Back in July, we wrote about Robert Bowman, whose application for admission to the New York bar was derailed by debt. A panel of five appellate judges concluded that, in the words of the New York Times, “his student loans were too big, and his efforts to repay them too meager, for him to be a lawyer.
Bowman sought reconsideration of the ruling. His effort was unsuccessful.
Details after the jump.
Continue reading “Update: Debt Still Disqualifying for New York Bar Applicant”
Ed. Note: This is actually a list on out-of-state enrollment at public universities. It’s not law school specific (as I had initially thought). I still think it’s interesting to look at which schools have more out of state pull, so I’m leaving it up.
We’ve been documenting the struggles at the University of California system as it tried to push through tuition hikes. I’ve argued that out-of-state students should think twice before crossing state lines to go to law school in California.
But it looks like they don’t need my advice. Tax Prof Blog reports:
U.S. News & World Report has published a ranking of the public universities in its 2010 ranking of the Best National Universities by the percentage of out-of-state students in the freshman class that entered in Fall 2008.
The list of public schools with less than ten percent out-of-state students is full of U.C. Schools.
After the jump, it’s time for a chart.
Continue reading “The State Schools That Make Out-of-State Students Stay Away”
Earlier today, we reported that protests over the proposed tuition hike at UCLA got a bit testy. But we also noted that the protests didn’t seem to include a lot of law students, even though their tuition is going through the roof as well. One friend had this apathetic response when asked about the protests:
Dude, I have finals. And my 2L grades matter because I’ll be doing 3L recruiting. Unless we’re protesting canceled summer programs, count me out.
We wanted to know how the law school generally was reacting to today’s festivities, so we reached out to the UCLA Student Bar Association President, Lenny Sandoval. We asked him why law student participation seemed lacking:
Being a third year with one foot out the door, it’s tough for me to give a totally representative view, but while I agree that the involvement of law students as a whole is a bit subdued, I think the reaction from the identity organizations and their leadership (Raza, BLSA, etc.) has been very supportive and vocal of the undergraduate led movements. Based on FB status updates and gChat blurbs I saw at least 6 or 7 people either returning from the protests or planning on going to the protests, so that’s something at least.
Sandoval also noted that law students need to be a little bit more careful when it comes to potentially getting arrested than college kids.
That’s certainly true, especially in this economy. There’s no sense having your tuition jacked up and hurting your chances at snagging a legal job.
But something other than fear and general apathy might be driving down law student participation in civil disobedience. We also spoke with UCLA Law professor Stephen Bainbridge and he notes that people at the law school might just be paying a little bit more attention to the general state of affairs with the U.C. system than your average college student.
Thoughts from Professor Bainbridge after the jump.
Continue reading “UCLA Protest Follow Up: On The Ground at UCLA Law”
A tipster just sent in this video from UCLA:
Berkeley students, take note. That is how you cause a ruckus.
The AP reports:
About 200 demonstrators are chanting and marching around a UCLA building where University of California regents are scheduled to vote on a 32 percent fee increase for next year.
Protesters from several UC campuses stayed overnight at a campus tent city to take part in a second day of demonstrations on Thursday.
UCLA spokesman Phil Hampton says 30 to 50 students also have staged a sit-in at an ethnic studies building and have chained shut the doors. They’re peaceful and are being allowed to stay.
Sadly, reports indicate that it is predominately college students that are involved in today’s shenanigans. Are all the law students already mentally beaten?
We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.
Get mad, but stay safe. Rubber bullets hurt like hell.
Protesters gather at UCLA to oppose UC fee hike [Associated Press]
UPDATE: UCLA student protest now in full swing [True/Slant]
Earlier: Berkeley Law Students, How Did the ‘Not Ironic’ Strike Go?
Yesterday, we told you that big tuition hikes could be coming to schools in the University of California system. But we didn’t know that Berkeley students had a plan to do something about it. They’re going out on strike! With university workers who want a raise! Or something!
Hey, it’s the Berkeley way. When they are pissed about something, they protest. It’s better than the Harvard way; when we’re pissed about something, we ask Daddy to fire somebody.
[Yale way = invite SCOTUS justice to speak about the issue, ask justice only clerkship application questions. UT way = shoot it. NYU way = wait to see how Columbia handles the problem. I could go on and on.]
The protest was scheduled for today. Those hardcore Berkeley students were even asking professors to reschedule classes so more people could participate in the strike.
(Wait for it)
Yes, you read that correctly. Students wanted to strike, but didn’t want to risk missing class.
After the jump, the Berkeley law blog, Nuts & Boalts explains the problems with this plan:
Continue reading “Berkeley Law Students, How Did the ‘Not Ironic’ Strike Go?”
Last month, we reported that UC Hastings College of Law was set to become the most expensive law school in California. Apparently, the good people at Berkeley and UC Davis took that as a challenge.
Tomorrow, November 18th there will be a meeting on the proposed budget for the California university system. The tuition numbers for law schools would be terrifying for prospective law students — if only they were able to exercise common sense.
First let’s look at the proposed tuition and fees for California residents at Berkeley and other California public law schools over the next three years:
Notice that these numbers are up from the proposal that was on the table just this past August. I can’t imagine what tuition will look like when we actually get to 2012 – 2013. By then they’ll be charging people in Euros and organ donations.
After the jump, we look at what these schools plan for non-resident students (hint, it’s obscene enough that I considered putting up NSFW warnings), and why UC administrators think students will accept the tuition hikes.
Continue reading “Law School Tuition Hikes Spread Like Wildfires in California”
We’ve had a lot of evidence that prospective law students have hatched a diabolical plan to flood the legal market with fresh talent. But this graph from Most Strongly Supported tells it all:
My Lord.
Right now, I’m like Oliver Platt at the end of 2012. Shut the damn door or we’re all gonna die.
Some other observations after the jump.
New Mexico law professor Erik Gerding started off an interesting discussion in the blogosphere with his post, Death of “Big Law School’?, on the Conglomerate.
Ashby Jones at the WSJ Law Blog and Larry Ribstein at Ideoblog have already weighed in.
Gerding’s central thesis is that problems with the Biglaw business model will have major effects on the law school business model:
It would likely mean the end of the law school boom – with its expanding law faculties and the bumper crop of new law schools. Like it or not, the business model (I hate applying that term to legal education, but can’t think of another one) of many law schools is heavily dependent on students getting high paying law firm jobs to pay off high law school tuition. Law firms are also prime benefactors of law school endowments. Without corporate law consuming law school graduates by the dozens, law school will face massive economic pressure.
You’d like to think that. But there is only one way to exert massive economic pressure on law schools, and it is not happening yet.
The American Bar Association has a plan to help out unemployed lawyers with their student loans. Seriously. An actual plan. The National Law Journal reports:
The ABA wants the government to let unemployed graduates convert private loans into federal ones. The change could allow them to defer repaying those loans for as long as three years.
The plan is so simple and helpful that I’m almost positive Congress will find a way to horribly mess it up. The ABA wants to let people borrow money from the government to pay off their private loans. Then unemployed lawyers can put their new federal loans into deferment for up to three years if they need to.
The effort is in its early stages — executives of the largest provider of private law school loans, Access Group Inc., weren’t even aware of it, according to spokeswoman Linda Smith.
“This is really intended to give them some breathing room,” said ABA President Carolyn Lamm.
The plan was proposed by the ABA’s recently formed Commission on the Impact of the Economic Crisis on the Profession and Legal Needs, which is examining how lawyers can confront the recession.
Of course, nobody knows precisely how the plan is going to work.
We have reported on the proposed merger of Southern New England School of Law with the University of Massachusetts, which would bring the first public law school to the state. At the time, I wrote:
I mean no offense by this, but isn’t the Southern New England School of Law not a very good law school? There’s a reason the school isn’t accredited, right? I just don’t see how raising the profile of bad law schools is the right way to go.
Apparently, Southern New England School of Law took offense. The Boston Globe reports:
“My students and faculty have been maligned,” the school’s dean, Robert Ward, said during a recent tour of campus, a 75,000-square-foot three-story building next to an outlet mall in North Dartmouth.
Ward acknowledged his school has a way to go to meet national accreditation standards, but said it is far from the crumbling, financially destitute failure critics portray it to be.
He noted a retired appeals court judge — a Harvard Law graduate, no less — among his 13-member faculty.
Putting aside the question of whether or not Southern New England is a good school, can we get back to the question of whether Massachusetts needs a public law school?
Continue reading “Southern New England School of Law Prepares to Fight”
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
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Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
Keep reading »
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