interviews (OCI). The story misrepresents our policy, omits some key facts, and gets others wrong. The purpose of the policy is not, as the story claims, to discourage transfers. Rather, its purpose is to make sure that offers intended for Loyola students in fact go to Loyola students. It is my job to maximize employment opportunities for Loyola graduates and to ensure that employers coming to Loyola actually get to interview Loyola students. That is why I approved the policy.

The key facts Dean Gold wishes to publicize, plus a reader poll, after the jump.

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Are Top Loyola Law Students Getting Poor Services?

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Loyola logo.JPGIs it right for a law school to discourage students from transferring? Is it right for a law school to deny services to students who are considering transferring? Because it looks like that is what happening at Loyola (L.A.) Law School right now.
Loyola has moved up its on-campus interview season; it now starts in late July. Unfortunately, that is too early for most students who are transferring to have received notice of whether or not their applications have been accepted. But now, at Loyola, students who have outstanding transfer applications are no longer allowed to participate in OCI. A tipster makes the situation clear:

Many schools have had similar policies for students who have accepted a position at another school, but Loyola’s policy is targeted at students simply applying for a transfer. This puts students in the very real position of applying, missing out on OCI, and then possibly not getting in at the higher ranked schools. Basically f*cking their chances at BigLaw.

Our tipster confronts the dean, after the jump.

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Featured Survey Results: And The Winners Are . . .

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The time has come, and the crowning of ATL’s Lawyer of the Year and Second Favorite Blog After ATL, both of which are sponsored by ATL and Lateral Link, is at last upon us.
In all, a whopping 4,186 votes were cast, with 2,683 of you voting for Lawyer of the Year and 1,503 weighing in on which blog you like second-most after this one. Find out how it all turned out after the jump.

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Featured Survey Results: Polls, Bloggers and Job Searches

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Barack Obama Senator Barack Hussein Obama Above the Law blog.jpgTime is running out on this month’s ATL Lawyer of the Year and Second Favorite Blog After ATL polls, both sponsored by ATL and Lateral Link.
So far, we’re up to just over 2,600 votes for Lawyer of the Year, and Wall Street Journal pick Loyola 2L is still going strong. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has a roughly 2.5 to 1 lead over Hillary Clinton, and Alberto Gonzales is stamping out civil rights stomping on music rights attorney Ray Beckerman . . . but pretty much nobody else.
On the blogging front, the Wall Street Journal remains the blog to beat, while Above The Law is still in second place and Volokh Conspiracy is on track for third, having opened up a hefty lead over Patently-O and SCOTUSblog. Write-in candidate Ms. JD has overpowered Overlawyered, and Likelihood of Confusion has turned the tables on Professor Bainbridge and is now closing in on Skadden Insider.
We’ll post the final results on Thursday.
But while you’re voting for the champions above, are you also voting with your feet at work? In last month’s ATL / Lateral Link job survey about 20% of you responded that you were considering leaving your current firms once you received your bonus. But that was before many of you knew what your bonuses were going to be.
So last week, we asked you whether your job searches were indeed underway. Find out if the answers changed after the jump.

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Featured Job Survey Results: Honors, Hours and Bonuses

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So far, about 1,400 of you have cast your vote for ATL Lawyer Of The Year.
Loyola 2L is in the lead so far, but Obama is close behind. Whoever helps Chipmunk Lady is a not-so-distant third, showing that this year’s ATL reader wants change (and bonuses) and supports the little guy (and not-so-little bonuses).
Hillary Clinton, currently in fourth place, urges us to vote for experience. Meanwhile, Aaron Charney, Alberto Gonzales, and Ray Beckerman are in the Thompson / Kucinich / Gravel zone, respectively. On the write-in front, Bob Link and “DC Pants Judge” are beginning to get some traction.
Meanwhile, this month’s ATL / Lateral Link survey on hours and bonuses continues to get responses of its own, and we’re now up to almost 1,750 participants.
We revealed the bonus breakdowns for the Classes of 2004, 2005 and 2006 in the results to Monday’s survey on whether you’re looking for a new job. Today, we reveal the numbers for 2003 after the jump.

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