Stanford Law School is one of the best law schools in the country. SLS is ranked #3 in the latest U.S. News law school rankings. Stanford graduates are generally intelligent, capable, and employable individuals (with some exceptions).

But are they smart enough to miss the first few weeks of Bar/Bri? The law school has changed its academic calendar to a quarters system. Stanford University already followed a quarters system, but the law school had been on a semester-based academic calendar.

The change could result in some conflict between 3L classes and the beginning of bar review courses. One student explains:

Stanford Law School changed to the quarter system, leaving their students in very precarious position vis a vis the bar exam. Classes do not end until several weeks after the California bar review courses start. Aside from the fact that this puts an extra burden on all SLS 3Ls, who will have to study for the bar at the same time they are attending classes and studying for finals, it creates a real mess for those students who are not remaining, or cannot remain in the immediate area. to study for and take the California bar.

This is because the bar review curricula differ from location to location. Accordingly, a student who is planning to take the bar review course somewhere other than in the Bay Area cannot take the first few weeks of the bar review course in the Stanford area and then move to wherever it is they are planning to move and finish up the bar review course at that location. Moreover, many of the students have leases on their apartments that end before the bar exam; thus, even those students who have the flexibility and financial wherewithal to change their relocation plans and remain in the Stanford area through the bar exam may not have any place to live (and how many of those do you think there are?) Stanford Law School refuses to address this issue head on, attempting to placate their students with vague promises that they’re “looking into it.”

We spoke to officials at Stanford Law School, and it appears that the school has “look[ed] into it.” Overall, the school feels that the benefits outweigh the burdens, and the burdens can be mitigated.

Look at it from Stanford’s perspective, after the jump.

For those of you considering prostitution to pay off your law school debts (you know who you are), consider the cautionary tale of Cristina Warthen. As we have previously reported, Cristina graduated from Stanford Law School in 2001. But instead of going into Biglaw, Cristina adopted the porn name “Brazil” and turned herself into a high-priced escort.

Granted, if she graduated today, Cristina might have been able to get some public interest deferral money for her “service.” But this was a long time ago.

And for a while Cristina was a smashing success. She even landed a rich husband, AskJeeves founder David Warthen.

But the Warthens were hit hard by the recession, and the couple split. Meanwhile, the government came looking for $313,000 in back taxes from Cristina’s sultry side business.

The ABA Journal reports that there is a resolution in Cristina’s case. What sentence did she get?

LEWW is fascinated by ATL’s Douchiest Law School contest. Official results haven’t been announced yet, but based on our preliminary read, Yale seems to have notched a decisive first-round victory over the University of Texas, and it looks like Harvard has trounced UCLA. Stanford Law School, however, appears to have been decisively out-douched by lowly Georgetown. Conclusion: The relationship between douchiness and prestige is not linear.

This week’s weddings feature two YLS grads and two SLS grads, so these lawyer newlyweds are undeniably prestigious. But are they also representative of their respective institutions’ reputations for d-baggery? We’ll let you make the call.

Here are the couples:

1. Wendy Katz and Matthew Waxman

2. Megan Wall-Wolff and Joshua Younger

3. Julia Kripke and Matthew Kellogg

Read all about these couples and vote for your favorite, after the jump.

Rejoice, wedding fans! We have some compelling mid-summer material for you this week: Wachtell, SCOTUS, lesbians, French nobility — read on for the details on all of that and more, as reported in the New York Times and filtered by us.

Our finalist couples:

1. Rebecca Gutner and Rodman Forter Jr.

2. Laura Hammond and Christopher Hemphill

3. Laure de Vulpillières and Vanessa Dillen

Admire these couples’ achievements, after the jump.

Another week, another NYT Vows column comparing the bride to a giant coniferous tree (“The bride stood stately and erect, echoing the Redwoods that surrounded them … “). Seriously, could they maybe assign Vows once a month to a real writer, just to make it a little less chirpy and insipid? What about Maureen Dowd? What about Paul Krugman?

Here are this week’s finalists, including the tree-like bride:

1. Alizah Diamond and Itai Maytal

2. Stefanie Schneider and David Alpert

3. Anya Emerson and Jonah Staw

After the jump, our non-chirpy analysis of these couples.

When we first got a tip that a Florida lawyer had been disbarred for making a client pay her fees with sexual favors, we thought, “Ho hum. Another crazy Florida lawyer.” Then we Googled the pro boner attorney, James Harvey Tipler, and found out that the low-life lawyer has a sterling Stanford degree.

According to his Justia profile and his listing on the California Bar Association website, Tipler is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School. We hope this doesn’t make Stanford fall even lower in the U.S. News rankings.

Tipler is not the first Stanford Law graduate to get mixed up in sex work. But making an 18-year-old client pay for legal work on her parental custody case with sexual favors is a new low.

From the Florida Supreme Court order disbarring Tipler:

Tipler charged his client a fee of $2,300 and entered into a fee agreement with her that allowed a “credit of $200 for each time she engaged in sex with Respondent” and a “$400 credit if she arranged for other females to have sex with him.” For his misdeeds, Tipler was charged with racketeering and four counts of prostitution. He ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of solicitation of prostitution.

Fellatio in exchange for filings was not Tipler’s only offense. He’s gotten into trouble in many other ways, and not just in Florida. He’s got a record in California and Alabama, and we suspect he may be trying to set up shop in South Carolina now. More after the jump.

Stanford Law School just issued a press release announcing that Judge Michael McConnell of the 10th Circuit will be joining the school’s faculty in the fall. McConnell hails from Utah and was on Bush’s Supremes short list in 2005. From the press release:

McConnell will step down from his role on the bench to rejoin the legal academy and direct the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.

McConnell is widely regarded as one of the nation’s top judges and most distinguished constitutional law scholars. He has written broadly on many aspects of the Constitution but is best known for his work on freedom of religion—a critical area of constitutional law that he effectively redefined before ascending the bench. McConnell was appointed to the Denver-based Tenth Circuit in 2002 by President George W. Bush.

This is great news for Stanford, but surprising news from McConnell, who had already lined up his clerks for 2009-2010. McConnell is a highly-regarded judge who is reputed to be great to work for and has been known to feed clerks to SCOTUS in the past. This must come as a big disappointment for the four clerks who had been slated to work with him. David Tighe, the 10th Circuit’s spokesman, says he’s unsure of the would-have-been clerks’ plans. Well, it’s easy to get a job nowadays, right?

In a press release [PDF] from the 10th Circuit, McConnell says:

“The opportunity to serve on the Tenth Circuit has been a great privilege and one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I will especially miss working with my colleagues on the court, whose friendship, collegiality, and commitment to upholding law and justice are a model and an inspiration. But my first love remains in teaching and scholarship. Especially at this time of grave international and domestic challenges and transformation, I want to contribute more openly to debate, scholarly analysis, and public understanding of the governing principles of the American Republic.”

Unsaid is that a Stanford salary trumps that from the 10th Circuit. And that McConnell’s SCOTUS dreams died along with Obama’s winning the election.

After the jump, we’ve got McConnell’s resignation letter to President Obama.

Stanford law professor Larry Lessig had an editorial in the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition, “In defense of piracy.” Lessig starts off hating on the lawyers who went after the mother in the dancing baby/YouTube/Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” case. (Background here.)

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there’s some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music?

The answer: Crazy copyright law.

Lessig goes on to defend others whose creativity is derived from others’ creativity, like Danger Mouse and mash-up artist Girl Talk, whose latest album samples from 300 different songs. No rights acquired.

Midway through, the editorial goes into “Braveheart” mode. There’s a war going on, says Lessig— the “copyright wars.” Kids these days are sharing copyrighted material through peer-to-peer networks, while the art world is embracing a rampant remix culture.

This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can’t kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them “pirates.” And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as “criminals.” They begin to get used to the idea.

That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison.

That’s heavy. Lessig’s suggestions for ending the war, saving our lawless kids, and encouraging creativity, after the jump.

We recently reported on Stanford Law School’s new grading system. Does it involve dollar bills? Or leaving book prizes on bedside tables?

Cristina Warthen (née Cristina Schultz) — aka the Stanford Law Escort, now married to David Warthen, the filthy rich co-founder of Ask Jeeves — is back in the news. From the San Jose Mercury News (via TaxProf Blog):

A Stanford law school graduate suspected of paying off her costly student loans by running a high-priced escort service has now been hit with federal tax evasion charges.

In court papers filed Tuesday in San Jose federal court, prosecutors allege that Cristina Warthen failed to pay taxes on more than $133,000 she earned as a prostitute in 2003, jetting off as a call girl for clients in Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York and other cities. The government has charged her with felony tax evasion for failing to pay about $25,000 in federal income taxes.

Warthen’s business as a reputed high-priced hooker was first revealed several years ago, when the federal government searched her then-home in Oakland and seized more than $61,000 in cash suspected to be linked to her escort business. Court papers allege that starting in 2001, Warthen, then Cristina Schultz, used the name “Brazil” and advertised her escort services on a Web site, TouchofBrazil.net.

Brazil. Great beaches. And waxing.

A little bit more, after the jump.

Last week we told you that Harvard and Stanford law schools were enacting sweeping grade reform. Reactions came in from students and alumni from many top schools. One close friend emailed:

If Harvard had this when we were in school, I’d be emailing you from DPW right now.

Suffice it to say, the friend emailed from a little further down the Vault list.

But to be clear, HLS doesn’t have anything just yet. Dean Kagan announced, “the new classifications, much as at Yale and Stanford, will be Honors-Pass-Low Pass-Fail.” She did not speak on the crucial question of how honors would be determined.

On the other hand, Stanford did announce precisely how their honors would be determined (“book prizes”). Some commenters criticized the decision because it could not be mapped onto a traditional four-point system:

The important issue with any grading system is whether the grades can be aggregated into one number—the GPA—and the students ranked on that basis. The A-F system is mapped onto the 0-4.0 scale (or 0-8, at HLS, until now). The HP-F system is not mapped onto any numerical scale. This makes it impossible to precisely rank students (without developing your own formula).

HLS could still end up with a four-point system of some description. As one reader pointed out:

Honors = A
Pass = B

Low Pass = C

Fail = Elie

Unless you believe the deans’ quest for “pedagogical excellence,” there is an open question as to why two top institutions would radically change how law students are judged.

Possible answers after the jump.

Update: Harvard Law School also just announced changes to its grading system that will make it more like the Yale and Stanford systems. See here.

In May, we reported that the faculty of Stanford Law School voted to change their grading system. The school went from the traditional “A, B, C, Die” system to a Yale-esque pass/fail hybrid. From the May message of Dean Larry Kramer:

[T]he faculty voted to adopt a grade reform proposal which will change our grading system to an honors, pass, restricted credit, no credit system for all semesters/quarters. The new system includes a shared norm for the proportion of honors to be awarded in both exam and paper courses. No grading system is perfect, but the consensus is that the reform will have significant pedagogical benefits, including that it encourages greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom and in designing metrics for evaluating student work.

We noted then that the school was still working on the exact meaning of “honors.”

“Honors” has now been defined. “Watch that first step … it’s a doozy.” From Dean Kramer:

[W]e will no longer use or award Order of the Coif or “Graduation with Distinction,” honors we have in the past recognized and given out at or after graduation. Instead, prizes will be awarded in individual courses to recognize outstanding student performance. Tentatively called “book prizes” (after the fashion of some other schools that use this system), one book prize may be awarded for every 15 students, and this will be true in all classes, whether the basis of evaluation is an exam or a paper. In first-year required classes, 2 prizes will be available in small sections, and 4 in large sections. In advanced classes, professors have discretion about whether and how many prizes to award, though within the same maximum guideline of one per every 15 students (faculty may round up at 8). Discretion is meant to signal that faculty are recognizing genuinely outstanding performance, not just the event of receiving a high grade. Prizes will be registered on student transcripts when grades come out at the end of each term and you will be free to list them on your resumes. The policy is effective beginning this term….

[T]he faculty also concluded that we should award book prizes to students in the class of 2010 for their 1L classes last year, following the standard set forth above. (It will take some time for these retroactive prizes to be calculated and incorporated onto student transcripts.)

The full message is reprinted, and students weigh in, after the jump.

A commenter recently noted that “[t]he LEWW posts are marked with a logo to make it easy to avoid them.” Ouch! In fairness, we note that the same commenter also called us “one [of] the best, funniest, most well-written features on ATL” (thanks!). Whether the sight of the LEWW logo makes your heart sing or sink, the please note that the logo has changed to something a bit more festive.

In other business, we certainly made the right call when we decided to include an extra couple in May’s Couple of the Month poll! The “write-in” candidates were your favorites by far, running away with over 60 percent of the vote.

Congratulations to Noraan Sadik and Stephen Haskins, ATL’s Legal-Eagle Couple of the Month for May 2008!

We caught up on our wedding-watching backlog this weekend, so stay tuned, LEWW lovers. There’s more coming this week, and it includes some of our readers’ favorite acronyms.

Cheers!

Back in February, we wrote about more students at Stanford Law School taking classes on a pass-fail basis. This development fed into a discussion about possible changes to SLS’s grading system, which would replace its fairly standard grading system with a more bare-bones one (like that of Yale Law School, similar to Stanford in the size of its student body, as well as its overall ranking).

When we spoke at Stanford in March, most of the students we met seemed to support grade reform. They will be pleased by this news: the Stanford law faculty has approved the broad outlines of a reform proposal. From an email just sent out by Dean Larry Kramer:

From: Larry D Kramer
Date: Thu, May 29, 2008 at 11:27 AM
Subject: Grade Reform

Dear All:

Yesterday afternoon, the faculty voted to adopt a grade reform proposal which will change our grading system to an honors, pass, restricted credit, no credit system for all semesters/quarters. The new system includes a shared norm for the proportion of honors to be awarded in both exam and paper courses. No grading system is perfect, but the consensus is that the reform will have significant pedagogical benefits, including that it encourages greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom and in designing metrics for evaluating student work.

As you may know, we spent all year studying the issue and discussing the likely advantages for recruiting students, placing our graduates in practice and clerkships, reducing the disparity between on-mean and off-mean courses, and, above all, enhancing the intellectual environment of the law school. I am extremely grateful for the student input we received, not only from the student liaison committee but from countless others who wrote emails, met with faculty, and spoke with me directly. We benefited immensely from your contributions.

Yesterday, the faculty agreed only on the basic proposal. We have not yet voted on the timing of our transition to the new system or a number of other details. For now, then, the decision does not and should not affect your course planning or anything else. We are working to settle the transition questions as quickly as possible and will inform you as soon as they have been resolved.

Best,
Larry

If any of you are thinking of filing a transfer application with Stanford, this may be of interest to you. But note that the details, including timing of implementation, have yet to be determined.

Additional discussion, plus a reader poll, below the fold.

For LEWW, one of the best things about spring is the return of a reliable stream of lawyer-lawyer couples to the NYT wedding pages. Soon we’ll even be seeing SCOTUS clerks! This week five out of our six newlyweds sports a JD. Here they are:

1.) Michelle Lieberman and Daniel Lubetzky

2.) Michelle Davidowitz and Jed Schwartz

3.) Jessica Zeldin and Johnston Whitman Jr.

More about our finalists, after the jump.

Relax, folks. We are aware that the 2009 law school rankings of U.S. News & World Report have leaked, in advance of their official Friday publication date. They’re all over the blogosphere and the message boards (links collected below).

We’ve been sitting on this item for a little while — coordinating with our other posts this morning, taking into account our traffic patterns, etc. There is a method to our madness.

Ideally we’d hold this item even longer (which would allow us to do a more detailed write-up). But it’s clear that you’re all dying to talk about the rankings RIGHT NOW. And we don’t want to get any more emails and comments of the “why aren’t you writing about U.S. News” variety.

So here you go. Rankings and discussion, after the jump (i.e., click on the “Continue reading” link below).

Most law students are well into the spring semester of law school. First- and second-year students will soon have to pick their courses for fall 2008.

Here’s a subject that may be on some of their minds: pass / fail grading. Check out this interesting article in the Stanford Daily (from last month; we came across it belatedly, while going through our 4,000-email backlog over the weekend):

In a departure from tradition, record numbers of first-year law students chose to take at least one of their first semester courses pass-fail this year.

Law students have traditionally found themselves in a bind when choosing to “3k,” the common term for pass-fail grading. Students interviewed independently described the situation repeatedly as a “prisoner’s dilemma,” referencing the archetypal problem of decisions made with imperfect information.

Choosing to be graded pass-fail, whatever one’s personal reasons, could cause problems if the student is one of only a handful of students to do so in the law school class. However, last semester somewhere between one-third and one-half of first-year students elected to take a class pass-fail, a fact which affects the way the action is perceived by others.

There was this whole issue before where employers might say it’s an oddity,” said first-year law student Chris Wells. “[From orientation onwards] a lot of us wanted to make it a real option at the law school.”

The SLS students were spurred to action by one of their peers:

First-year law student John Kimble drafted an open letter about the 3k decision and sent it to the first-year student email list on the last day students could choose their grading basis. Seeing the letter and the excitement it generated emboldened students to take the pass-fail option and also gave the student body an indication of the movement’s support.

So, ATL readers, what do you think? Is taking more courses on a pass-fail basis a smart move, or is it ill-advised? What types of courses lend themselves best to being taken pass-fail? For those of you involved in hiring — of law firm associates, law clerks, AUSAs, etc. — do you askance at transcripts with lots of pass-fail classes?

And will this trend spread to other law schools? Or is it a luxury available only to students at places like small and selective Stanford, where even academic underperformers can still land good jobs?

P.S. Stanford Law School students seem to be in the vanguard these days when it comes to taking a stand against some of the more stressful or unpleasant aspects of the legal profession. The school is also the home of Building A Better Legal Profession, a group of law students pushing to reform Biglaw. For their mission statement, click here.

First-years go pass-fail [Stanford Daily]
building a better legal profession [official website]