I’ve been going through comments looking for a Comment of the Week, and I’ve got to say that the entries were not strong.
Part of that has been the news cycle: there have been a lot of posts about rape and child porn this week. Predictably, the comments have been filled with largely inappropriate comments about porn and inaccurate comments about rape (seriously commenters, I hope some of you are trolling, otherwise a bunch of you are just date rapists trying to justify ridiculous behavior).
Instead of going with some obvious Todd Akin riff, I’m going with a comment that was largely overlooked, on a story that many of you missed. But I think once I play one of the greatest clips in movie history, you’ll all understand….
Comment of the Week was real goddamn easy this week.
You see, I’m the guy who thinks law schools are trolling all of you. I don’t actually think most law school administrators could possibly believe all of the things they say to their students. It’s a joke. It’s one big joke, and the only people who aren’t in on it are prospective law students.
The person who comes onto Above the Law and says, “the car is spelled LEXUS, not Lexis,” is exactly the same person who comes on and says, “I’m going to law school on the cheap because I received a LOAN through financial aid.”
We live in a world of trolls, so we might as well give a T-shirt to one of the most successful ones….
It’s been quite an explicit week here at ATL. We’ve covered BJs, strip clubs, and oh yeah, more BJs (of the metaphorical if not literal type). Ample opportunity for snark, clearly. But I have to say, some of the best comments came from our old standby: law school drama. Our commenters know that sometimes it pays to stick to what you know.
For pure yuks, I’m a fan of Concerned Pastafarian’s comment on the story about the Jesuit law school which, in the words of one of our Twitter followers, is in the middle of a nervous breakdown:
“The tuition is too damn high!”
- Dean Mystal
That comment, a shout-out to Jimmy McMillan, is almost like a haiku. It’s brief and balanced, yet it still creates a clear, awesome picture in the mind.
But sorry Pastaman, your airborne spaghetti deity doesn’t have your back today. Like many other Americans, I can’t turn away from the ongoing trainwreck that is D-list reality TV stars and all the ways “normal,” “dignified” Americans make fun of them online….
Maybe our readers were inspired by feats of athletic greatness in London, because people brought their A-game to the comments this week. The breastfeeding thread alone was hilarious. If Comment of the Week were an objective sport, like swimming, this comment probably would have won:
David, having the biggest breasts doesn’t make Elie the best qualified ATL staffer to write this story. Please assign such stories to one of the women staffers next time, either Staci or Danzig. Thanks!
But Comment of the Week is subjective, like gymnastics, so suck on my moobs, “Guestnoxious.” Mwahaha. I hope the ATL T-shirt was your last option for comfortable cotton clothing and you now have to wear a polyester blend for the rest of the summer.
Same goes to you, Mr. Paw, with your decision to insult esteemed columnist Brian Tannebaum in a thread that should have been devoted to insulting Cooley Law:
I was inspired to go to law school by Joe Pesci in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I’ve since carved out a niche practice suing children who’ve injured criminals with elaborate booby traps.
Yeah, instead of these (admittedly funny) slams on the prestigious and classy ATL writing team, I’m going with comments from the post where the Florida State kid allegedly got shot by a classmate. Since he survived it’s okay to joke about it, right?
Let the record show that a person running for President of the United States has spent a week willfully misrepresenting the statement of the incumbent president.
The “you didn’t build that” comment has been grossly taken out of context. Everybody agrees that it’s been grossly taken out of context. And yet some people keep taking it out of context to advance a point that the president believes something that he never said. I’m honestly stunned that in the so-called greatest democracy in the world, we can’t even debate things that people have actually said.
But since that’s what people are talking about, we might as well meme it up. Our Comment of the Week does just that….
Wouldn’t it be better if law schools behaved more like college football programs? I think it’d be pretty awesome. Hear me out:
Elite law candidates would be recruited by the accredited law schools. Most students would get scholarships to attend law school, instead of loans.
Weaker candidates could still “walk-on” and pay full price, but they’d know their chances of making it into Biglaw were low.
Two words: Biglaw Draft. “With the first pick Wachtell Lipton selects Yang Patel Shapiro — Berkeley Law. Elie Kiper Jr. reports that this is a huge blow to to Cravath who was hoping the Chinese Jewish student with the Indian mother who clerked for Scalia and Breyer would fall to them at #2.”
And that’s just the tip of the awesomeness iceberg.
Yes, that entire little fantasy was inspired by one, seven-word comment this week…
This week, we had many wonderful comments to choose from, simply due to the high number of entertaining stories we’ve written about. But perhaps the most entertaining of all was a story about the daughter of a legendary football coach allegedly getting into a battle royale with one of her former sorority sisters. Because when Kristen Saban dots the “i” in her name with a heart, she does it in blood.
After all, everyone knows that joining a sorority is like taking a pledge of evil — it only takes a little bit of alcohol for all of the demons to escape (and various articles of clothing to come off, but that’s neither here nor there; Google it if you like).
How the hell are we supposed to pick our Comment of the Week when there was a holiday smack dab in the middle of the week? I mean, really, people are still nursing their Fourth of July hangovers, which made this week’s pickings a little slim.
Luckily for us, Katie Holmes fell prey to the Curse of 33, and “blindsighted” “blindsided” Tom Cruise with divorce papers, just in time for his 50th birthday. You’ve got to feel a little bad for the guy — his marriages all die quicker than Goose.
So this week, we picked the winner from the TomKat divorce post. Hold on to your thetans, folks, because we’re about to ride into the danger zone….
I assumed that the comment of the week this week would come from the news that Justice Roberts turned into Severus Snape and saved Obamacare.
There have been some hilarious things said about the Obamacare decision, and Buzzfeed captured the 25 funniest tweets. I even got off a couple of nice one liners. Popehat is running a whole competition for the most outrageous rage reaction from the Obamacare decision.
But the comments on Above the Law were kind of… tame. I mean, there was a lot of making fun of CNN and the usual number of people who are still butthurt that Obama is the president, but there wasn’t a lot of insight, and very little was funny. The comment with the most likes was BL1Y’s:
Why is Obama waging a war on poor people with this incredibly regressive tax?
That’s pretty good. But the general dearth of good comments in the thread made me look elsewhere for the Comment of the Week this week….
The Reema Bajaj story has been highly entertaining. The amount of lewd comments, jokes, and puns that can be made about a lawyers and prostitution is endless. I mean, lawyers are kind of like prostitutes in the best of times.
Here, during the worst of times, it sure feels like the difference between servicing a client for $100 and being a prostitute is nil.
And if there is something that a lawyer is doing to make money, you know her law school will try to take credit in some way…
A college graduate without student loan debt is akin to reading a kind quote about Kim Kardashian in a tabloid—it’s rare.
In the past eight years, student loan debt has nearly tripled to a whopping $1.1 trillion, and in the past 10 years, the percentage of 25-year-olds with such debt has risen from 25% to 43%
It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that New York Fed economists warned last month that the burden of student debt could stilt consumer spending by twentysomethings, as well as further hamper the recovery of the housing market and economy.
To get a better idea of what massive student loan debt (we’re talking over $100,000 massive) looks like, we talked to an attorney who graduated with a large student loan debt. We also consulted LearnVest Planning Services CFP® Katie Brewer to see just how their repayment plans stack up.
S. Fischer, 36, Attorney Graduated: 2001
How Much I Borrowed: $100,000
What I Still Owe: $45,000
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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Comment of the Week was real goddamn easy this week. 
Comment of the Week: Let’s Talk About the Birds and the… No, NOT THE BEES
By Elie MystalPart of that has been the news cycle: there have been a lot of posts about rape and child porn this week. Predictably, the comments have been filled with largely inappropriate comments about porn and inaccurate comments about rape (seriously commenters, I hope some of you are trolling, otherwise a bunch of you are just date rapists trying to justify ridiculous behavior).
Instead of going with some obvious Todd Akin riff, I’m going with a comment that was largely overlooked, on a story that many of you missed. But I think once I play one of the greatest clips in movie history, you’ll all understand….
Tags: Animal Law, Animals, Bees, Comment of the Day, Comment of the Week, Law Schools, Nicolas Cage, UVA Law, Wicker Man