The dean of the University of Texas Law School, Lawrence Sager, decided to weigh in on the mess created by three of his 1L students. He kind of had to. For over a week, the legal world has been questioning the worth of a UT Law degree.
But Sager is a man with a marvelous wit, so you just knew that when he decided to light up the 1Ls pissing on his school’s reputation, it was going to be good. Sager penned his response in the Daily Texan:

I am writing in response to the opinion piece written by three students which appeared in The Daily Texan on March 4 under the title, “Law students need a practical education.”

A little more than halfway through their first year of law school, the authors of this call for practicality have not yet confronted the law school’s extraordinary array of courses, ranging from Admiralty Law to Wind Power Law.

Ouch — laying down the black-letter smackdown. Dean Sager’s going to blow these 1Ls out of the water….

Continue reading “University of Texas Law School: Looking for a Few Good Human Beings”

The reaction to three Texas 1Ls slamming the University of Texas Law School came in fast — so fast, in fact, that the Texas administration was on the defensive even before we published our post yesterday.
Over at Legal Writing Prof Blog, Professor Wayne Schiess, Director of the UT legal writing program, responded to the students’ criticism:

It is true that the University of Texas School of Law has a first-year legal-writing curriculum without brief writing. When the law school administration removed credits from the required course five years ago, brief writing was lost. Needless to say, the legal-writing faculty thought it was a mistake. So we’ve been teaching a brief-writing elective that only some 1Ls can get into. We’re optimistic that brief writing will return to the required first-year curriculum. Indeed, a proposal to do that comes before the faculty this week.

Wow, who knew that students and some faculty took the legal writing class so seriously? I thought that professional legal writing involved completely ignoring your legal writing course when a partner tells you to.
But legal writing isn’t the only problem the UT law faculty will try to address….

Continue reading “UT Law Fallout: Professors, Students Scramble”

Everything is bigger in Texas — even the law student explosions. A tipster gives us the lowdown on some super-sized bitching, spearheaded by three UT Law students:

It seems that three 1Ls took it upon themselves to lambaste our curriculum, our professors, the “Institution” of law school, etc. due to what they perceive as a lack of practical education. That would be pretty un-newsworthy had they not published their cavalcade in The Daily Texan.

I love it when law school communities air their dirty laundry in the press. There’s something so, je ne sais quoi, mais je sais que c’est merde, about it. Here’s the lede for the item from The Daily Texan:

The University of Texas School of Law was recently embarrassed in legal-industry news by a story claiming a law professor delayed releasing his class’s grades by two months — so long that employers had to tell a student they had filled all of their summer internship vacancies while he was waiting for this grade.
The incident is a symptom of a deeper problem at UT Law that has drawn criticism from all corners of the legal industry: Lax institutional standards have marginalized the law school’s role in society of preparing its students to be competent, ethical lawyers.

It looks like the UT 1Ls noticed our little story on grade delays last month.
But that’s just the teaser. Hey, UT – Law students, tell us what you really think …

Continue reading “University of Texas Law Students Warn Employers to Stay Away from UT”