ATL March Madness: The Worst Law School In America — First Round

Games are underway. Your daily routine of blowing off work to read Above the Law is now complemented with blowing off work to watch a streaming CBS feed. If you’re going to do anything legal today — and I mean “legal” both as “law work” and “not illegal” — you might as well vote on the worst law school in America.

Polls for all 16 first-round matchups appear below. Get down there and vote for your favorites. Or least favorites, as the case may be.

Whatever you do, may your degree not be permanently sullied by this competition….

We have a couple of housekeeping issues. First, a number of Western New England students and alums complained that Staci drafted Western New England on the podcast and that our initial bracket listed WNEC in the pool. As you may recall, WNEC is no more, having changed its name to Western New England University and with the stroke of that pen removed itself from the legacy of failure that was WNEC. We regret the error, and have dutifully changed the name of the school on the updated bracket.

Second, I failed to name the regions on the first bracket. Last year, we named each region after a defunct law firm, so it only makes sense to name each region this year after a law school whose failures led to its closure. Specifically, we have a bracket named for Litchfield, the once successful law school that couldn’t keep up with the Harvard monolith; New College of California, once a committed public interest law school that couldn’t make its payroll; and American Justice School of Law, a short-lived school (with an equally short-lived successor, Alben W. Barkey School of Law), that takes the cake for the most pretentious name for a law school.

And, of course, WNEC. Because all you Western New England people are so insistent that the effort to put lipstick on that pig resulted in the end of the old WNEC, you get to be the name of a whole region now. You wanted the bracket fixed, but like a Civil War surgeon, the cures I dish out are worse than the original malady. Enjoy.

We’ll assign the Litchfield tag to the region boasting fellow Connecticut school Yale; New College of California will go where all the California schools are; American Justice will reside in the same region as fellow Kentucky school Louisville; and, we’ll put WNEC in the region where its most famous alum managed to pick Cornell as the top overall seed.

Law schools will advance to the next round based on reader polls, in which we ask you which law school is the worst. You can define that however you choose. Feel free to justify your votes in the comments.

The polls are below. The first round will close on SUNDAY, MARCH 23, at 11:59 P.M. (Eastern). Vote early, and tell your colleagues and friends.

WNEC REGION

[poll id=”383″]
[poll id=”384″]
[poll id=”385″]
[poll id=”386″]

LITCHFIELD REGION

[poll id=”387″]
[poll id=”388″]
[poll id=”389″]
[poll id=”390″]

AMERICAN JUSTICE REGION

[poll id=”391″]
[poll id=”392″]
[poll id=”393″]
[poll id=”394″]

NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA REGION

[poll id=”395″]
[poll id=”396″]
[poll id=”397″]
[poll id=”398″]