Justice Elena Kagan
Sounds like a dumb law.
– Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, commenting during her confirmation hearings on Senator Tom Coburn’s attempt to compare the Affordable Care Act to a hypothetical law requiring consumption of fruits and vegetables.
(Senator Coburn wondered if such a law would violate the Commerce Clause. In response, Kagan noted that “whether it’s a dumb law is different from … the question of whether it’s constitutional.”)
Law schools have faced an incredible amount of public scrutiny this year. Three law schools — Thomas Jefferson, Cooley Law, and New York Law School — are facing lawsuits over their allegedly deceptive employment statistics. Fifteen more lawsuits of the same variety may be filed soon. Three senators have demanded action from the American Bar Association, but the response has been lacking.
And in the face of all of this public ridicule, the ABA’s Section of Legal Education declined to ask questions pertaining to employment in legal jobs in its 2011 questionnaire. Apparently the powers that be at the ABA have adopted a honey badger policy with regard to questions of post-graduate employment data (i.e., don’t care; don’t give a sh*t).
So, what’s the next step in this process? Is there a Senate hearing in the works?
Continue reading “Is a Senate Hearing on the Way for Law School Transparency?”
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), come on down! Okay, I’m sure Senator Coburn wouldn’t put it this way, but you can count him as the latest Senate member who has joined the fight for something that the Occupy Wall Street people should really care about. He wants there to be more transparency when it comes to American law schools.
First, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) led the charge to try to get law schools to engage in some basic honesty when telling prospective students about the value of a law degree. Then Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) added his voice. That was important, as Grassley is the Republican leader on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And now Coburn, another Republican on the Judiciary Committee, is joining in.
Democrats, Republicans, men, women, when will the ABA figure out that there will be broad support for law schools that are required to tell the truth about their graduate outcomes?
Continue reading “Another Senator Wants to Hop on the Occupy the ABA Bandwagon”
Why your 3,500 sq ft wife shouldn't be driving a Lexis.
* Maybe we need law school law firms in the first place because law school professors — the ones who drill law into our heads for 3 years — are “incapable of practicing law.” [Adjunct Law Prof Blog]
* “Boss, I’m stuck in traffic. No, I’m literally stuck.” Driving your car into wet concrete is a pretty great way to perpetuate the stereotype that women can’t drive. Thanks for that. [Daily Mail]
* Star Wars Old Republic ships in November, so clients better get used to the old, “I’m too busy playing video games to attend to your matter” automated message. [Legal Profession Blog]
* If you’re Asian American and you want to be a lawyer, according to Lat it would be a good idea to have some social skills (not just study skills). [Northwest Asian Weekly]
* If you’re still thinking of taking the LSAT in October, get a leg up on the competition by getting inside the mind of one of the nerds who helped write questions for the test. [LSAT Blog]
* Proofreading is probably something that we here at Above the Law could stand to actually do every once in a while. [What About Clients?]
* Apparently, Tom Coburn forgot about the “tremendous advantage” he received from rich daddy Coburn of the “O.W. Coburn School of Law” Coburns. [Gawker]
* Alabama, I think you might be doing it wrong. Men aren’t supposed to get hosed at abortion clinics. [Constitutional Daily]
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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:
• 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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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