As we all know, law schools are eager to sell you naming rights if you give them money. Bad schools are willing to sell out, good schools are willing to sell out. Harvard Law School sold the naming rights to their freaking bathrooms.
Usually, these sales are made by deans at country clubs or wherever, with handshakes and checkbooks.
But one law school has put out a chart so that interested alumni can buy naming rights to things like they’re shopping at Wal-Mart.
Why not? It’s better than raising tuition. How much do you think it should cost to name a law school dining room?
Ed. note: Your Above the Law editors are busy celebrating their freedom today (and we hope that you are, too). We will return to our regular publication schedule on Thursday, July 5.
* At this point, the Supreme Court’s dramatic deliberations on the Affordable Care Act are like a leaking sieve. Now we’ve got dueling narratives on Chief Justice Roberts’s behind-the-scenes flip-flopping. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Life, liberty, and the pursuit of fabulosity! The Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to grant cert on two DOMA cases, contending that Section 3 of the statute is unconstitutional. [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* A famous fabulist: according to California’s State Bar, disgraced journalist Stephen Glass is a “pervasive and documented liar,” but that’s not stopping him from trying to get his license to practice law. [Los Angeles Times]
* Clayton Osbon, the JetBlue pilot who had an epic mid-flight nutty and started ranting about religion and terrorists, was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a federal judge during a bench trial. [New York Post]
* After a month of bizarre legal filings, Charles Carreon has dropped his lawsuit against Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal. We’re hoping that there will be an awesome victory cartoon drawn up soon. [Digital Life / Today]
* Northwestern Law is the only American law school to have joined a 17-member global justice league geared toward legal teaching and research collaborations. But do they get cool costumes? [National Law Journal]
* UNC Law received two charitable gifts totaling $2.7M that will be used to fund tuition scholarships for current and future students. Maybe their students won’t have to create tuition donation sites anymore. [Herald-Sun]
* This law is for the birds (literally and figuratively). California’s ban on the sale of foie gras had only been in effect for one day before the first lawsuit was filed to overturn it as unconstitutional. [San Francisco Chronicle]
* The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Department of Commerce recently announced that mermaids do not exist. Not to worry — it’s still legal to believe that Ariel is a babe. [New York Daily News]
We recently wrote about world-renowned d-bag Tucker Max, and his attempt to donate $500,000 to Planned Parenthood of Texas. The organization’s executives snubbed their noses at Max’s half-million because they didn’t “feel it would be appropriate, given . . . [his] body of work.” This happened in August of 2011, but rejection hurts, even when you’re a hardcore bro. Max was unable to abort his frustration with the situation, and almost fittingly, he waited just about the length of a full-term pregnancy to reveal the dirty details of what went down.
But why did he wait so long to start spreading the news about this injustice? Wouldn’t the women of Texas have wanted to know about this sooner? Maybe it’s because he was scamming us all along….
When we last checked in with self-proclaimed a-hole and famed misogynist author Tucker Max, he was busy getting sued by his alma mater, Duke Law School, over some allegedly missing tuition money. Almost two years later, Max has decided to hang up his bro hat. Believe it or not, he’s retiring from his hard-partying lifestyle, and he claims that he’s attempting to become a mature adult.
With his choice to become a big boy came some big-boy problems, like how to alleviate his huge tax burdens and promote his new book at the same time. Eventually, Max decided to make a charitable donation to an organization he’s relied upon many times in the past (thanks to his former womanizing ways): Planned Parenthood. And wasn’t just any donation — this was a $500,000 donation meant for a women’s organization in Texas that desperately needed funding.
But Planned Parenthood didn’t want his money. Why? Because he’s Tucker Max….
Oh Hofstra Law, you didn’t think I’d forget about you, did you? The Pride? Home of the commenter formerly known as “Hofstra 2L” (may he rest in peace)? I’m a Long Island boy, don’t ya know.
Hofstra Law School will be renamed the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, according to the New York Law Journal. For those not ankle-deep in Hofstra friends, here’s the new slang you need to know. A tipster reports: “Hofstra Law School (aka the OTHER HLS) is now the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University (aka the MAD School of Law).”
Straight outta Strong Island.
But the MAD Pride isn’t the only law school to accept big dollars in exchange for naming rights. As this trend continues, you wonder if any of this money being thrown around will benefit the actual students….
As an undergraduate, I worked for the Harvard College Fund. I made calls to alumni of the college and many of the professional schools asking for money. Yes, scum salt-of-the-earth kind of work.
You learn a couple of things doing that job: don’t let women call people who graduated before 1960 and think that girls still belong at Radcliffe. Make sure your accent is “good for all time zones” (mine is). And most importantly, don’t call up graduates of HLS asking for money unless you can handle rejection well. HLS graduates are more likely to cry about their backbreaking work schedules than voluntarily fork over $20.
Granted, I’m not the best person to ask. I try to avoid giving HLS the money that I already owe them — I’m not about to dip into my pocket to give them anything extra. But I think most people would rather give money to their undergraduate institution than to their law school. College is an experience; law school is a trial.
And that was before the recession.
Now that we’re in a situation of salary deflation and job uncertainty, one imagines that law schools are only getting money from the cold dead hands of recent graduates.
Harvard Law School students recently received an email reminding them about the 2010 class gift. When I was there, such reminders were met with annoyance. But this year, students reacted with outright anger. Are Harvard kids alone on the “I’m not giving you a penny” island?
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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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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?
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As we all know, law schools are eager to sell you naming rights if you give them money. Bad schools are willing to sell out, good schools are willing to sell out. Harvard Law School sold the naming rights to their freaking bathrooms. 
