Your best lawyers are ALWAYS… at Fry’s!
I’m working in a Fry’s
UT Career Services will find some way to call this full-time legal employment.
– an only semi-sarcastic Facebook message from an anonymous, recent University of Texas Law grad.
University of Texas School of Law
This Gun Is Your Gun, This Gun Is My Gun: A 2L’s Quest To Make Printable Firearms
By Christopher DanzigBuild-a-gun!
This is absurd. Over the past month, the United States hasn’t been able to go a full week without a devastating public shooting — but we still have stuff like this rising from the collective woodwork.
Meet Cody Wilson, a University of Texas Law student and founder of Wiki Weapon, a new venture aiming to merge the growing popularity of 3D printers, the internet age, and deadly weaponry.
Step right up, get your cheap, do-it-yourself gun right here. And while you’re at it, why don’t you just shoot me in the face, too….
Continue reading “This Gun Is Your Gun, This Gun Is My Gun: A 2L’s Quest To Make Printable Firearms”
- Biglaw, Christopher Christie, Civil Rights, Department of Justice, Dewey & LeBoeuf, Health Care / Medicine, Insurance, Law Schools, Layoffs, Morning Docket, New Jersey, Politics, Staff Layoffs, University of Pennsylvania Law School, University of Texas School of Law
Morning Docket: 05.11.12
By Staci ZaretskyHow... do you keep changing your race?
* Dewey seriously have one chairman again? Good Lord, this law firm is literally falling apart! Martin Bienenstock had “no plans to file bankruptcy” because he knew he was taking the first life raft off this sinking ship. [WSJ Law Blog]
* When Dewey WARN people? When it’s already too late. In case you missed it last night, the firm was served with its first suit following its en-masse layoffs. The more the merrier, because it’s a class action. [Bloomberg; WSJ Law Blog]
* Elizabeth Warren can’t decide whether she’s white or Native American. Apparently it depends on her geographic location, because she was white at UT Law, but a minority while at Penn Law. [Boston Globe]
* Racial profiling still ain’t easy, but Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio “will fight this to the bitter end.” The Department of Justice has filed a civil rights suit against the no-nonsense Sheriff and his department. [Associated Press]
* New Jersey Governor Chris Christie must be gearing up for his inevitable 2016 presidential run, because yesterday he vetoed an online insurance marketplace required by the Affordable Care Act. [New York Times]
* Syracuse Law recently broke ground on a $90M building that will serve as its new home. May political plagiarizers continue to grace the law school’s halls for years and years to come. [National Law Journal]
I wonder if the new UT dean is related to the Farnsworth on Contracts guy.
This past winter, faculty at the University of Texas were busy running their popular and successful law dean, Larry Sager, out of town. The rumors surrounding his ouster suggested that some faculty members were not too happy about Sager’s attempts to pay top dollar for certain professors. But bringing a little East Coast administration to Texas seemed to work out for UT.
We’ll see if there is more magic in that well, as Texas is about to transplant another Yankee to the Southwest….
Continue reading “Texas Hires Another Yankee To Run Its Law School”
- California, Georgetown Law School, Law Schools, Reader Polls, Texas, UCLA School of Law, University of Texas School of Law
The Decision: Georgetown v. Texas v. UCLA — An ATL Debate
By David Lat & Elie MystalLat here. Not long ago, Elie and I debated the merits of Harvard Law versus Yale Law, in response to a request for advice from a prospective law student lucky enough to be choosing between HLS and YLS. Then we opened up a reader poll, in which about 60 percent of you urged the 0L in question to go to Yale.
As we move deeper into spring, more aspiring law students will have to make up their minds about matriculation destinations. Today we’ll look at the case of a student who’s choosing between a trio of very fine schools: Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Texas School of Law, and UCLA School of Law.
Let’s hear him out, weigh the competing factors, and vote….
Continue reading “The Decision: Georgetown v. Texas v. UCLA — An ATL Debate”
Presumably, Tebow will continue to wear #15.
Much has been said about the baleful impact of the U.S. News hegemony over the law school rankings racket. Probably the most trivial of these effects has been the establishment — based on USN’s dubious methodology — of a static tier of 14 elite schools. And as “collective numerical names for elite groups” go, “T14” must be among the most inelegant and arbitrary-seeming. (By contrast, the exemplar of the genre must be “Sweet Sixteen / Elite Eight / Final Four.”)
As noted earlier this week, the composition, if not the precise order, of the T14 has been basically constant for more than a decade. All the “action” is at number 15, with UCLA, Texas, and Vanderbilt all claiming at least a piece of that spot since 2009.
So we asked you: which school should rightfully claim — and maintain — the 15th position? More than 1,100 of you responded. Quite a few felt that there simply is no other school worthy of inclusion in the top tier; the 14th position is simply where we have to draw the curtain between First Class and Coach, and that’s that. Many more respondents made a case for one of the three top contenders or a write-in candidate. (The three most common write-ins were, in descending order, USC, George Washington, and Washington University in St. Louis.)
After the jump, we’ll reveal the people’s choice for the 15th and final spot in legal academia’s most exclusive club, as well as arguments for and against each of the contenders….
- Columbia Law School, Law Schools, Northwestern University School of Law, Rankings, U.S. News, UCLA School of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, University of Texas School of Law, Vanderbilt
ATL Survey Update: Rearranging the T14 and Choosing a Permanent Number 15
By Brian DaltonLast week, we received our 4,000th response to the ATL School & Firm Insider Survey. (Please take it here, if you haven’t yet). Approximately half of our respondents are current law students, and in the wake of the U.S. News rankings release and the resultant hullabaloo, we thought it would be interesting to compare how the vaunted T14 stack up based on our own survey feedback.
The ATL survey asks students to rate their schools in five different categories:
- Quality of faculty and academic instruction;
- Practical / clinical training for the practice of law;
- Career counseling and job search help;
- Financial aid advising; and
- Social life.
After the jump, we’ll look at how the elite schools compare….
Continue reading “ATL Survey Update: Rearranging the T14 and Choosing a Permanent Number 15″
- Law School Deans, Law Schools, Rankings, U.S. News, UCLA School of Law, University of Texas School of Law
Early Reactions to the U.S. News Rankings: Deans and the Excuses They Make
By Elie MystalLet's see them talk their way out of this.
The U.S. News law school rankings are out, which means it’s open season on law school deans. Nothing puts a law school dean’s job in jeopardy like a fall in the law school rankings. Nothing. The law school deans can lie, dissemble, raise tuition to backbreaking levels, and still keep their jobs. But when law schools drop spots in the U.S. News rankings, law school deans start updating their résumés.
If you want proof, just look at how deans from schools that dropped are falling all over themselves to explain their results. The deans will say anything; their explanations don’t even have to make sense.
While deans from schools that dropped are trying to save themselves, deans from schools that went up in the rankings are crowing from the rooftops.
Let’s start with a school that we left out of our Most Honest Law School bracket that is now a rankings darling…
Continue reading “Early Reactions to the U.S. News Rankings: Deans and the Excuses They Make”
The Texas Law School is that way.
Everything is softer in Texas?
Occasionally we have an opportunity to look at how soft law school has become. Gone are the trials by fire immortalized in the book One L. Now it seems that law schools are taking their teaching cues from Harry Potter and Professor Dumbledore.
At the University of Texas School of Law, they’ve divided their classes into “societies” that compete against each other in games, wear special uniforms, have dedicated house mentors, and employ special Care Bears who hug people when they get back from the library. Okay, one of those things isn’t true.
Of course, the Texas millennials love it…
Continue reading “University of Texas Law School Tries To Become Hogwarts”
- Celebrities, Columbia Law School, Elena Kagan, Fabulosity, Law Professors, Law Schools, Pictures, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, University of Texas School of Law, Weddings
A Law School Love Story: Prominent Professor Marries Columbia 3L
By David Lat
Professor Philip Bobbitt
In 2008, we profiled celebrity law professor Philip Bobbitt. Professor Bobbitt has a breathtaking résumé, featuring degrees from Princeton (A.B.), Yale (J.D.), and Oxford (Ph.D.); distinguished government service, for both Democratic and Republican administrations; and numerous acclaimed books, including Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution (1982), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002), and Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-first Century (2008) (affiliate links). For a very thorough enumeration of his amazing accomplishments, read his excellent Wikipedia page.
Our profile drew heavily upon a New York Observer piece that dubbed him “the James Bond of Columbia Law School.” What did Professor Bobbitt do to earn that sobriquet?
“His mannerisms just kind of ooze a James Bondian kind of quality,” says Vishal Agraharkar, a former [Legal Methods] student and a teaching assistant for this year’s class. “Someone who acts like that in class and outside class we assumed must have just an incredible personal life. James Bond has a hell of a personal life, so he must as well.”
Well, it appears that Professor Bobbitt, 63, does have one heck of a personal life. Over the past few days, we’ve received some rather interesting information about the good professor’s love life. The reports go something like this: “Professor Bobbitt married one of his students! Over the Christmas holiday! She’s a 3L at Columbia Law! And a Turkish princess! They were married at the Supreme Court! By one of the justices!”
As is generally the case with juicy gossip, most of this is true — but some of it is not. Here’s the real story, based on my interview with Professor Bobbitt himself. And wedding photos, of course….
Continue reading “A Law School Love Story: Prominent Professor Marries Columbia 3L”
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Virtual Canary in the Digital Mine #3: Total Pre-Cull (Part 1 of 3), Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Predictive Coding
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In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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