Law Schools

Thomas Cooley Law School Campaign To Defend Its Reputation Ends In Backfire So Epic The Quote 'Minstrelsy Was Fun' Comes Up

Sometimes it's best to not say anything at all.

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Thomas M. Cooley Law is getting a lot of press these days, and it’s not happy about it.

As Michael Cohen sinks farther and farther into the quagmire of a federal criminal investigation, the rest of the world is starting to learn what those of us in the legal world have known for a long time — Thomas Cooley is a terrible law school. Almost every news story that mentions Cohen’s association with Cooley includes a quick aside that it’s a perennial bottom-feeder of a law school. The irony is, the school wasn’t even all that bad back when Cohen went there. You could even learn how to get up 2-1 on the Bruins with a Cooley degree back in the day. It’s not like the school was ever elite, but before they started telling the world that they were better than Yale — a thing that actually happened — it was a perfectly serviceable school.

Unfortunately for the old grads, the school isn’t about to adopt the “we didn’t always suck” defense. Instead, the school’s general counsel James Robb is pushing back against the negativity and vigorously fighting to repair Cooley’s tattered reputation. He probably should have just stayed quiet, because when he told Politico he didn’t care for the criticism the school receives, the publication did some digging and managed to out Cooley as even worse than we all imagined.

In a deep profile subtly titled, “Trump’s Lawyer Went To The Worst Law School In America,” Philip Shenon reached out to Robb and heard Cooley’s frustrations:

The school is sensitive to the headlines: “In light of the current publicity about Mr. Michael Cohen, one of our graduates, it is disappointing to see all the gratuitous negative comments about our law school from people who know nothing about us,” the school’s general counsel, James Robb, said in an impassioned written statement to Politico. “What I am seeing is incivility and bullying by people who truly know little about legal education—and especially about our fine law school.”

The chronic misuse of the term “bullying” has got to stop. Bullying refers to the exploitation of power imbalances to torture the vulnerable; its definition does not stretch to encompass public criticism of a law school collecting millions of dollars in tuition every year to turn out graduates who can’t get a job in the profession. Its employment score is 27.8 percent! If anyone’s on the wrong end of a power dynamic, it’s the students vis-à-vis this school. Or, perhaps, another Cooley graduate like Judge Beckley in Pennsylvania, who was calling ICE on couples trying to get married based on nothing but racist stereotypes and a dream. That’s bullying.

Robb, the Cooley spokesman, said the school is being held to a higher standard than other law schools that produced graduates who went on to become controversial in legal and political careers: “I wonder whether the ‘commentators’ would say the same thing about the University of Alabama in light of Judge Roy Moore; about Columbia [University] in light of Roy Cohn, who also represented Donald Trump; about Duke [University] in light of Richard Nixon; about [the University of] Baltimore in light of Spiro Agnew; about Harvard in light of Alger Hiss, or Yale in light of William Clinton. I think not.”

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We’ve reached the unhinged portion of the discussion. The irony of Nixon and Hiss being mentioned in the same thought as equivalent pockmarks on their institutions is truly top-notch. Did he really put Bill Clinton on the same plane as Michael Cohen? Last I checked, Columbia was still putting out students who pass the bar, something Cooley struggles with these days. That, much more than Roy Cohn’s legendary capacity to be an asshole, is how we judge a school.

The school’s critics, he said, were “elitists who do not appreciate, or do not care about, the opportunity to succeed.” He said that Cooley takes pride in its willingness to admit students, including many from minority groups, who would have trouble being accepted at other schools because of their relatively low test scores and educational backgrounds: “Our law school was founded on the premise that all qualified applicants should be given a chance.” About 35 percent of Cooley’s recent graduates identify themselves as members of minority groups.

Here we go with the disingenuous nobility talk. Promoting diversity in the profession is a goal that law schools should aspire to, but we need to stop letting lower-tier schools try to deflect from their performance by pointing to their diversity numbers. It doesn’t promote diversity in the profession to put minority students into debt and leave them unable to pass the bar exam.

Speaking of Cooley’s commitment to minority students, Politico decided to check in on the school’s founder, Thomas Brennan, who still makes $329,000 a year to work five hours a week. He has a blog!

In a 2016 post, he remembered with affection the blackface minstrel shows of his youth. He recalled how he and his brother performed in local minstrel shows in the Detroit area, “our faces blacked to the teeth.”

“In these days of political correctness, the whole idea of minstrelsy seems preposterous,” he wrote. “But the truth is that minstrelsy was fun.”

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Oh. For the record, deriving fun from mocking the systemically underprivileged is, in fact, bullying.

Other blog posts have criticized the move in Southern states to remove the statues of Confederate Army generals from public spaces. “Political correctness is running amuck,” he wrote. “The Civil War did in fact occur. And there were good people on both sides.” He has labeled Islam “a primitive belief system which comingles [sic] religious doctrine with civil law.” He described the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage as “evil.” The decision, he said, meant that “our beloved nation will slide further toward Armageddon.”

Good people on both sides.

It’s certainly possible that this Politico article was coming out no matter what happened. But reading between the lines, one wonders if it would have accreted into such a damning critique if Robb had just let kept quiet and let this be one more “Cooley has bad test scores” article. When someone doth protests that much, it piques interest. That’s a good lesson for lawyers too.

But apparently not one they teach at Cooley.

Trump’s Lawyer Went To The Worst Law School In America [Politico]

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