Colorado Law

The Most Important Part of Law School: Social Life Rankings!

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Wooooo, law school!

It’s about that time: law school tuition deposits are due in a few weeks, and the class of 2016 will soon be bilked out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for questionable promises of an improving entry-level job market. So obviously this is a great time for rolling out the latest set of dubious law school rankings.

You’ve seen the prized U.S. News rankings. You’ve seen the somewhat-ridiculous Princeton Review rankings. You’ve even seen the “What is this? I don’t even…” Cooley Law School rankings. But today, for your viewing pleasure, we present you with the GraduatePrograms.com rankings, because that’s apparently a thing now.

While GradPrograms ranked the top 25 student-rated law schools, as well as the best law schools for financial aid, we’ve decided to focus on one of the most important parts of the law school experience: your social life. Now let’s be perfectly clear, if these were colleges, they’d be called “party schools.” But because they’re law schools, there needs to be an air of highbrow prestige — hence these “social life” rankings.

Let’s find where you can go to law school and still party your face off….

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Quote of the Day: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

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Paul Campos

It’s a Ponzi scheme, in almost a literal sense. You’re taking money from current students and paying it to unemployed graduates.

– Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, commenting on a scheme that many law schools use to find work for otherwise unemployed recent graduates in the hopes of boosting their employment statistics.

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The Tenured Law Prof Turned ‘Scamblogger’ Reveals Himself

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The 'scamblogging' law professor has revealed himself.

Earlier this month, we wrote about an anonymous law professor — a tenured professor, at a top-tier school — essentially joining the ranks of the law school scambloggers. Writing over at a site entitled Inside the Law School Scam, under the pseudonym LawProf, the author offered a harsh indictment of legal education, purportedly from within the ivory tower.

I believed that the author was who he said he was, but others did not. Professor Ann Althouse, for example, opined that the blogger was a student, “uncharitably projecting thoughts onto [a] professor” (who talked about how little he, and his colleagues, prepared for teaching). Professor Althouse explained that she thought was student-written, “because it had some bad writing and simplistic thinking.”

Well, as it turns out, LawProf is an actual tenured law professor, at a top 50 law school. Who is he, and where does he teach?

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Law Schools Lie Like A Dog… Or A Rug. A Dog On A Rug.

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I graduated from Northwestern Law in 2009. It is now 2011, my loans are coming due (real due — not the fake, put ‘em in forebearance, due of yesteryear), and I am currently “employed” doing two things: reviewing documents at an embarrassing hourly wage on projects that start and stop without any sort of consistency, and writing “jokes” about the Microsoft Zune every weekday morning, every other week. To borrow from David Foster Wallace, this is water.

And so it is with a sick sort of pleasure that I read Professor Paul Campos’s very interesting piece on The New Republic website yesterday. Coupled with Elie’s post on the Biglaw bloodletting, the article tells me what I’ve wanted to know and, in fact, what I’ve been telling my mom for two years now. Namely, that MJ was right. I am not alone.

What is the true state of unemployment for law school graduates? Professor Campos has crunched some numbers….

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Morning Docket: 04.05.11

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Kaga, L., dissenting

* Did Malcolm Gladwell’s endorsement lead to an increase in Colorado Law applicants? Malcolm Gladwell, a man whose book Blink was described by Richard Posner as “written like a book intended for people who do not read books.” [Law Week Colorado]

* A litany of legal challenges faces the Obama administration now that they’ve backtracked on Khalid Sheikh and the boys. [msnbc.com]

* The Supremes ruled against Arizona taxpayers who claimed a tax credit for religious school donations was unconstitutional. Justice Kagan popped her dissent cherry on this one. [NPR]

* Connecticut looks to “add teeth” to a law that attempts to determine whether racial profiling exists in the state. Sorry, I don’t find anything funny about racism. Unless, of course, we’re talking about the basketball scene in Soul Man. [Hartford Courant]

* Google has bid $900 million on a whole bunch of patents. Meanwhile, the patent to Google Wave is being peddled for two dollars and a box of envelopes. [Financial Times]

* “Police have nabbed the second prepubescent punk wanted for trying to rip off the religious headdress of a Muslim schoolgirl on Staten Island.” [New York Post]

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Colorado Law Employment Correction

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Colorado law logo.jpgLast week, we mentioned the disturbing employment statistics for the University of Colorado Law School. Colorado Law Week had reported that only 35% of the school’s students were employed upon graduation.

Apparently the publication got it wrong. After doing some digging, a Colorado Law professor explained how the mistake was made:

The news story got the stat backwards: as of May 2009 graduation, we had 35% unemployed, not 35% employed. Of course, even 35% unemployed is unfortunate, and much worse than CU law’s ordinarily strong employment figures: in the prior two years (i.e., pre-recession), we had just 11-17% unemployed upon graduation, and that figure dropped to only 3-6% unemployed 9 months after graduation, a stat that had made us proud. I don’t know other schools’ figures, but it’s very unfortunate the newspaper decided to single out CU based on an incorrect stat.

Well, that’s a big difference. Colorado’s accurate “employed upon graduation” statistic probably brings it in line with quite a number of state law schools.

The numbers are still far from ideal, and prospective law students should take note (and consider learning a marketable skill like plumbing). But at least students heading for the Rockies don’t have to be disproportionately concerned about their career prospects.

Earlier: A ‘Rocky Mountain High’ Jobless Rate

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A ‘Rocky Mountain High’ Jobless Rate

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Colorado law logo.jpgCORRECTION: It appears that the jobless rate reported below is INCORRECT. Please click here for the correct information.

I really hope that students at the University of Colorado Law School have enjoyed their time in Boulder. I hear it is beautiful country out there. But it’s no country for old law students who want a job. The ABA Journal reports on the terrible employment situation for Colorado law students:

The numbers are bleak for the class of 2009 at the University of Colorado School of Law.
About 35 percent of the students had jobs at graduation, down from 55 percent the year before, Law Week Colorado reports.

On a totally related note, Law Week Colorado has this interesting statistic from the July 2009 Colorado bar exam:

In 2009, more people passed the July Colorado bar exam than in any other year this decade. But the boom in the number of new lawyers is happening during a bust in the job market.

Future Colorado law students, please take note. There are no jobs for you. Do not apply. I repeat, “The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead. And the dead keep it. The way is shut.”

For those already in the pipeline, is there any hope?

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