The Shark

updates on depaul and university of illinois scandals.

[cynthia]

While we're all still feeling gross about Mark Sargent with prostitutes, let's take a moment to update ourselves on two more lingering law school administration scandals.

TaxProf is reporting that DePaul interim dean, state appellate judge Warren Wolfson, has rejected requests from some faculty members for his resignation. 

Wolfson, who was appointed without any involvement by the faculty after the university provost ousted Dean Weissenberger for being inadequate, wrote the following letter to those who requested he step down:

I have considered your oral and written requests that I resign my appointment as Interim Dean of the College of Law.  I respectfully decline.
You said in your letter that harm has been done to the law school's good name.  If so, the best way to repair the damage is to let go of whatever has occurred and work with me to enhance the school's future.
I assure you my first and only priority as interim dean will be to build on the accomplishments I inherit and to work to elevate the law school's standing in the national legal community. I will need the wholehearted cooperation, advice, and support of the faculty.  All of it.  When it comes time to sleect a permanent dean the faculty will, as President Holtschneider has promised, "play a full and traditional role in the search for a new dean."
I made only one commitment when I accepted the appointment. I said I would do my best to make this a law school the students and alumni can be proud of. With your help, I will keep that promise.

No movement yet on the various Facebook groups created to support ousted Dean Weissenberger.

The faculty over at University of Illinois has been busy with a letter-writing campaign, as well. A three-page letter to the Chicago Tribune, criticizing the paper for, er, over-criticizing the school made its way onto the paper's opinion pages. U of I recently made news when its law school's admissions office was revealed (by the Tribune) to be engaging in preferential admissions policies that resulted in the admission of underqualifed politically-connected students.

The letter insists that preferential admissions happen at many public universities (stating that none of the signers had ever worked at a university where they didn't happen), and even charges the Chicago Tribune to deny that its senior staff has never used the paper's reputation to assist in gaining a golden ticket to a university. 

The letter is co-signed by 16 faculty and staff, and has been identified (by me) as an "angry missive."

blagojevich scandal reaches university of illinois law school admissions office.

[cynthia]

In case you hadn't heard, it's WTF Is Up With Law School Administrators Week.

In addition to the drama at DePaul, things at University of Illinois are also reaching a "oh no they did not" boiling point, due to some investigative work done by the Chicago Tribune when they asked themselves: "What does it cost to get an unqualified student into the University of Illinois law school?"

According to the Tribune and internal emails released earlier in the week, all it costs is a handful of jobs for U of I law grads. Now that's taking a creative look at career services!

"In one e-mail exchange, University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman forced the law school to admit an unqualified applicant backed by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich while seeking a promise from the governor's go-between that five law school graduates would get jobs. The applicant, a relative of deep-pocketed Blagojevich campaign donor Kerry Peck, appears to have been pushed by Trustee Lawrence Eppley, who often carried the governor's admissions requests."

When Law School Dean Heidi Hurd balked on accepting the applicant in April 2006, Herman replied that the request came 'Straight from the G. My apologies. Larry has promised to work on jobs (5). What counts?'

Hurd replied: 'Only very high-paying jobs in law firms that are absolutely indifferent to whether the five have passed their law school classes or the Bar.'

Hurd's e-mail suggests that students getting the jobs are to be those in the 'bottom of the class.'"

I'm not really sure what to say about that. It looks like Illinois politicians aren't sure what to say, either. So far, a state commission has been convened to investigate those administrators implicated.

Dean Hurd apparently spent a lot of her work-time hating her students, as the emails characterized her as one who "showed [her] disdain for the special admits and even worked behind the scenes to campaign against them" at the same time as she was "[operating] a parallel admissions review for clouted students."

"I'll do my best to keep the number of Provostian admits to a minimum, and extract payment for them," Hurd wrote to her admissions staff in 2003.

At least 24 "special interest" students were admitted over a four year span, indicating that despite their dislike of politically-connected students, they weren't willing to give up the lucrative possibilities of their admittance. In a sense, these "clouted" students were admitted for their potential to serve the school, like really fucked up and sad athletes.

So why'd they do it? My guess: the US News rankings, of course! Job placement after graduation accounts for 18% of a school's US News ranking score.

JFK not afraid: new marketing push during an economic downturn.

[petra pasternak]

We predict no shortage of lawyers in the foreseeable future.

The blood letting in the legal profession has neither snuffed out the spirits of would-be first-years, nor the ambitions of one JFK law school. We've noted their enthusiasm on BART rides, as it seems every car has an ad for the school.

With a campus in Pleasant Hill, John F. Kennedy University School of Law remodeled and expanded its campus in Berkeley last summer and rolled out a new public interest law program (built on the curriculum core of the now-defunct New College law school). Now the tiny East Bay school is wooing more students to check it out. 

Chris Kanios, a professor and associate dean, says that the main university has plunked down more than $100,000 for an ad campaign to promote the law school’s new offerings. Billboards featuring actual JFK law students have punctuated the walls at select BART stations (pictured), the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and local airwaves for the past few weeks. Kanios said it’s a spring effort to attract up to 30 more students this fall, for a total first-year class of about 75 students, up from between 50 and 60 in past years.

So far, Kanios said that applications are up by about 13 percent over the same period last year. By April 30 last year, 95 had come in, compared with 108 by April 20 of this year. JFK will accept applications until July 1.

Where will all these people work in three years? 

“I do think that most people are confident that the economy will come back in the next few years,” Kanios said. With tuition costing $20,500, JFK is not cheap, but he notes that alums don’t typically go work in the largest firms that take the biggest beating during a downturn, he said. Though there is no career office to track alumni, Kanios says JFK grads end up working at small local firms (those with no more than 12 lawyers), and with local nonprofit agencies and in public sector jobs.

And JFK students don’t come in expecting that they’ll be as pampered as students in more mainstream schools, who rely on a summer internship formula that has – at least historically – had their future employment pegged by the second year of law school. “Here people have never had that expectation,” he said. “They’ve really had the expectation of finding their own way, and people have been doing that for years.” 

Maybe they’d have a few pointers for students at big-name schools who aren’t so used to fending for themselves?

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

berkeley professor spends years developing alternative to lsat.

[julie anne ines]

While I was preparing for the December 2008 LSAT, I couldn’t help but find other things the acronym stood for besides “Law School Admissions Test”. Lame, stupid and tedious. Long, scream-inducing, anxiety-stirring tripe. Long shot at T14.

It wasn’t just that the test is difficult. For me, it was. I also couldn’t understand how law schools could gauge how successful of a law student I would be from how effectively and quickly I could jump through logical reasoning, reading comprehension and logic game hoops. I didn’t think they could.

Apparently, there are those in the academic world who think the same way too. Criticism of the LSAT ranges from its accuracy at predicting law school success, to the hurdles it presents for some minority students, to its ability to find students who would make good lawyers.

But a team of professors at U.C. Berkeley say they have come up with a test that would be better at finding students who would succeed in the legal profession.

Retired professor Marjorie M. Schultz started investigating the matter after the passage of Prop. 209, which banned the consideration of race in school admissions.

The result of Schultz and colleague Sheldon Zedeck’s inquiry — which was funded by the organization that administers the LSAT, the Law School Admissions Council — was a test that measured not solely analytic ability, but also an individual’s ability to respond to hypothetical situations.

After administering the test to 1,100 practicing attorneys, the researchers concluded that while LSAT scores were not particularly useful “in predicting lawyer effectiveness, the new, alternative test results were — although the new test was no better at predicting how well participants would do in law school.”

Read what some admissions deans thought about the test here.

Got an opinion, or something else “LSAT” could stand for? Share your thoughts below!

irvine is the best law school. EVER.

[cynthia foster]

Never mind that it's yet to hold a class. Never mind that its short history has been fraught with politicking and conflict. Never mind that no one in the world wants another law school. Goddamn it, Irvine is amazing!!!

That's the message of the press release UC Irvine's new law school sent out today, announcing that they are the most competitive law school in the U.S. This, readers, is a Bogus Law School Stat. What's its qualification for being the big man on campus? It's accepted a mere 4% of its applicant pool, the lowest of any law school in the country.  Yale rings in at 7% and Stanford at 9%. Never mind that Irvine practically invited an outpouring of wildly underqualified applicants to pad these numbers by offering free tuition to its inaugural class. NEVER MIND.

Full release with lots of details after the jump.

kids still flocking to law school in droves. you know why? well, we don't.

[brian lauter]

It looks like the conventional wisdom is correct and the weak economy isn’t hurting law school applications after all.

A while back I mentioned some statistics showing that law school applications were down this year. Others were surprised, but not I. Instead of incurring thousands of dollars in debt to avoid the recession, I advised folks to “drop everything, curl up into the fetal position, hold your breath, and wait for it to be over.”

Apparently, the 0Ls of the world weren’t listening to me, because, according to Legal Writing Prof Blog, LSAC is repporting that as of February 27, 2009, law school applications are up 4.3% at private schools and 2.4% at public schools this year.

More on this when the all of the data become publicly available.

bad news bears and captain obvious sit down to discuss your future.

[brian lauter]

NALP released a report on 2008 fall recruiting yesterday and it contains all kinds of depressing statistics, many of them in the form of depressing charts. The gist of the report probably won’t surprise anybody (law student recruiting = worse than usual), but it’s always nice to have the numbers.

I know how annoying it is to click on things and read articles, so here are the highlights from the National Law Journal’s synopsis:

“About 90% of 2008 summer associates were offered full-time positions, compared to about 93% in 2007.”

And some bad news for 3Ls looking for jobs:

“Only 25% of firms said they recruited 3Ls not previously employed by them, compared to about 66% in recent years.”

And back to 2Ls:

“The median number of offers to 2Ls for summer associate positions at firms of all sizes fell from 15 in the fall of 2007 to 10 in the fall of 2008. The decline was even steeper at firms with 700 or more attorneys, where the median number of summer associate offers fell from 30 in 2007 to 18.5 in 2008.”

Finally, something for everybody:

“Close to half of law schools — 46% — reported a decrease of 5% or more in firm participation in recruiting activities.”

It’s not as bad being the bearer of bad news when everybody already knows the bad news you’re bearing.

Check out other bad news bearers ATL, The Blackbook Legal Blog, and Nuts & Boalts.

channel that one gender studies class you took in undergrad and understand rankings better.

[brian lauter]

I always just assumed that law school faculties hate law school rankings for the same reasons the rest of us do. It turns out, however, that they really hate them because rankings are the only form of discipline they’re ever subjected to.

In an article in the February issue of American Sociological Review, Professors Michael Sauder and Wendy Nelson Espeland apply the work of Michel Foucault to law schools and U.S. News rankings.

Foucault is a staple of college feminism classes, but he also, apparently, drew up a fairly well known sociological model of discipline and punishment. 

Sauder and Espeland argue that “Foucault’s insights about disciplinary power offer a compelling account of how cognitive, normative, and affective processes mediate members’ responses to environmental pressures, including multiple or coercive pressures from powerful outside organizations.”

Got it? Me neither, but it gets a little easier when you ignore Foucault. Sauder and Espeland essentially argue that rankings “discipline” law schools by acting as an external surveillance and normalization mechanism.

is free tuition enough to get scared students to school?

[cynthia foster]

For all of those interested in the free tuition program at UC Irvine's new law school, Petra has an interesting look over at Cal Law.  The story is free with registration, and includes a discussion with Director of Admissions Victoria Ortiz, formerly of Boalt.

"[Ortiz] and her staff at UC-Irvine's law school have been traveling to various corners of the country to recruit students at college fairs in places like New England, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Michigan and Minnesota. Ortiz has also met with pre-law advisers and with college clubs and societies. When candidates ask about job prospects, Ortiz points out the 70 or so employers that have pledged to at least interview on the law school's campus, including firms like Bingham McCutchen; Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis; Arnold & Porter; Irell & Manella; Morrison & Foerster and O'Melveny & Myers."

Petra also delves deeper into enrollment trends this year, and how schools are dealing with the uncertain applicant pool sizes.

To read more, check the story out here and continue to stay tuned into The Shark as we bring you more news on the changing climates law students and prospective law students are facing.

fetal position > law school.

[brian lauter]

Applications to Campbell Law School are up 20% this year!

It’s true, according to an article I read this morning on Carolina Newswire (they cover both Carolinas!).

Yes, I know you don’t care about Campbell Law School. I only mention it because the article quotes Campbell Law School’s Assistant Dean for Admissions Lewis Hutchison opining:

“It is interesting that the economy seems to be having no effect on applications. You would think the application count would be up overall given the state of the economy and job uncertainty, but it’s actually the exact opposite. In fact, 48 percent (96) of the 198 ABA approved law schools show a decline in the number of applications.”

I was surprised by Assistant Dean Hutchison’s statement, because, to me, incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt in the hopes of entering a field where most employers are instituting salary and hiring freezes and others are laying people off is not natural.

Assistant Dean Hutchinson is right about one thing: the conventional wisdom is that the number of grad/law/med school applications increases during recessions.

I suppose some people look to school as a way to ride out the rough economic times and emerge on the other side with a valuable degree. If we’re talking opportunity costs, the three years of income you lose while in law school will likely be worth less during a recession. Also, school is an especially attractive sanctuary if Mom and Dad are going to pay for it.  So, why are law school and grad school applications on the decline during this recession?

Dean Richard Matasar of New York Law School thinks people have figured out the great insidious law school hoax lottery shot conspiracy and are mad as hell and not going to pay for it anymore.

I think people have just discovered the wisdom in my instinctive recession survival strategy:  drop everything, curl up into the fetal position, hold your breath, and wait for it to be over.