Some liberals view Professor John Yoo as a sadist. They cite Professor Yoo’s involvement in the so-called “torture memos” during his time as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
But I think Professor Yoo is a masochist. Only a masochist would try to develop a citation-based system for ranking the relevance of law professors.
Relevant law professors? Yes, they exist!
Let’s learn about Professor Yoo’s ranking system and see who comes out on top. An added bonus: he also has a list of the top 50 most efficient law professors. Yes, law professors are efficient too!
* In response to our contest for the best law firm offices, Vivia Chen proposes a contest for the shabbiest law firm offices — and gets the ball rolling with one nominee. (Hint: CHECK YOU hallways.) [The Careerist]
* And Professor Josh Blackman has some ideas about the identity of the conservative professor discussed in the controversial emails. [Josh Blackman's Blog]
* Villanova hired ESPN’s Andrew Brandt to be the director of the school’s Center for Sports Law. Students would probably be more excited if this meant ESPN was interested in hiring them. [SB Nation Philly]
* Sumner Redstone of Viacom just donated $18 million to Boston University Law. Quick, Boston College, hurry up and find an old rich guy to make a multi-million dollar donation to your school! [Hollywood Reporter]
* Reality TV hottie Reichen Lehmkuhl, perhaps better known for being Lance Bass’s ex-boyfriend, reports that he’s going to law school. He should be required to attend class without his shirt on. [Instinct Magazine]
Grind up some brilliant legal theories, spice liberally with Bluebook-compliant citations, and voilà — law review articles!
Have you ever wondered how the law review sausage factory works? Perhaps you’re a law professor or practitioner who regularly submits pieces to law journals for possible publication. If you are, and if you’d like to know more about how the process works — or, more to the point, what law review editors say about you behind your back — you’ve come to the right place.
Thanks to the wonders of technology, collaborating with far-flung colleagues has never been easier. Here at Above the Law, for example, your four full-time editors — myself, Elie, Staci, and Chris — keep in touch throughout the day using Gchat.
But what if, due to inadequate security, your organization’s internal deliberations were accessible to the public? And, in some cases, even crawled by search engines?
What if you were, say, law students at a highly ranked law school, where you served as editors of a high-profile law review? And what if your, er, candid and colorful comments about the articles pending before you were to become publicly available?
* When thinking of the Penn State situation (the alleged cover-up, not Jerry Sandusky’s crimes), I am reminded of how critically important due process is to the proper administration of justice. You really notice due process when it’s gone. [The Volokh Conspiracy]
* I haven’t eaten at Chick-fil-A since college. No homo. [Fox News]
* It’s funny to think of law professors getting their pieces rejected by law reviews. Funny insofar as there are people who actually care about what ends up in a law review. [lawprofblog]
* I’m not inclined to believe things coming out of Nigeria, but if this is true, it’s crazy. [Gawker]
* The bright side of losing your job because of the LIBOR scandal. [Dealbreaker]
* Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California Irvine School of Law, thinks that you can’t cut faculty salaries enough to achieve substantial reductions in tuition without losing your top faculty. But in this market, I bet a law school that said, “We hire only cheap professors and pass the savings on to you,” would have a lot of appeal. [National Law Journal]
How a person handles a semi-serious discussion of the zombie apocalypse can be an important indicator of a person’s sense of humor and general pleasantness to be around.
At my old apartment in Oakland, my friends and I would often discuss barricading the front door, disabling the elevator, transforming old liquor into Molotov cocktails to hurl off the balcony, how best to make use of the convenience store across the street… some actual thought went into our analysis. (We also lived in Oakland, so there’s that.)
But it’s not just weirdos like me who enjoy this stuff — turns out law professors do, too. Last week, we read about a law prof analyzing Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” And today, we take a look at one legal academic’s investigation into the crazy problems the U.S. government must manage once it is forced to maintain revenues in the face of the rise of the undead….
If you sent a document to the Engineers in Prometheus in .docx, they would say, 'Kill the one who expects us to convert.'
When most people call lawyers “paper pushers,” they mean it in a pejorative way. But pushing paper around correctly, in an organized and detail-oriented fashion, is a big part of a lawyer’s job. Some might say it’s the most important part of the job. The best lawyers have an attention to detail that can only be matched by research scientists and portrait artists.
If you can’t bring that maddening, borderline obsessive-compulsiveness to the little things, you might not be able to do things like become an awesome Supreme Court clerk — or even make it onto your school’s law review. That’s okay; you still might have other talents. But good lawyers can follow instructions (or afford secretaries who can follow instructions).
It’s an important lesson that three kids who got booted from their school’s law review competition just learned the hard way…
* Dewey know how deep in the red D&L’s international operations were? Enough to make you shout bloody hell and sacré bleu: the U.K. and Paris offices had liabilities of at least $175M. [Financial Times (reg. req.)]
* “To the extent that we the estate have claims, we would like to settle those claims sooner rather than later.” The joke’s on you if you thought you’d be able to keep your Dewey defector money. [Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)]
* According to the allegations in former Cravath associate Ellen Pao’s sex discrimination suit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, the “Mad Men” culture seems to be alive and well in Silicon Valley. [New York Times]
* Who will be the first to puff, puff, pass the vote — Obama or Romney? It looks like the path to the White House in Election 2012 might depend upon the legalization of marijuana in key states like Colorado. [Reuters]
* Apparently you can’t take the “duh” out of “Flori-duh” when it comes to voting laws without a fight in the courts. A federal judge has blocked portions of the Sunshine State’s “onerous” voter registration law. [Bloomberg]
* “People want to go to our school, and why should we say no?” Because they can’t get jobs? Northwestern Law is considering shrinking its class sizes; John Marshall Law, not so much. [Crain's Chicago Business]
* Stop crying about coming in second in the U.S. News rankings, Harvard, because you can still brag about beating Yale in having the most-cited law review articles of all time… for now. [National Law Journal (reg. req.)]
* Gloria Allred is representing one of the Miami “zombie’s” girlfriends for reasons unknown. Maybe the zombie apocalypse is truly upon is and she saw an opportunity to stand up for undead women’s rights. [CBS Miami]
As a law student, having an article accepted for publication in a law review or journal is usually a great way to ensure that your résumé lands on the top of the enormous stack of papers on the hiring partner’s desk. Having a degree from Harvard Law School is an even better way to do the same thing. But the ultimate claim to success is having both of these things. You’ll get the Biglaw job that you’ve always dreamed of, and a six-figure paycheck to pay off your matching six-figure debt.
Unless you’ve been accused of plagiarism. Then you can kiss all of your dreams goodbye, and say hello to the unemployment line. This is what one recent Harvard Law graduate claims happened to her in a lawsuit against her Ivy league alma mater….
Majority opinions are hardly sitting ducks for the criticism dissentals may heap on them. If a panel majority finds that a dissental scores some valid points, it can modify its opinion to eliminate the problem, something that happens regularly in the Ninth Circuit. Indeed, fear that internal criticisms will be taken public often causes judges to moderate outlier opinions so as to present a smaller target for public criticism and possible certiorari. One of us (yes, the hot one) is even aware of a case where the panel withdrew its opinion and reversed the result, after winning the en banc vote, in the teeth of a stinging dissental.
* One of ATL’s favorite celebrities — Yale Law School grad Yul Kwon, the first Asian-American winner of Survivor (as well as a former Second Circuit clerk and McKinsey consultant) — is returning to television, hosting a new show.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
The proper hair styling product might just be the only thing standing between you and your dream job. And the best way to find what works for you is to try the best stuff on the market. Join Birchbox Man for $20 a month and you’ll get customized shipments of the best grooming and lifestyle gear on the market every month—everything from haircare and shaving supplies to style accessories and tech gadgets.
As the leading discovery commerce platform, Birchbox is redefining the retail process by offering consumers a unique and personalized way to discover, learn about, and shop the best grooming and lifestyle products out there. It’s a full 360-degree process: try, learn, buy. Once you sign up and fill out your profile, head over to Birchbox Man’s online magazine to find article and video tutorials on how to get the most out your monthly box products. Pick up full-size versions of anything you like in the Birchbox Shop and earn points for every purchase.
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:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
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?
The traditional job application and interview process can be impersonal, and applicants often struggle to present themselves as more than just the sum of their GPAs, alma maters, and previous work history. ATL has partnered with ViewYou to help job seekers overcome this challenge. ViewYou NOW Profiles offer a unique way for job seekers to make a personal, memorable connection with prospective employers: introduction videos. These videos allow job candidates to display their personalities, interpersonal skills, and professional interests, creating an eDossier to brand themselves to potential employers all over the world. Check it out today!
