Grading

He messed up grading, throw all your hands up!

* Which Biglaw giants are “committing tens of millions of dollars in free legal services” to the gun control cause? Seems like they’re getting a great return on that investment… [New York Times / Dealbook]

* The EU fined JPMC and two other banks $552 million for manipulating futures. As if the EU has any future now! [Courthouse News Service]

* Lawsuit filed against teacher for 16-year-old bad grade that trapped lawyer in low prestige career. It’s like the Plasgraf of bad life choices. [Legal Cheek]

* Police called because man whistled “Closing Time.” Good. [Lowering the Bar]

* Celebrate the holidays with this buyer’s guide for trademark disputed beer and wine! [Trademark & Copyright Law Blog]

* Immigrant children need assistance coping with trauma. Pro bono lawyers can help. [Psychology Today]

* A short reaction to today’s piece on Tiffany Trump’s law school plans — and make sure to note the update to that story about her experience taking the LSAT. [Law and More]

These are REAL COMMENTS students have made to this law professor about their exams.

Some wise and practical advice on course selection, courtesy of Lawprofblawg.

There has been another law professor who has decided to take the easy route and reuse an earlier exam -- for the third year in a row.

Students were embarrassed, so now we've got a whole thing.

Why do law professors hate grading so much?

Law school exams are mental challenges. This is how you can defeat them.

Employers take law school GPAs very seriously. Shouldn't low-ranked schools adjust their grading policies to match their higher-ranked competitors?

To help all law students get a grip on the grading process -- to determine how professors grade and to get an insider’s perspective about before and after exams -- we interviewed a law professor.

Crim Law exam features Fifty Shades of Grey prequel as fact pattern. [Legal Cheek] * You’d think being in jail would be a pretty good alibi. But that’s not the Chicago Way! [Overlawyered] * How many law professors have wished they could say this before? “Don’t give me any of your s**tty papers and you get an A.” [Critical-Theory via TaxProf Blog] * Lawyer powerlifting to raise money for mentoring programs. Because donating to charity is more fun when it comes with the risk of severe groin injuries. [Chicago Tribune] * U.S. News has a list of ways being a paralegal first can help with law school. It’s dumb. There’s only one reason paralegal experience helps and that’s to meet practicing lawyers and figure out whether or not law school is even worth it. [U.S. News] * In the past, Professor Nancy Leong was accused of narcissism. But she doesn’t seem to be attention-seeking at all based on this publicly posted shot. Maybe she can post that on Ashley Madison and see what happens… [Instagram] * Regulating imports could drastically improve labor conditions around the world (and potentially bring more jobs back home). But that could curtail profits by a smidgeon so let’s table that discussion. [Lawyers, Guns & Money] * A former AUSA on the Phil Mickelson/Carl Icahn insider trading case and wiretaps. [mitchellepner] * John Oliver made a powerful appeal to the Internet to take action in defense of Net Neutrality. If you want to know what you can do (or don’t even understand the issue) and laugh at the same time, the video is embedded below… [Huffington Post]

Hopefully this conversation will give law students a better roadmap for their upcoming exams.

Please welcome Above the Law's new poet in residence, who will be sharing poems about the legal profession in our pages.

Can somebody please stop this rookie professor from ruining his own class?

If law schools are supposed to train people to pass the bar exam, they seem to be already doing the right thing.

Schools just can't get over that requirement that you "actually pass" classes to graduate.

Is there a better way to grade law school exams? And if so, would professors be willing to do it?

* As we noted last week (third item), Judge Rosenbaum recognized that the government was bound to have phone records of the defendant since they were dragnetting the whole friggin’ country. Now the government has responded and predictably claims that this is all classified. [Southern District of Florida Blog] * Speaking of follow-ups, remember how NYU Law was using non-profit slush funds to pay for housing for professors? Well, they also provided sweetheart loans for summer houses. [New York Times] * The battle rages over the admissibility of audio expert witness testimony in the George Zimmerman trial. At least Howard Greenberg isn’t going to be there to call them all whores. [The Expert Institute] * With the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy about to get smacked down in federal court, it’s important to remember there’s nothing wrong with “stop and frisk” — just every single way that it’s been applied for over a decade. [Vocativ] * For our law professor readers, cognitive psychology says you get more fair results if you grade exams by question rather than grading the whole exam at once. It also means you’re not as likely to find 15 whole exams missing and fail to grade one student’s exam for weeks on end (in fairness, I ran into Professor Winkler and he assures me he eventually graded that exam). [Concurring Opinions] * Communications between Superman and a minister in Man of Steel would likely be shielded by Kansas law. A better question is what law are we going to use to prosecute Superman for wontonly demolishing a city? [The Legal Geeks] * If you’re living the Bitcoin lifestyle, you’re probably about to get taxed. [TaxProf Blog]

Here's another pathetic attempt to save law faculty from the burdens of actually educating people...

* Given the name and origins of the Tea Party movement, it actually makes perfect sense that their groups got grief from the IRS. [Washington Post]

* Wachtell Lipton weighs in against the practice of shareholder activists offering special compensation to director nominees. [Dealbook / New York Times]

* A law professor, Joshua Silverstein, argues that schools should embrace grade inflation. (But haven’t most of them done this already?) [WSJ Law Blog]

* Facebook shareholders might not “like” this news, but Ted Ullyot is stepping down as general counsel after almost five years. We’ll have more on this later. [National Law Journal]

* The Brooklyn DA’s office is reopening 50 murder cases that were worked on by retired detective Louis Scarcella (who looks oh-so-savory in the NYT’s photo of him). [New York Times]

* In news that should shock no one, Nicholas Speath’s dubious discrimination case against Georgetown Law has been dismissed. [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]

* Not long after leaving Cravath for Kirkland, Sarkis Jebejian is putting together billion-dollar deals for private-equity clients. [Am Law Daily]

* Professor Jeffrey Rosen reviews an interesting new book, The Federalist Society (affiliate link), authored by Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin. [New York Times]