The Shark

linx: keeping things cheerful on black monday.

[cynthia foster]

At least we're not trying to retire.

• LSAT-Free Law School Admissions Can Goose U.S. News Rankings (TaxProf Blog)
• UCI Set to Launch Dual Law, Business Degree Program (Orange County Business Journal)
• Law Firms, State Dept. Collaborate to Enroll Afghan Lawyers in U.S. Schools (BLT)
• More Loan Help for USC Law Graduates (Media Newswire)
• Congress Poised to Create a Dozen New Clerkships (The National Law Journal)
• Students Help Free Life-term Prisoner (USC News)

pursuing big law during the downturn may open up previously locked doors.

[justin gosling]

With all the talk about the Heller dissolution, I can't help but view the situation from the point of view of a law student. Or, more correctly, from the point of view of a law student who is not in the upper echelon of their class and is looking for a job.

While it's of course frightening to think that a law firm with such an extensive history and impressive resume can fall victim to the harsh economic times, all is not lost for the enterprising law student. This law student can take advantage of the situation by strategically applying to specific law firms.

For instance, take a firm experiencing some financial trouble, but not enough to cause rumors of a complete meltdown. This troubled firm may create an opportunity for the savvy law student.

Here is the situation as I see it: A firm experiencing some economic trouble will likely alarm those students that are usually among the firm's recruiting bread and butter. These top candidates will likely play it safe and shop their services to other employers. The overall level of competition for coveted summer associate slots is reduced. It's quite possible that students the firm would otherwise ignore in a typical year are are now the heart of the firm's recruiting efforts. By applying to a firm just out of reach during a tough economic year, you've just bumped up your competitiveness in exchange for taking on a little bit of risk. Fantastic.

Everyone is happy, right?  Well, maybe not. If you do scout out the major firms with some financial worries and then accept an offer to join the firm's summer associate class, you are putting all your eggs into one basket. What happens when your employment gamble backfires and the firm dissolves or cancels their summer associate class altogether?  Scrambling to find gainful employment after your classmates have participated in OCI and have already filled the majority of summer associate slots at large firms, that's what.

So, is it worth taking on the risk, you ask?

Risk is inherent in every employment decision a law student makes. We can't predict the future and it's more than likely that some firms that appears rock solid today will run into problems down the road. Now, I'm not saying you should apply to firms that are in obvious trouble, but I am saying that you should use risk as one factor to consider in making a final employment decision. If you accept that a law student's employment decision has an intrinsic risk factor, and that those risks are often undetectable, then I say it's not a bad idea to try and exploit the risk that other students fear and create opportunities for yourself.

(former) incoming heller associates: what to do now?

[cynthia foster]

Our sister blog, Legal Pad, has beaucoup coverage on the Heller dissolution.  Start here and here.  One question that comes to my mind: exactly how screwed are the first years whose start dates were pushed back to January?  Will Heller offer any assistance to them?

Any thoughts welcome in comments.

3L thinks 3L year may just be a moneymaker.

[brian lauter]

The third year of law school. Some call it boring. Some call it pointless (pdf). Some say it should be abolished. Some say it should be reformed. Some want to make it the second to last year of law school.

The Avid Penguin says its just a scam to make money for law schools, and they are probably right.

No matter what their specific take on the situation, most people agree that law students are not getting much out of their 3L years. A few schools, like Dayton and Northwestern, have abolished the 3L year altogether.

I’ve written a couple of items here about various attempts to reform the 3L year.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but after reading the Avid Penguin item, and seeing the idea hinted at and mentioned, I am beginning to wonder if all of this discussion about reforming the 3L year is really just money-hungry law schools and academics trying to hide the ball.

The critics are right: the 3L year adds very little to our legal education. Students would rather not pay the $30,000 or more in tuition. Most employers already recognize that law school doesn’t prepare students very well for practice. Only law schools have any real interest in maintaining a three year legal education.

All of this theorizing leads me to one conclusion:

The debate on how the third year of law school should be organized and what should be taught is really a grand distraction. A diversion and a decoy, designed to hide from us the obvious fact that the third year of law school, no matter how well-conceived, is essentially a colossal windfall for law schools, and a waste of money for law students.

The real trick here is that, while two year programs sound like a solution, they aren’t actually any cheaper since these schools still “charge by the degree rather than the time served.” I guess no matter how you go about it the law schools are going to get theirs. At least in a two year program you can start paying off the massive debt you’ve incurred a year earlier...

greta van susteren thinks your legal education is predicated on FRAUD!!!!

[cynthia foster]

I love TaxProf.  I know nothing about taxes (other than the fact that I pay them), but TaxProf always finds the best Internet stuff.  I don't know how he does it, but here he's done it again: Greta Van Susteren (Georgetown alumna and sometime professor) "going off" on a "four minute riff" on the more... suspect principles of law school grading.

law review ranking fails to take suckiness of law review into account.

[brian lauter]

Law Review sucks. The same can be said for rankings, and, since misery loves company, it only makes sense to combine the two.

Perhaps trying to prove that two wrongs really do make a right, The Faculty Lounge has assembled what it calls "The Kindest Rankings of the 'Top 25' Law Reviews."

The Faculty Lounge's rankings are based on U.S. News' peer assessment score, on citations by other journals, and by citation impact of the journal. Any school that ranks in the top 25 in any of these categories makes it into the Kind 25.

As I looked at the Faculty Lounge’s rankings, I was struck by the absence of several important variables. The Faculty Lounge neglected to factor in the number of non-italicized periods after the word "Id" in the journals. It also forgot to consider the amount of passive voice in each journal and the number of instances of explanatory parentheticals not beginning with a past participle. Maybe most egregiously, the Faculty Lounge failed to factor in the number of times a journal printed multiple internal cross references in the wrong order.

Instead, the Kind 25, and the rankings schemes it references, seem to focus exclusively on the number of citations a law review receives. This seems odd, given most law reviews' pathological dedication to the minutiae of legal citation and writing style.

It reminded me of an interesting article I read a few weeks ago by Judge Posner titled "Against the Law Reviews." Posner noted that "the average quality of [editors'] suggested revisions is low," and that "the revisions they suggest (or impose) exacerbate the leaden, plethoric style that comes naturally to lawyers."

All of this begs the question: If law review rankings only value the number of times a journal is cited, and a pedantic obsession with style and citation rules is not improving the quality of law review articles, why do law review editors and members spend so much time and energy manufacturing arbitrary style and citation rules and forcing law professors to adhere to them?

Sure law reviews articles should cite sources accurately and consistently, but I think law reviews would be much more successful and much more useful if they focused more on publishing good scholarship and less on publishing perfect footnotes.

scalia thinks the poor are unimportant.

[abony holmes]

I take issue with Justice Scalia’s comment to University of Chicago Law’s Federalist Society: “I took nothing but bread-and-butter classes, not ‘Law and Poverty,’ or other made-up stuff…”

Since when is law, or poverty, or the intersection of the two made-up?  As someone who took Law and Poverty, I found it to be quite the bread and butter for a potential public interest attorney. Unlike Scalia, I believe the study of poverty is serious, and far from a waste of my time. Combing over the minutia of cases in “bread and butter” classes to prepare for a grilling by a Socratic professor to learn theory that will not be tested on the bar nor will benefit my clients in practice — now there is a big fat waste of time.

let's revisit this electronic casebook issue, shall we?

[justin gosling & abony holmes]

Remember Amazon's Kindle?  We talked about its shortcomings for the law school set here and here.  Well, the folks at Seattle PI clearly don't read The Shark, because they just ran a story about the need for an electronic casebook for law students.

Intrigued by the case against casebooks?  You're not the only one - and not just because law students are cheap.  There are also those of us who are environmentalists/minimalists with a hatred of the overuse and under-use of technology.

For the time being, we're not huge fans of electronic books for law school because the highlighting and writing in the margins of an ebook feels artificial (and many helpful law students have structured their outlines around them). Maybe Lexis and West will market an ebook of their own that is tailored for law students. Until that happens, plain vanilla electronic books may be great for reading novels, but they do not work as well for law school.

Also, I would hate to be the first person to 'fess up when called on in class that I am unable to participate because I forgot to charge my electronic book's battery.

The one thing that struck me in the Seattle PI article was the suggestion that law professors could just write their own books by selecting certain cases and building their lecture around the exact cases they want to use.

improving career services at king hall - an eight to ten point plan.

[brian lauter]

Remember when King Hall dropped 10 spots in the U.S. Rankings a few months ago? I’ll tell you who does: King Hall students and employers.

After most students blamed Career Services, Dean Rex Perschbacher promised better. Now, Sexy Rexy is out and Dean Kevin Johnson (“KJ” is the best we’ve been able to come up with so far) is in.

Yesterday, Dean Johnson sent out an email informing us all that the administration understood “the gravity of the situation” and that “a ten point plan of immediate steps that will be taken to improve counseling and other career services” was forthcoming.

Later in the day we received this ten point plan (after the jump). Reviews have been mixed. The favorite part of the plan, which has been suggested for years, is the creation of an alumni database so that students can contact King Hall alums for easy job hook-ups.

The plan also lists the creation of a Career Services Blog, which may seem a little gimmicky, but I think actually has some promise. It would be nice to have a central place to look for job related info and make suggestions.

A few of the ten points were less than well received. The last two points ("Reception for new Associate Director Kirsten Hill" and "Free Coffee and Lunch for the Rest of OCI") , for instance, seem to really be event announcements tacked on because a ten point plan sounds a lot better than an eight point plan.

A reception and free lunch are not points in a plan of immediate steps to improve Career Services, they are an event announcement and what your friend whispers to you in the library when there is pizza left over from a lunchtime meeting in the quad.

What I’m really curious about, and I haven’t been able to find an answer to this online, is whether these changes are old hat at other schools. Is King Hall just lagging behind the cutting edge in Career Services innovation, or are these ideas new?

At any rate, it is encouraging that the King Hall administration and Career Services are taking this situation seriously. Lots of changes at King Hall these days, and they seem to be for the better.

former california assemblywoman causes complete chaos by running for 1L rep at king hall.

[cynthia foster]

Thanks to a very jolly tipster, I have some gossip from King Hall to share with you all.  UCD students will no doubt already know about this going-on, but it's really a must-read for the rest of you.

King Hall's Law Student Association elections seem to have caused a bit of drama.  At the front of the fray we have Rebecca Cohn, a former assemblywoman from Saratoga and a 1L who may be the record holder for oldest student to enroll at King Hall (unverified).  This month she took her commitment to her school one step farther, and ran for LSA 1L Representative. 

Cohn, seen at the left in all her glory on the front of San Jose magazine, told the student body (in her election statement) that "being able to go to law school has been a lifelong dream of [hers]."  After a six year stint in the State Assembly, Cohn decided to enroll in law school to pursue a new manifestation of her career in public service: public interest attorney.

No doubt recognizing the tough road ahead of her, Cohn ran her 1L Representative campaign with some enthusiasm that stunned some students.  Her ascension to high profile student caused a commotion on campus that involved: a war over her Wikipedia entry, the re-use of signs from her assembly campaign, and several salacious rumors that are too inflammatory and unverified to repeat. 

Most of these rumors seem to stem from the report that her San Jose magazine cover (again, seen left) prompted two assembly aides to sue her for creating a sexually charged workplace.  (The case was later settled.)  Cohn, who is single, seems to be avoiding this situation at King Hall: the San Jose Mercury News reported that she has not been asked out on a date by a single King Hall student.

Cohn lost the election to fellow students Joshua Eisenberg and Kelly Martin, but she didn't go out without a fight. 

Included in her materials used to persuade the student body to vote for her are two letters of recommendation.  One, from Senator Gloria Negrete McLeod, praises Cohn's "world and legislative experience" and her "humor."  The other, from Assemblyman Charles Calderon, is a little more backhanded: "More than any other contribution you make as First Year Rep, you will serve as firsthand evidence to your classmates that life is what you make of it.  You are one tough 'Broad'."  Nice.  You can check out these letters for yourself here (from Sen. McLeod) and here (Assemblyman Calderon).  Also reproduced for you is Cohn's election statement, after the jump.

We congratulate Cohn on her raucous and exciting campaign, and only wish we could've been around ourselves to see it firsthand.  If you have any info or opinions you'd like to share, please do so in the comments.  We think this is all too hilarious to just go unnoticed.

For her part, Cohn seems to be handling her loss with some of her trademark "humor."

"Elections at the university level are like a Reese Witherspoon movie," she told the Mercury News. "It's about being young and Greek, the Barbie and Ken of the class or something."