Yale Law School

Morning Docket: 12.19.11

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* It’s about freakin’ time. Guess who’s jumped on board the ever popular “blame the ABA” bandwagon? None other than David Segal, the New York Times equivalent of the law school scam blogger. [New York Times]

* Newt says that as president, he’d ignore SCOTUS decisions. Raise your hand if you want to elect someone who doesn’t understand our government’s system of checks and balances. [Los Angeles Times]

* Remember that time you applied for the DOJ Honors Program? You were probably rejected because you were a damn, dirty, liberal hippie. [CNN]

* Facebook is threatening to sue Mark Zuckerberg. No, not one — he founded the company. The other one — no, not the lawyer. This guy: the “ultimate Facebook troll.” [Hollywood Reporter]

* “We are the 99 percent.” You know that our country is circling the drain when even Yale Law thinks that the Occupy Wall Street movement coined 2011′s quote of the year. [ABC News]

* North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has died. Say hello to his slightly taller successor. [Bloomberg]

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Congratulations to the 2012 Skadden Fellows

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It’s that time of the year again. No, we’re not talking about the Above the Law holiday party, which happened already. Or the ATL holiday card contest, which is now underway.

It’s time for celebration of a different sort — time to celebrate, and congratulate, the latest class of Skadden Fellows. The winners of these prestigious public interest fellowships were just announced, as they are every December.

As explained in the Skadden Fellowship Foundation’s press release, the 28 new fellows are graduating law students or judicial law clerks who are devoting their careers to public interest work. They’ll be working for organizations located in nine states and the District of Columbia, “focusing on issues ranging from the health and safety of low-wage immigrant workers in California to representing Russian-speaking victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking in New York.”

(Baby Jesus would be proud of what they do. Unless they work for the ACLU and try to ruin his birthday.)

Who are the Skadden fellows for 2012? Which law schools produced the most fellows? And what’s different about this year’s program compared to past years?

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The University of Chicago Law School Offers Detailed Employment Data; Will Other Schools Follow Suit?

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The battle for greater law school transparency, for more accurate and complete information from law schools regarding the jobs obtained (or not obtained) by their graduates, has many fronts. Some advocates for transparency work through organizations, such as the Tennessee non-profit Law School Transparency. Some have turned to the political process, where the issue of transparency has attracted the attention of several United States senators. And some have looked to litigation, suing law schools for providing allegedly misleading data about post-graduate employment outcomes.

Here’s an interesting idea: what if law schools just started posting comprehensive, accurate employment data on their websites? On a voluntary basis — not compelled by politicians, lawsuits, or the American Bar Association (ABA)?

Wouldn’t that be great? And wouldn’t it be helpful to prospective law students trying to decide whether it’s worth investing three years of their lives, and a large amount of (often borrowed) money, to pursue a law degree at the school in question?

Take a look at what they’re now doing at the University of Chicago Law School. Could it perhaps serve as the model for law school reporting of employment data?

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UC Irvine Announces Better Clerkship Numbers Than Almost Everyone Else

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Ever since the UC Irvine School of Law opened its doors in 2009, the fledgling institution has been garnering rave reviews. It has already been labelled one of the most selective schools in the country. Every single member of its inaugural class had a job last summer. And that same first class goes to school for free.

Over the weekend, the emerging West Coast powerhouse added a new impressive statistic to its quickly filling trophy case. This year, the school boasts one of the highest federal clerkship placement rates in the country.

Keep reading to see which elite law schools have been edged out by UC Irvine….

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Clarence Thomas Is Coming To Town

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Justice Clarence Thomas

Elie here. Imagine Santa Claus stopping by your house — except this time Saint Nick is a mute, who stuffs your stocking with personal responsibility and brings you wooden toys, because those were the only ones available when his legend was born.

Well, joking aside, Justice Clarence Thomas will be stopping by Yale Law School on December 14th. And since there won’t be a case in front of him, he’ll actually be talking.

But not to everybody. Sources tell us — and Yale Dean Robert Post confirmed, in a school-wide email — that Justice Thomas will be speaking to the Yale Federalist Society and to the Black Law Students Association, as well as attending a class and a private reception. He won’t be making any general public appearance.

Setting aside commencement, it’s fairly typical for guest speakers (including Supreme Court justices) to speak to specific student groups and not the law school at large. If Justice Elena Kagan went to Yale, she’d likely speak to the American Constitution Society and the Socratic Hard-Ass Faculty Coven.

Some students claim, however, that the Yale administration has contacted several student organizations and asked them not to protest during Thomas’s visit. We don’t know if that’s true, and a message from Dean Post (reprinted below) does not directly mention anything about student protests. But the mere rumor of Yale trying to quash protests, circulated on “The Wall” (the YLS list-serv), has made some students angry.

Should they be? Strap yourselves in for an ATL Debate….

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Pay to Go to Law School or Get Paid to Quit: You Won’t Be Learning Anything Either Way

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How screwed up is legal education these days? One mainstream publication recently published an article suggesting law students should be paid to not go to law school, while the paper of record noted that nobody learns how to be a lawyer in law school anyway.

That’s what it’s come to, folks. Can you imagine Slate, which is owned by the Washington Post, publishing an article suggesting that we should pay M.B.A. candidates to stop going to business school? Can you imagine the New York Times publishing a feature article about how medical students don’t learn anything in medical school?

Welcome to law school, the red-headed stepchild of American professional schools….

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Morning Docket: 11.21.11

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* I guess it really doesn’t matter how much lawyers love Ron Paul if Biglaw firms keep emptying their seemingly overflowing coffers into Obama’s re-election campaign. [Washington Post]

* Congratulations to Yale Law School graduate Ronan Farrow, son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Ronan probably isn’t shallow and empty with no ideas and nothing interesting to say, since he’s just been named a 2012 Rhodes Scholar. [ABC News]

* National drinking age laws: keeping women from killing themselves or being murdered since the 1980s. Now where’s the study on how many people actually obey these laws? [USA Today]

* A Florida woman has disappeared after battling it out with her ex-fiancé over an engagement ring on The People’s Court. As if you needed another reason not to be seen on that show. [Daily Mail]

* According to a new law in England, water might be wet, but that doesn’t mean it’ll fix dehydration. Not elementary, my dear Watson, but “stupidity writ large.” [International Business Times]

* The fall of the Third Reich fourth tyke? Poor little Adolf Hitler’s parents have lost custody of yet another child thanks to the state of New Jersey. [New York Daily News]

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Some Random Friday Fun: A Law Professor Turned Songwriter

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Some people — for example, Chief Justice John Roberts — are not fans of contemporary legal scholarship. These critics might say, “You’d have to pay me to read the writings of a law professor!”

Well, what if a law professor were willing to pay you to check out his writings? And what if the writings in question were not, say, 150-page law review articles on “the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria,” but fun stuff — like song lyrics?

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Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Hero and Heroin

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It’s hard to say which of these (non-lawyer) wedding write-ups is more cliché-ridden: the one about the two lesbian PE teachers, or the one about the peace activists who keep their income below a taxable level so they don’t give money to the Pentagon. The latter pair are way too busy rummaging through dumpsters to read the Internet, so we feel zero guilt about exposing them to ridicule in the comments. There’s certainly a lot of ridiculous material there.

But on to the lawyer weddings: still ridiculous, but in a different way. Your finalist couples:

Kathleen Cassidy and Ian Shapiro

Nina Yadava and Travis Davis

Emily Feinstein and Eric Olney

Aliya McLendon and Aaron Horne Jr.

Rebecca Krauss and Benjamin Taibleson

This is a summer mega-LEWW, with five finalists and a loooooong list of also-rans at the end. Read on for a virtual nuptial feast….

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Aspiring Yale Transfer Student Explains and Defends Her Blog

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Tammy Hsu

This afternoon we wrote about a blog entitled Confessions of an (Aspiring) Yalie. In this blog, Tammy Hsu, a 1L at Wake Forest University School of Law, chronicles her journey through the first year of law school — a journey she hopes will culminate with a successful transfer application to Yale Law School.

As we noted, Tammy Hsu’s blog is now restricted to invited readers. Some posts are still accessible via Google Cache (and in the comments to our original story, some of you identified favorite posts of yours).

Shortly after we wrote about her, we heard from Tammy C. Hsu. She sent us a defense and explanation of her blog’s origins, which we will now share….

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