When the UC Irvine School of Law first opened its doors in August, and perhaps even before, some were speculating that the presence of another Orange County, Calif., school — a public school no less — would put a stop to the private Chapman University School of Law's plans to make it to the Valhalla of law schools: the U.S. News and World Report's Tier 1.
But after Thursday night's "Battle of the Law School Deans" — a debate between Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of Irvine and Dean John Eastman of Chapman — I don't believe that a neighborhood rival is such a bad thing for Chapman or Irvine, which also has its sights set on a top spot.
Apparently, there are no Barbri girls in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin legislature believes that graduates of the University of Wisconsin Law School and Marquette Law School are so well versed in Wisconsin law that it is unnecessary for them to take the Wisconsin bar exam.
The plaintiffs argue the bar exam is a burden faced by graduates of out-of-state law schools. They note that the fees for admission by bar exam are roughly double the fees for admission by diploma privilege. The plaintiffs allege a disparity of preparation for admission, arguing that the bar examination requires study of all the subjects listed in SCR 40.03 because all are potentially tested, but a Wisconsin law student can graduate without taking classes in all of them. An out-of-state applicant is further hindered in a way the Wisconsin law school graduate is not by the delay created by an exam administered just twice a year, they added.
The exemption does have some advocates, especially at The Daily Cardinal:
But simmering under the legal grounds of the lawsuit is the issue of whether the bar exam in really all that necessary for Wisconsin students. It would seem that a diploma proving you had completed three grueling years of legal study is a better indicator of one’s possible legal success than a single two-day exam. And considering that attorneys educated at Wisconsin law schools are only marginally more likely to be investigated for ethics complaints than other attorneys, it seems there is little statistical need to weed people out using the bar exam.
This Minnesotan is unimpressed.
There is a reason why most states require a law school diploma and a bar examination: competence.
This smells a lot like the loophole that I discovered as a high school student in Florida. In high school I had two options:
Take AP classes and suffer through a grueling exam in hopes of scoring a perfect "5" because my university might not give me credit for a "4" or,
Go to the community college in the evenings on my high school's dime and rack up A's that Florida colleges could notreject.
Of courseI opted to go to community college. A student who would not get any credit for their AP score of a "3" or "4"
could easily earn an A in the comparable community college course, which meant that out of state applicants to my university were grossly disadvantaged. I had a friend who started college with 90 credits through this dual enrollment program, whereas out-of-state students who took a boatload of AP classes typically started with only 20 or so credits, if they were lucky.
Was this unfair? Of course it was.
This in-state favoritism is exactly what is going on in Wisconsin. I’m sure that Wisconsin and Marquette are great law schools, but not everyone that manages to graduate law school is competent to practice. If Wisconsin schools are really that great at teaching their students, then their graduates will do as well on the bar as their Nordic neighbors.
One of the generally understood perks of being a tenured law school professor is the job security. This assumption, however, requires that your law school is not run by a pizza mogul who moves the school halfway across the country so he can erect a 250-foot crucifix. Read: as long as your boss doesn't have a crazy agenda, you'll probably be able to keep your job
Naplesnews.com reports that the professors at Ave Maria School of Law settled their wrongful dismissal claims against the school, who sued for wrongful termination or denied tenure. This means that there will be no ruling on whether the professor's claims were barred by a constitutional exception for "ministerial" employees that prevents the filing of employment claims.
The saga of how Ave Maria went from a start up with a bright future to the lowest ranked law school in the country is detailed over at The Washington Monthly. Excerpts from the Washington Monthly article are after the jump:
Normally I think excerpts from IMs are the lazy man's blogging, but this one over at The Namby Pamby made me smile. (Laughing is a lot to ask of me today.)
Daisy: [Our Law School] Alma Mater just sent me a survey!
A friend recently emailed to tell me that he was starting law school, and to ask if I had any advice or suggestions for staying abreast of his first year. I did, and I do.
While I realize the following eight suggestions may be controversial, I'm going to throw them out there anyway. The've worked for me and although each may be subject to qualifications and exceptions (isn't everything in law school that way?) I stick by what I wrote to my friend:
Use the Examples & Explanations series (published by Aspen). Unlike casebooks or professors' lectures, the series covers the basic concepts and then provides examples for you to respond to, followed by explanations of how your answer should have looked. They're no substitute for your casebook, but they'll go a long way to helping it make sense. You can likely get your hands on one for each of your classes, and it's money well spent.
Avoid using another student's outlines. First, nobody is perfect and you don't need to compound your own mistakes (which everyone makes) by building off of someone else's. Second, outlining a course is where the real learning takes place and there isn't any viable substitution for it - with outlines, it's the process and not the finished product that counts.
Do brief cases separately on your computer, at least for a while. The exercise is good because it is important to learn how to distinguish the "holding" in the case from the "reasoning" and so forth, but as time goes on two things will happen: First, you'll start to see that the distinctions are sort of artificial - e.g., the so-called "reasoning" is often intertwined with the so-called "holding" or the so-called "rule," such that the categories overlap. Second, you'll start to find that you can separate out the various elements of an opinion without actually having to type anything up. When that begins to happen for you, you'll know the case briefing exercise has lost (or perhaps realized?) its utility. At that point, you can trust yourself to take reliable notes in the margins of your book, and you can forgo the briefing exercise.
Do read and reread each case until you understand it. You are after the rule at issue, and how it applied to the facts - don't stop until it makes sense, and I mean REALLY makes sense. This might take more than one reading at first because law has its own language, but it'll come faster with time. I promise.
Do not worry about minutiae. Minutiae includes memorizing case names, judge names, the name of the court in which was heard, the state in which the court sat, and so forth. Some professor may or may not bust your chops over this in class some day, but I promise - PROMISE - you it will not be relevant to the exam. The exam will test your facility with the rules and your ability to apply them to the facts. It will not ask for nor will it reward trivial details that do not bear on the core rules and principles the cases for which you read stand.
Do not worry about what your peers are up to. There are probably people with crazy highlighter schemes and freakish coding or index card systems for rote memorization. These are likely the same people who talk about staying up all night, and who later in the semester will talk about how long their outline is, or whatever. What they are expressing is insecurity, not some kind of insider knowledge you don't have. Ignore them as best you can.
Do not study with others. And if you can't take that advice, do not study with more than one other person. I know that sounds coarse, but as a 1L I fell a time or two for the "study group" thing and I swear it's the blind leading the blind. If you don't understand an issue, try to frame it as a clear and precise question, then go look it up yourself. You'll have the answer in front of you instead of the word of someone who is just as new to the law as you. If looking it up doesn't work, and it sometimes doesn't, go ask your professor in person. You'll have an expert answer from your evaluator, instead of a lay answer from someone in your shoes.
Do not underestimate your ability to succeed. Law school is all about work, not brains. True, you have to meet some threshold level of intelligence to get by, but that bar is set disappointingly low. The most successful students are not the brilliant ones. The successful students are those who take the time to think everything through, to understand what is happing in a case, why the judge decided it they did, and what the case "stands for" now. Admittedly, there is a lot of information to sort through. But that's a blessing in disguise, because the volume of information makes it so that the people who apply themselves will succeed where the lax do not. And whether you apply yourself is entirely within your control.
Note that none of this addresses how to stay a cool person. Frankly, if you need tips or advice on that, you're already a gonner. Do, however, try to remember: it's only school.
Earlier this week, US News released a list of top clerkship feeder schools. I came across it this morning, and I have to be honest with you. A couple of things made me go "Hmmm."
I know that there has been news of incorrectly reported/tabulated data (with the schools blaming US News and US News apparently not altering its list), but the news from University of North Dakota and Western New England College that their data is not accurately represented does not really seem to account for the overwhelming presence of Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools. Neither does anything else I can think of, like "small class sizes at T3 schools" or "loyalty of fly-over state court judges to their local regional schools." Maybe a perfect storm of all of those things? Or maybe something else?
After consulting both other people who should know and Underneath Their Robes, I still have no answers.
Share your theories, or insight, with me in the comments section.
There is an article on Law.com by Valerie Fontaine and Roberta Kass about tapping the hidden job market. The article is targeted at older attorneys, but its lessons are applicable to law students as well.
Fontaine and Kass write:
Information about the vast majority of job openings passes by word of mouth, rather than through recruiters or advertisements. Therefore, you need to tap into this "hidden" job market.
A surprising number of law school opportunities pass through word of mouth. These opportunities include research assistant openings, student committee spots, scholarships, and fellowships. Many of these opportunities are ignored because they are buried in the law school email spam electronic student digest, or otherwise under-advertised.
Law School Networking in a Nutshell:
Meet upperclassmen through activities that interest you.
Protect your reputation and don’t piss off your peers. These are the people who will vouch for you when asked.
Be natural because insincerity is counterproductive.
Be consistent because returning to an organization or event will strengthen ties and present new opportunities.
From standing in line at the university business office next to 2Ls and 3Ls, from passing by more experienced students in the hallways in my first full week of school, and from being laughed at by the 2L boyfriend for my primeval 1L law school student ways, I have learned there are certain things that just scream "1L law school noob".
Are you channeling Quasimodo by having a ginormous backpack filled to the brim with ginormous casebooks, and cluttered with a rainbow of pens and highlighters? You just might be a 1L law school noob.
Upon entering the law school library, do you gracelessly struggle to get out your ID, attempting to balance your casebooks and coffee mug, while 2Ls and 3Ls brush on past (which happened to me this morning)? You just might be a 1L law school noob.
Do you highlight every single sentence in your casebooks because, dude, everything is important? Does the sight of your professor riffling through the class roster or even anything slightly resembling that (i.e. your date flipping through a menu, your dog digging in the backyard, etc.) make you break out into a cold sweat? Do you dream, as I did, about the horror of your casebriefs suddenly being deleted and being replaced with tons of photos containing Photo-Crashing Squirrel?
And do you write a blog post during a cancelled class when you should really be reading ahead and briefing more cases? Then you definitely are a law school noob.
Calling all 2Ls, 3Ls, law school survivors and professors. What things do us 1Ls do that are a dead giveaway that we are 1Ls? Feel free to comment below!
Yesterday I was directed, thanks to TaxProf, to a list of the National Jurist's list of law schools that give you the "Best Bang for your Buck."
While generally unmoved by the top 25 (which you can see, sorta, here), I did find it interesting that Hastings, despite its near-constant tuition increases, is holding it down for California at #54.
The qualifications for making it on the list were pretty strict:
Public schools with a maximum of $25k annual tuition
Private schools with a maximum of $30k annual tuition
85% employment rate upon graduation
Higher bar passage rate than state average
The schools were then ranked according to these statistics, with North Carolina Central University edging out BYU for the top slot.
The saddest part of this piece, however, was the headline of the piece that came directly after it: "Is Anyone Hiring Now?" As if to say "What the hell does it all matter, anyway?" If you're asking yourself that question, you might want to check out these 100 blog posts.
If you're reading this, then I survived the three-day Chapman Law orientation and the first day of classes.
As far as orientation goes, I didn't know that just sitting around and getting talked at could be so tiring. As far as classes, I'm sure that today everyone was just as scared as I was, but hid it a whole lot better.
If you go to my school and are in my class, I'm the shifty-eyed girl who sat in the front row of property who giggled nervously at the professor's jokes: yeah, those jokes are kinda funny, but, dude, what if he calls on me next?
All throughout that first class today, I had visions of being the one person in all of 1L-dom who couldn't regurgitate portions of the assigned cases.
I also imagined that I would somehow be found to be unsuitable for the rigors of law school in the manner that that emperor guy who wasn't wearing any clothes was found out.
I would march into the classroom, armored with and secure in the fact that I had prepared for class as best I could, but somehow someone - either the professor or a fellow law student seeking to draw first blood - would call me out and point that armor out to be flawed and inadequate.
"But mother, she doesn't belong in law school!"
Thankfully, I wasn't called on today. But it's only the first week of classes.
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