The Shark

the nice side of law school: no one actually cares about what you don't know.

[cynthia]

I'm not sure if this is news to anyone or what, but I can be a sort of negative individual. Some might even say (and rudely, I might add) cynical. But every now and then I come across something that even I can't think of anything negative to say about. This happened to me today, with the Really? Law? post on the Socratic method (hat tip to Thanks, But No Thanks).

The 1L in charge over there had these things to say about any insecurity you may be feeling about that one time yesterday you got called on by the professor and had no idea what to say and felt trapped in the headlights and Oh My God!!!!!:

1. We don’t really care. We’re too busy focusing on what the professor says. 
2. We don't remember. Unless you keeping bringing it up after class. 
3. We’re not laughing at you. We all know that next week the professor might be drilling us and we may not have the answer. It’s not funny and we’re not laughing.
4. We don’t think you’re stupid. You just got caught on the one thing you didn’t know. Or you got flustered. Or you misunderstood the question. Or any number of things that don’t involve your intelligence. Law school is hard–for all of us. 

I think this is all really nice. And practical. For all the flak law students get for being ruthless and indiscriminate in their ruthlessness, it appears that there are those out there willing to stand up for the nice side of law school. Particularly in these uncertain times, it behooves us all to stand up for some normalcy, in the classroom and otherwise.

the professors' fallacy: making a case against the science of bar exam failure.

[patrick]

A UCLA School of Law researcher recently found that people who fail the bar-exam fare more poorly than even college graduates in the first five years after graduation but spring back in the later half of their careers.  By "spring back" the researcher refers to these numbers:

Broken down by age group, the median salary of law grads who never passed the bar was $32,000 before they reached the age of 30 (compared to $48,000 for lawyers and $35,600 for college grads), $48,000 from the ages of 30 to 39 (compared to $64,000 for lawyers and $42,000 for college grads), $54,000 between the ages of 40 and 49 (compared to $83,600 for lawyers and $46,250 for college grads), and $62,849 between the ages of 50 and 59 (compared to $86,400 for lawyers and $48,416 for college grads).

The article goes on to conclude that:

"Despite the resilience of the law grads who never passed the bar . . . their law school experience wasn’t worth the cost."

Wait, what?  But it gets better.  Law schools should take heed, because: 

“Legal education may be a disservice for the significant group of students that never pass a bar exam—a group whose composition can be predicted fairly accurately before they’ve even begun law school,” she says. “At the very least, law schools owe it to their prospective students to provide candid information about the risks of attending law school.”

The data is interesting, but the article frames it as what I've started calling the Professors' Fallacy; it makes a generalized observation about a whole, then it proceeds to the conclusion that concrete advice should be given in particular cases.  In this case, it suggests that "because people who share some similar traits to you fail the bar exam, you weren't cut out for law school."  

My objections to this are legion.  

first year humiliation: a rite of passage, always.

[julie anne]

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!

1L playbook: a grain of salt.

[dennis]

Last year during my 1L orientation, two female law review members came into my section’s room for a Q&A session.  

One of the girls was a blonde who wore a starched button-down, pencil skirt, and pumps. The other girl was a redhead who wore a school T-shirt, jeans, and flipflops. They looked like catalog models for Express and the school bookstore.

I don’t know if it was staged, but the two girls started sparring during the Q&A session.

Redhead: “I love, love, love Microsoft OneNote. I have amazing categories for all of my notes and can show y’all how to make custom functions!”
Blonde: “I don’t even bring my laptop to school. I hand-write all my notes.”
Redhead: “OneNote is really useful for your outlines. I make these sprawling outlines with multicolored tabbies!”
Blonde: “I don’t outline. I’m all about flash cards.”

They were tit-for-tat for the entire Q&A session: if the blonde did things one way, the redhead did the complete opposite.

Both girls were successful students and had completely different habits and personalities. The exchange really illustrated the cliché: “Do what works for you.”

Many of you 1Ls will find out that law students love to give advice. The motives for the advice givers are mixed (cue the Eurythmics). Some upperclassmen are condescending or just want to see how long it will take to make you cry, but I suspect that most students genuinely want to be helpful.

Just remember to take all advice with a grain of salt. There is no universal magic method or secret. Other law students can tell you what works for them, but ultimately you have to figure out what works for you.

life in law school: orientation! (wear comfortable shoes.)

[julie anne]

There are a several things I learned yesterday, during the Chapman School of Law 1L orientation.

First, law school orientation means swag. 

After signing in during orientation registration, the nice people behind the table handed me a nifty messenger bag with law school merch inside. I'm talking a lunch bag, an accordion file folder, a 1GB flash drive and a nice pen in a nice box. Awesome because I had yet to purchase a flash drive and was planning to purchase one. Not so awesome because I had decided to walk to school that morning.

Which brings me to the second thing I learned yesterday: Your business casual shoes that were kinda comfortable when you put them on at 7 a.m. are not so comfortable when you've been running around to get your student parking pass, your student ID, and your law books. 

My feet were so angry at me by the end of the day, that I decided to just wait on the hefty law tomes because I knew there was no way I was going to be lugging them home in addition to my laptop bag and my swag bag.

The third and final thing I learned yesterday - in addition to the usual stuff about succeeding in law school, being healthy in law school, not being a smelly hermit, etc. -  is that law school students are not so scary as they are sometimes made out to be and as I had imagined them to be.

Besides the tons of people who introduced themselves early on during orientation, the law students we were assigned to sit with during the lunch hour were more than willing to give us pointers on surviving law school, and also volunteered honest evaluations of some of the teachers listed on our schedules.

Sure, there were students who made unnecessary comments during some sessions, and some people who had already formed cliques and had erected their clique-y walls, but on the whole, everyone I met was friendly and open.

Turns out that the only enemies I had that day were my angry, mutinous feet.

whoopsy, i owe $400k to sallie mae!

[petra]

Can you say "a mountain of student debt?"

One former Hastings law student has made it into the New York Times, picture and all, for $400,000 in student loans earned over 26 years. 

The paper describes the lifetime of misfortunes that helped steer Robert Bowman, who’s 47, toward that astronomical sum.

His road to becoming a lawyer involved a childhood spent in foster homes, two tragic accidents and years of rehab, Hastings law school and international travel. He passed the New York bar exam in February 2008 on his fourth try.

While the committee of New York lawyers that reviews bar admission applications found his tenaciousness awesome, a group of state appellate judges didn’t agree.

They denied Bowman entry into law practice in the spring. “Applicant has not presently established the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law,” the NYT quotes them.

Bowman is now preparing to sue his way to practice, which, we’re guessing, won’t help lower that debt load. Any guesses on when he'll make his very first payment?

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

shame on you, law school cheaters! shame on you.

[julie anne ines]

Sometimes, I imagine law students, law school and the lure of high grades akin to throwing a bunch of hungry, ugly-cute baby sharks into a small tank with a juicy piece of red meat.

Besides being fiercely competitive over-achievers, these Type-A sharkies have been told their survival in the law school tank depends on them being able to get those yummy ‘As’ and ‘Bs’.

Which is why it came as no surprise when we wrote a couple weeks ago that the Syracuse University College of Law would be taking measures to flush out cheaters who used their bathroom breaks to cheat on exams.

It is also no surprise that the National Law Journal recently reported that students are seeing more gray areas between honesty and dishonesty, and are using technology and changes in testing administration to get ahead.

What is surprising, to me at least, is that law students still see cheating as a viable option.

We’ve all been told since kindergarten that “cheaters never win, and winners never cheat,” and that “the only person you cheat when you try to cheat is yourself.” Call me square and naive, but I think both quotes are true, especially in law school exams.

Yes, law schools use exams to gauge how you fare against your classmates. But students should also take advantage of exams as an opportunity to reflect on material learned and possibly predict how well they’d do on the bar exam.

If you cheat in law school, you may be able to stay afloat and keep swimming. But when you get into the bigger ocean out there, you’ll be eaten alive if you fail to know your stuff.

fark on law school.

[julie anne ines]

If you ever make it to the headlines of Fark.com, chances are you’re a more likely candidate for the Darwin Awards than a Nobel Prize. The folks in the stories listed at the user-submitted, news-aggregating site, for the most part, fell out of their family trees and are people you hope never reproduce - or at least do so somewhere other than America - much less practice law. As such, you’re never going to find a law student in the lineup. 

Ha.

That’s right. Sometimes the “leaders of tomorrow” end up as the Fark headlines of today. Here’s a list, from the least to the most egregious displays of “Dude! Get out of my future profession!” behavior out there.

No. 6

Headline: Law student with new car was "trying to impress his girlfriend" when police clocked him at 126 mph on George Washington Parkway. Well, it did get him on Fark, that'll impress her pants off too. (Here’s a link to the story)
Published: May 12, 2006
Comments:
FRCP_61: What? You mean the fact that he was a GW law student wasn't enough to impress her in the first place? What more does this woman want!?!?!?

Read what the Fark world thinks of your peers, after the jump.

ignore u.s. news? it won't go away.

[brian lauter]

The U.S. News law school rankings should be out in about a week (check out the countdown clock), unless they're leaked early, like last year's were. This, of course, would be more climactic if half of the nation's incoming law students hadn't already made their enrollment decisions.

Last week, Brian Leiter requested that law bloggers not post the rankings at all, because they're "meaningless, often perniciously so."

I agree with Professor Leiter regarding the merits of U.S. News' rankings system. The U.S. News rankins are methodologically weak and often manipulated. However, I think Professor Leiter is wrong in requesting that bloggers not post the rankings. The rankings will be published somewhere, and their prevalence is such that ignoring them really does nothing to mitigate their influence.

The rankings should be posted and publicly critiqued. Writing about the underlying data while ignoring the final result weakens the argument of those critical of the U.S. News system and essentially amounts to backing away from a fight.

I know that there are times when backing away from a fight is a good idea, but I believe the argument against the U.S. News rankings has been gaining momentum of late. Professor Leiter has done great work critiquing the rankings, and he has support.

With all of the recent changes in the economy and the legal industry, now is the time for Professor Leiter and others like him to really attack the U.S. News> methodology and expose, again, the ridiculousness of their rankings. In my humble opinion, a reasoned attack works best when it exposes an opponents' weaknesses, not when it ignores them.

Professor Leiter is right that most people know the rankings are "garbage," but, as my roommates will attest, when you ignore garbage, it just keeps piling up.

autoadmit "exec" sues mark lemley and two victims of the message board's claim to fame: vitriol.

[brian lauter]

The National Law Journal reported yesterday that a U.S. District Court is allowing Anthony Ciolli, former Chief Education Director for AutoAdmit, to move ahead with his lawsuit against Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley and others for wrongful initiation of civil proceedings, abuse of process, libel, and a host of other claims.

Professor Lemley was a member of the legal team for Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, two Yale Law students who sued Mr. Ciolli and others for statements made on AutoAdmit.com.  Nobody I mentioned this to had any idea what this was about, so I wrote a summary of the AutoAdmit saga to bring you up to date:

AutoAdmit is a website designed for college students, grad students, law students, and lawyers.  It’s best known for its unmoderated law school discussion board, where socially and sexually repressed law students anonymously write ridiculously offensive things about their classmates.  There may also be more legitimate uses, but they don’t really matter.

Back in 2007, anonymous posters wrote some bad stuff about Iravani and Heller.  One of them thought that the comments ruined her job prospects when they came up in Google searches run by law firms she was interviewing at.

About a month later,  Iravani and Heller, then known as Does 1 and 2, filed a lawsuit against Anthony Ciolli and a bunch of pseudonyms, alleging copyright infringement, false light, defamation, etc.  If you want to read what the posters actually said, check out the complaint (pdf), but beware, its offensive stuff.

Nobody really understood why Mr. Ciolli was named in the suit, because he didn’t actually write anything on the site and, as an administrator, he was protected from liability by statute.  Regardless, Mr. Ciolli’s post-graduation offer was rescinded by his law firm due to his association with AutoAdmit and the lawsuit.

Also, folks got pretty concerned about the possibility of suing anonymous posters on websites.  Apparently, it’s becoming common practice to name pseudonyms in lawsuits, and then to track down their IP addresses and get their names.  The Yale students’ lawyers managed to track down a few of the posters that way and added them to the amended complaint (pdf).

Then, in late 2007, the Yale students amended their complaint to leave Mr. Ciolli out of the lawsuit entirely.  Mr. Ciolli, of course, turned right around and filed suit (pdf) against the Yale students and their lawyers for wrongfully including him in the original lawsuit.

There are a few subplots, but that’s the gist of it.  Today’s news, that Mr. Ciolli’s lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss, means the AutoAdmit saga will likely become even more outrageous in the coming months.