Law Professors

Non-Sequiturs: 01.03.13

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* I didn’t make this list of the 25 most influential people in legal education. That pisses me off. I’m going to start writing about how people shouldn’t trust legal educators because law schools are only interested in profits and not the employment outcomes of their students. That’ll show ‘em! [Tax Prof Blog]

* … Of course, you know what else doesn’t make any list of influencing legal education? The truth. [Constitutional Daily]

* This has been a big day for our friends at Thomson Reuters and at LexisNexis. [3 Geeks and a Law Blog]

* Time Warner Cable is well within its rights to act like feckless cowards. [Huffington Post]

* I like watching the Feds try to roll rich people. I’ve got no horse in the race, I’m just there for the competition. [Dealbreaker]

* U.K. considers forcing fat people to lose weight in order to keep their benefits. I was going to make a “Britain, outsource, BBW” joke, which somehow led me to the Wikipedia page for BBW, a page that has really not at all what you’d expect the graphic on BBW to be. [Legal Blog Watch]

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Above the Law’s Top Ten Most Popular Posts of 2012

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It’s the last day of December, so it’s a good time to look back on the year that was. We’ll do what we’ve done for the past three years (wrap-up posts from 2009, 2010, and 2011 can be found here, here, and here) and identify the ten biggest stories of the past year as decided by you, our readers. With the help of Google Analytics, we’ve compiled a list of our top ten posts for 2012, based on traffic (as represented by pageviews).

By the way, for the third year in a row, the most popular category page on Above the Law was Law Schools. People have now been intensely focused on the declining value proposition of going to law school for as long as it takes to earn a Juris Doctor degree. Isn’t it time that we graduate from the current educational model?

The second and third most-popular categories on ATL in 2012 were Biglaw and Bonuses. Although this year brought us the largest law firm failure ever, nearly all other firms indiscriminately doled out offers to summer associates, and bonus season looked better for the first time in years. While the legal profession is still in transition, things are certainly looking up, and through the highs and the lows, we’ve been there to cover it all.

So what were the ten most popular individual posts at Above the Law in 2012? Let’s find out….

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Non-Sequiturs: 12.28.12

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Chris Christie, king of the prose-ticians.

* U.S. Attorneys are rising up, taking office, and conducting their business like hard-ass prosecutors. [Wall Street Journal]

* If only they had more guns at the police station, this might never have happened. [Fox News]

* Of course, out in Arizona, the state attorney general is pushing for an “armed posse” to patrol schools. Arizona: where bad ideas go to be fruitful and multiply. [NBC News]

* Would you give your kidney to your favorite law professor? I wouldn’t, but I would consider taking the kidney of my least favorite law professor and giving it to, well, pretty much anybody else. [Wake Forest School of Law]

* “Aereokiller” has been ordered to stop killing TV networks. [Film On]

* Wait, we still have “longshoremen”? For real, not just as the backdrop for a season of the Wire? [Miami Herald]

* Should law deans be “disbarred”? I like how people have to spend all this time just trying to figure out how to get law deans to tell the truth. [Tax Prof Blog]

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Quote of the Day: It’s the End of the World as Law Schools Know It…

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Paul Campos

There is a zealous faith in American culture that higher education always pays for itself, but it’s like the subprime mortgage scandal without securitization. When people realize it’s a worthless degree, the system is going to collapse.

– University of Colorado Law School Professor Paul Campos, author of the blog Inside the Law School Scam and the book Don’t Go To Law School (Unless) (affiliate link), commenting on the unsustainability of the current law school model.

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Non-Sequiturs: 12.14.12

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* Joe Patrice reposted this on his site and I’m linking to it because it’s a great look at the rhetorical weaknesses of the pro-gun argument. It’s old, so you can’t say that he’s being reactionary to the current tragedy. [Recess Appointment]

* Here’s a very good takedown of the self-serving law school rankings from Loyola Law School (LA) Professor Theodore Seto, who magically finds that Loyola Law is the 25th best law school for becoming a Biglaw partner. [Witnesseth]

* Is the procedural posture of same-sex marriage sexy? [Opinionator / New York Times]

* The jury system is dumb. [The Republican]

* And so is arguing over rate increases, according to Susan Hackett; it’s just a distraction from the real conversation that needs to take place about the appropriate pricing of legal services? [Legal Rebels / ABA Journal]

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NYU Law Comes to Reasonable Resolution After Latest Exam Screw-Up

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The only people who hate final exams as much as students are the professors who must eventually grade them. Some professors look at finals with open disdain. It takes them away from scholarship and they don’t even get the thrill of hearing themselves talk in a packed lecture hall.

Maybe it’s because so many professors hate giving exams that there seem to be so many screw-ups. Mistakes will happen, but often it doesn’t seem like schools have a clear plan of fixing mistakes in a way that is fair to all students.

NYU Law School has had its fair share of exam mishaps. It’s a long and embarrassing list.

But maybe NYU Law is finally starting to learn from past mishaps. Oh, the faculty still make mistakes when it comes time to administer exams, but this time the solution is that the professor is going to do extra work.

Then again, maybe it’s working extra hard after you’ve made an error that separates this famous NYU professor from the rabble….

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Law Profs Have Holiday Party In The Reading Room During Exam Period

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Party time?

It’s finals time already. For professors, that means another semester is in the books. Sure they still have to grade the exams, but that’s what stairs are for.

With their teaching duties done, the faculty at the University of Memphis School of Law decided to have a holiday party, with a band, in the reading room of the library while students were studying for finals.

Kind of brings new meaning to the term “tone deaf,” doesn’t it?

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Non-Sequiturs: 12.10.12

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* I’m not sure what it takes to be a top “Global Thinker,” but I’m sure these law professors are worthy. [Volokh Conspiracy]

* Good to see that I’m not the only one who gets crazy pitch letters from lawyers. [Popehat]

* If somehow this results in a Simpsons episode where the 11th Circuit rules on whether or not the family can have another Snowball, I’ll be happy. [Find Law]

* No joke, the “things you can’t do on a plane” series is probably my favorite thing in the blawgosphere right now. [Legal Blog Watch]

* Keith Magness, the lawyer accused of masturbating on the office furniture of girls in his firm, entered Alford pleas. But the pleas kind of stuck together. [Times-Picayune]

* But really, how is anybody going to get trial experience if everybody is entering pleas all the time? [Underdog]

* Could a benevolent monopolist fix legal education? Perhaps. But I’d vote for a malevolent blogger instead. [lawprofblog]

* This law student is worried about the tax implications of getting free donuts. He’d better be worried about letting me know that he can get donuts whenever he wants. (Yes, I make the jokes so you can’t hurt me, then go home to bacon-wrapped, fried steak wedges, which don’t judge). [Tax Prof Blog]

* I was on Geraldo at Large for about 30 seconds this weekend telling a gun range owner that guns should be regulated while standing in the middle of his gun store. I wore bright orange because, well, I didn’t want to get shot. [Geraldo at Large]

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Who Are the 25 Most Influential People in Legal Education?

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As we reach the end of the year, it’s time to step back and assess 2012 as it draws to a close. In the legal world, things have certainly changed from years past, but the one thing that remains constant is the focus on the state of our nation’s legal education. Something’s got to give, and while no one agrees exactly on what needs to change, many have influenced the way the discussion has developed with their insightful visions for the future.

At the end of the day, certain voices were more powerful than others. Whether through reducing class sizes or increasing the transparency of employment statistics, certain individuals have wrought substantial change in the way that law schools are currently operating — and have laid the groundwork for how law schools will be run in the future.

Whose words mattered most? Let’s take a look at this year’s most influential people in legal education….

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Inside Straight: The Coming Death Of Law Reviews

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Personally, I gave up on law reviews in the mid-90s.

For a while after I graduated from law school, I flipped through the tables of contents of the highest profile law reviews, to see what the scholars were saying and to read things that were relevant to my practice. But by the mid-90s, I gave up: There was no chance of finding anything relevant, so the game was no longer worth the candle.

(When I took up blogging about pharmaceutical product liability cases, I began rooting around for law review articles in that field, which could generate the fodder for blog posts for which I was always desperate. Even then, the law reviews rarely offered much that practitioners would care about.)

None of that convinced me that the law reviews were dead, however, because I figured that the academics were at least still relying on the law reviews to screen and distribute each other’s work. But I had dinner recently with an old law school classmate who’s now (1) a prominent scholar in his or her field and (2) a member of the hiring committee at his or her law school. A short conversation with this guy (or gal) convinced me that law reviews are not long for this world. . . .

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