Remember the poor guy who wasn't given a license to practice in NY because of his $400k student loan debt?  Well,this guy hasn't had his license taken away, but he's trying to navigate through the bankruptcy system with almost that much student debt.  I'll leave the legal issues surrounding discharging student debt in bankruptcy to the experts, but I'm much more interested in the issue of how much student loan is even reasonable.

This Lewis & Clark student graduated in 2000 (nine years ago) with student loan debt that was listed as more than $360k when he filed for bankruptcy in 2005.  So, what's the monthly payment on that kind of student loan?  The judge thought that if he had taken advantage of an federal repayment program (consolidation?), his payments would have been $629 a month.  Not fun, but not unthinkable, compared to car payments, mortgage payments, rents, childcare costs, etc.  But, the debtor seems to have other expenses (child support) and a decreasing amount of income.  (His three jobs since graduation have been judicial clerk in Saipan, legal aid attorney in Alaska, and most recently, a Kelly temporary worker (presumably non-legal?).  So, one would think with that kind of debt, that he's picking the best work opportunities he has.  Perhaps his grades were poor?  Perhaps he has trouble taking the bar?  Unclear, but the judges that have heard his case seem to put his limited income down to lack of ambition and personal decisions.  This Chronicle of Higher Education article says that Mr. Jesperson, 43, has followed a nonlinear path, finishing college in 11 years and law school in 4 (at 2 institutions), but that he did pass the bar on the first try (Alaska?  Minnesota?  Unclear.)  Also, he is now working as a temporary legal services worker for $25/hour.

I think these two cases in tandem should force debate on some important issues with respect to law schools, students and student debt load.  How much is too much?  Just as we have learned that just because someone can qualify for a home loan doesn't mean that repayment is even feasible, we have to force debate on the mathematical reality that the more student debt one has, the more income one must have to repay that debt.  And, although there has historically been a correlation between mortgage principal and home FMV, car loan to resale value, there is not a direct correlation between law school cost and law degree value.  This is a reality.  Schools with poor employment stats do not necessarily have cheaper sticker prices than schools with great employment stats.  Within a school, students with high grades and higher probabilities of post-graduation income may even pay less than other students because of scholarships.  In other words, some of the students with the most debt at graduation may be the least able to repay that debt. 

I graduated having taken out the maximum amount of federal loans for my institution, but that number seems so small now and that time seems like a whole different era.

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Layoff Tracker: "As of July 5, 2009, over 12,829 people have been laid off by major law firms (4,985 lawyers / 7,844 staff) since January 1, 2008."

Seems like a perfect time to start a new law firm.

Dion Persson is seizing the opportunity with gusto. Dion and I worked together at Skadden in Delaware, and for the past 15 years, he has been working in house and as Senior Vice President at Johns Manville. Now he is trying to build a national law firm that would provide services only to small businesses and entrepreneurs.

So far, Simplicity Law has two lawyers, with a few others on call. Dion tells me that this is an attempt to "build the law firm of the future," which is exactly what you would expect him to say. But could it be more than just a marketing pitch?

Dion is imagining a "new model" of law firm, one that relies on technology to provide super-fast service at fixed costs for many of the more-or-less routine transactions that arise in the small business context. Among the many things I like about the idea is the possibility that Simplicity Law will be more amenable to lawyers who are stay-at-home moms or otherwise have a hard time making it in the traditional law firm model. I am rooting for Simplicity Law.

But what do you think? Have you seen anything like this before? Is Dion onto something?

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[During the week of July 6-10, I reported for jury duty in my county.  I will obviously not post about any substantive issues (I'm not silly enough to Twitter pictures like Al Roker or give updates on a trial on my Facebook page!)  But, a lot of us are interested in the process of jury service, and I'm enjoying the "fly on the wall" experience, so I thought I would share thoughts when appropriate.  Unfortunately, I have no substance to leak -- I was never even chosen for a panel.  As a big law geek, I was very disappointed.]

Jury duty here seems fairly humane, we meet at 9:30 the first day, but after that we check in electronically at night to see if we are needed the next day, and at what time.  This beats sitting around for hours, so that's good.  Over the course of the week, I am only "called in" on Wednesday, at which time half of us are put on a panel, and the other half is released.  In essence, my jury service consisted of an orientation and dialing in to a call-in number.  So, I'll blog about orientation! 

During orientation, we're given recorded audio information from a judge and from the head of security at the courthouse.  (In 1999, a man threw a firebomb into a courtroom; luckily, no one was seriously injured, but everyone remembers it.)  So, if you had to provide a 15-minute overview to jurors about jury duty, what would you include?  According to a colleague, the debate over what to put in these orientation videos is fairly robust -- it's an important problem. 

First and foremost, you want jurors to feel good about their service, so you can't treat them as potential firebombers or Al Rokers.  So, the safety information (basically, what you can't bring into the courthouse) is framed as being in the jurors' interest.  So, no one can bring in a cell phone.  Not because we think you will text anyone sensitive information or taint the jury pool.  This is so no one can take your picture and compromise your safety.  (Funnily enough, no one said we couldn't bring in a camera, and they specifically said laptops were ok, and I saw a juror with a Nintendo DSi, which can take pictures.) 

The most interesting part for me came when the judge was trying to tell potential jurors that we could not conduct our own independent investigations, and that's the part I most want to post about.  I am told that courthouses struggle with what information to put in these orientation videos (audio in our case).  At some point, information can become too much information, and sometimes telling jurors what not to do gives them ideas they didn't have!  Another issue is what information to give the jury pool as a whole, and what information to give only once a jury is empaneled.  And apparently the Internet has blown this issue wide open.  I looked on the web and saw discussions about whether jurors should specifically be instructed not to Twitter, not to use Facebook, not to Google the attorneys and parties in the case, and not to use Wikipedia.  This NYT article gives a good picture at modern-day juror problems in our technological era.  In Champaign, we were told not to read the "court" section of the local paper, which seems so 20th Century!

OK, so how is the court supposed to broach the subject of independent investigation?  Now, with the advent of the Internet, jurors who ordinarily wouldn't bother to go look at a crime scene or otherwise retrace investigation steps might want to look up facts about scientific evidence, backgrounds of witnesses, maps of locations, anything!  Of course, the real reason that juror investigations are not allowed is we don't trust jurors to conduct thorough and valid investigations and research!  OK, that's not going to go over well on a jury orientation video.  The other, even less generally satisfying explanation is the system relies on the two parties to bring in all evidence, which is vetted by a judge according to the rules of evidence, and jurors have to work with the facts they are given, however limited.  Again, that 30-second explanation is not going to go over well.  So, how do you frame this warning so that (1) jurors aren't insulted; (2) jurors don't get the sense that "the system" is completely screwed up;  and (3) you don't give people ideas they wouldn't have thought about?

Well, our judge even said that she had given a lot of thought on how to describe the juror's role.  When she explained why jurors should not conduct independent investigations, she gave two examples, which I could see being completely dismissed by certain types of jurors.  In her first example, she stated that jurors shouldn't go look at an intersection that is the subject of a car accident case.  The reason given was that the intersection may have changed.  Really?  How often do intersections change?  I guess the lighting, the foliage, the traffic density may be different, but she didn't really say that.  I can see a juror saying, "Well, I know that this intersection hasn't changed in the past three years, so I'm going to go take a look at it." 

The other example she used attempted to tiptoe into the "Internet problem," which the more I think about it is huge and only going to get worse.  She said that in a trial, you might hear scientific evidence and have more questions, so you may be tempted to get on the Internet to find out more information.  But, she said, this is not allowed because, among other reasons, we all know that anyone can put anything on the Internet, so you never know what information is there.  Again, I can see a juror saying, "Well, I'll just go to a trusted site, like the CDC."  She didn't specifically mention the rules of evidence, although she tried to give an "I know your pain" story by saying that in bench trials, she sometimes has a lot of questions, but she can't do her own independent investigation either.  (But of course, she knows what evidence was excluded and why, and she can call for briefings/hearings.)

And of course, this admonition never got into the don't Tweet, don't Facebook, don't Google the parties, don't use Wikipedia when you want to know something; don't use Google maps to see how far apart things are, etc.  Maybe it's best to keep it short and sweet, but I just wonder if "don't use the internet to research scientific evidence" doesn't leave open all these other opportunities.  And, if you've never thought about the rules of evidence, couldn't you completely innocently think, "You know, they never have said anything about the background of the defendant.  I'm going to Google him just to see what kind of person he is."  Wow.

How will this change trial procedure?  More instructions?  Shorter trials, so jurors can't go home and surf the net?  More sequestration?

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Both my co-blogger Gordon and I have had the privilege of teaching separately at the two law schools in Wisconsin (Gordon at Wisconsin and me at Marquette), although neither of us benefitted from the diploma privilege bestowed on the students who graduate from those schools.  As most people know by now, those graduates do not have to take the Wisconsin bar exam and many become fully licensed attorneys the Monday morning after graduation.  And this has peeved some out-of-state plaintiffs, who say that the state of Wisconsin is violating the U.S. Constitution.  Their federal lawsuit was dismissed by the trial court, but on appeal Judge Richard Posner has reversed and remanded (and it doesn't look good for the diploma privilege).  Gordon had blogged on this ongoing lawsuit after oral arguments.

Posner did cite a blog post in his opinion, but not a Glom post (sigh).  He did cite a thoughtful post by my former Marquette colleague Eric Goldman, who was also a non-Cheesehead in the Land of Cheese for awhile.

Posner seems to want more facts on exactly how Wisconsin-y the curricula at Wisconsin and Marquette are.  Gordon has argued that his curriculum was Wisconsin-y, but I didn't see a lot of this at Marquette.   No one ever gave me any parameters as to what to teach in my courses beyond a slim course description, which I don't remember mentioning Wisconsin.  Of course, I may be jaded because, like Eric, I am no fan of the privilege.  I think it skews the incentives of graduates to stay in the Milwaukee area, limiting their own opportunities and saturating the market.  It may also incentivize applicants with low success indicators to borrow large amounts of money to go to law school because, if accepted, they are almost guaranteed a law license at the end of three years.

Posner was quick to point out to the plaintiffs that the case is surely not going to end with the state of Wisconsin granting the diploma privilege to all U.S. law school graduates.  The plaintiffs will still have to take the bar.  But, Posner acknowledges that the benefit to them (thus granting them standing) will be to compete in a legal market without barriers unique to out-of-state law school graduates.

The last point that I will make is that Posner almost seems to buy the argument that a state that is a market participant may favor its own, such as a state school benefitting in-state applicants with lower tuition.  So, the diploma privilege may be a form of in-state discount.  But, Posner point out, this argument is not available for Marquette.  I would hate to see an outcome whereby Wisconsin students had the diploma privilege but Marquette did not.  I don't think Marquette wins a lot of the head-to-head competition for students, but it does compete head-to-head for jobs in Wisconsin for its graduates.  I think that result would be the worst -- it would just add Marquette graduates to the pool of plaintiffs harmed by the diploma privilege, and the harm would be felt on a daily basis (or at least every graduation season).

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In the latest Planet Money podcast, Which Teacher's Worth More Money?, Robert Frank comments on the Business Week ranking of business schools, which depends in part on a survey of student satisfaction:

While the most prominent ranking of law schools does not depend on a survey of student satisfaction, law teachers feel some pressure to play to the crowd. At most schools, student evaluations matter for promotion and tenure, and most deans consider student evaluations when measuring job performance. Plus, let's face it, it's nice to be liked. But do evaluations correlate with learning? Probably not, at least not the way most schools do evaluations.

Even when student evaluations are done well, one might reasonable question the ability of current students to judge the quality of what they are learning. The University of Wisconsin Law School has a clever way of signaling its preference for practical learning, and that was to allow recent graduates to select the teacher of the year. (See details here.) Even this, however, does not tell us much about whether our students are being well trained.

Despite huge changes in legal education over the past several decades, some lawyers continue to complain that "legal training is inferior." Compared to what? Well, in the case of the linked article, compared to medical training. It seems to me we can't get very far by comparing legal education to medical training, so I am left to wonder, how do we measure the quality of our instruction?

Bar passage rates say more about the quality of the inputs (the students we admit) than the outputs (the students we graduate). Job prospects for almost everyone have dimmed a bit over the past year or two, but they tend to reflect the prestige of the law school, which has more to do with the publication record of the professors and the LSAT scores of the students than the quality of the training program. Feedback from employers is something, but it's only anecdotal evidence, and the baseline for these evaluations is often a mythical super-graduate who more closely resembles a fifth- or sixth-year associate than any law school graduate I have ever known.

Despite the difficulties in measurement, I believe that anyone who stands on my side of the podium realizes that what we do can make a difference. We realize when our students have learned a lot and when we may have fallen short. We hear it in class discussions, we read it in papers and exam answers. So until I find a more objective measure, my plan is to rely on those bits of evidence as I continue to evaluate and improve my own teaching. If you have a better idea, I am open to suggestions.

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As soon as our new Dean announced my appointment as Associate Dean for Faculty and Curriculum, my email inbox started to fill with various messages relating to law school administration. Among these messages was one that linked approvingly to Paul Lippe's "Welcome to the Future: Time for Law School 4.0."

On my first spin through the article, I thought it was just another rant on legal education, but Bill Henderson caused me to take a closer look. Bill uses the article as a springboard for talking about the apprenticeship model, but I am not sure Bill fully appreciated Paul's radical proposal. Bill asks, "is it appropriate to shorten law school to two years?" But that is not what Paul is proposing. Here is a quick outline of Law School 4.0:

That last bit is where I did a double take: law school is technically three years, but law students receive only one year of classroom instruction!

Given that clinical instruction is much more expensive than classroom instruction, I think it's fair to say that Paul's proposal would increase substantially the debt burden of most law graduates. And while we might be able to argue about it, I am pretty confident that Paul's proposal would not produce fully functioning lawyers. Even if a year of clinical work and a year-long externship taught them substantial lawyering skills, graduates from Paul's law school would suffer from having a much narrower exposure to substantive law than current law graduates. My guess is that Paul would concede that fully functioning lawyers need both lawyering skills and a knowledge of substantive law,* and his proposal simply strikes a different balance on instructional priorities than current law schools.

All law schools attempt to balance these instructional priorities, but the hard question is, what is the right balance? As I have observed in a prior post, "More this and more that inevitably means less of something else." So if you are going to reform legal education, you need to identify the opportunity costs. To his credit, Paul is willing to name his sacrifice: instruction in substantive law.

But we need more detail, and it should be easy to produce. What I want to know is this: if you had only one year of classroom instruction -- that's about 30 credits worth of classes -- what would you teach? Or, stated another way, what would you leave for the students to learn on the job? Once we know that, we can talk more intelligently about whether students would be better able to acquire missing lawyering skills (under the current system) or missing substantive knowledge (under Paul's proposal) while engaged in the practice of law.

* When I refer to knowledge of substantive law, I intend to include the skill of legal analysis, which is the primary skill taught in many substantive law courses. One possible implication of Paul's proposal is that law students would obtain less training in legal analysis, one of the areas in which law schools shone, according to the Carnegie Report.

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So, I'm sure you've all seen this story.  Robert Bowman, who reminds me of the joke "Someone gets mugged every 3 minutes in this country, and boy, is he mad," has weathered a lot of obstacles and bad luck in his Odyssey to complete college, law school, and an LL.M.  Now, at 47, after passing the New York bar on his third time, an appellate court has held that he cannot receive a license because he has amassed student loan debt of over $400,000 over the past 26 years without any serious effort to pay down that amount.

I guess my first reaction is sympathetic.  So what?  The State of California is paying its bills in I.O.U.s this month, and there are thousands of Americans who owe $400,000 on houses with the fair market value lower than Barbie's dream house.  It doesn't appear that Bowman is in default on his loans -- he has taken valid deferrals.  It does appear that he is disputing some of the amounts (interest and fees on various loans over 26 years probably does get complicated), but he's not a shirker.  Just a deferrer.  If the court is worried about the lenders, then denying Bowman a license to charge clients for legal services seems a little backwards to me.

If the NY state judges are uncomfortable with someone legally amassing this much federally-guaranteed debt, then they should alert their federal legislators about the possibility that the student loan program spawns "lifetime students" who make deferring a way of life.  But don't take your annoyance out on Mr. Bowman.  Just because he has a large loan balance doesn't necessarily mean he'll steal clients' money or abscond with retainers.

Has the financial crisis created some anti-debt backlash?  My retirement account is barely there now, and it's all the fault of people like you, Mr. Bowman, who borrow with no thought for the future?  We need to show this promiscuous borrowers that good people won't stand for it!

I saw a quip the other day that now there are 3 kinds of people:  the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-Not-Paid-For-What-They-Haves.  This may be a (sort of) funny Twitter, but it's not good state bar policy.

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Friend of Glom Kim Krawiec has been guest-blogging over at the Faculty Lounge and, no surprises here, has had some interesting and thought-provoking posts:

My Tenure's For Sale.  How About Yours?

Incentives and Institutions: Why Stop With the Banks? (My Tenure's For Sale, Part II)

When It Comes to Law Faculty, We're All Post-Modernists (My Tenure's For Sale, Part III)

"We All Contribute in Our Own Ways" is Not a Valid Institutional Goal (My Tenure's for Sale, Final Installment)

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My colleague, Mary Hoagland, pointed me to the "Roundtable on the Future of Lawyer Hiring, Development, and Advancement," sponsored by the National Association for Law Placement, Inc., where 19 "industry leaders" did the following, among other things:

• Expressed great interest in development of an apprenticeship model of lawyer training;

A closer look at the transcripts reveals that this idea was floated by Glom friend and legal industry guru, Bill Henderson:

The group also "[c]oncluded that increased competition will create new demands for lawyer training." Training by whom? Based on the transcripts, the group was of two minds about this. We get the obligatory reference to new associates "hitting the ground running," but lots more talk about the need for firms to invest in training. Like this:

And we circle back to apprenticeship:

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I was at the beach last week, but I thought I was keeping up with recent events (you know, Jon & Kate, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett).  So I was surprised when someone yesterday mentioned that the University of North Texas was opening a law school.  I did a little Googling today and found very little mention of this in any of the large newspapers of the state.  Brian Leiter linked to this, which was the most information in one place I could find.  But yes, UNT is opening a law school, the legislature and Gov. Rick Perry approved it, the school will be in downtown Dallas (not Denton, with the rest of the campus), the school plans to open its doors in 2011, and the $40 funding bill is still sitting in the legislature.

So, being a native Texan, a graduate of Texas Tech and the University of Texas, a former Houston attorney, and a former instructor at the law schools at Texas Tech and the University of Houston, I have a few thoughts. 

So, does Texas need a tenth law school?  Well, that depends.  Why does any state need an additional law school?  It's hard to imagine that a state with nine law schools is suffering from residents having a hard time finding adequate representation.  We know that graduates this year are having a tough time finding opportunities to represent clients!  I am sure many Texans have a hard time finding affordable representation, but it's not clear another hundred or two attorneys a year will bring down prices, although it could.  Now, it could be that some communities in a large state are underserved and lack good legal resources.  If you look at a map of Texas, there is a huge part of the state that has no law school, west of San Antonio, south of Lubbock. Also remember that New Mexico only has one law school, which is in the northern part.

View Larger Map

But the UNT law school will put another law school in the corridor that already has nine, in a "metroplex" that already has two law schools. But, the argument must be, Dallas has no public law school (Southern Methodist University and Texas Wesleyan are private, and presumably pricey.) A public law school in an urban center will make a law school education more accessible, if tuition is more public-like than private-like.  (This website, using old 2006-07 data, shows U. of Texas being $18k for in-state, more than in-state tuition at Texas Tech, $12k, but less than Texas Wesleyan, $21k, and Southern Methodist, almost $39k).

Back in the day, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Texas A&M wanted to affiliate with South Texas School of Law in Houston, the powers-that-be supposedly balked because Houston didn't need another public law school and other parts of the state, such as the Rio Grande Valley, had neither law schools nor medical schools.  (Note that El Paso, a large urban center, has no law school.)  The new UNT law school may have been part of a compromise that could bring a medical school to the Rio Grande valley.

Brian Leiter notes that SMU won't see much competition from the new school.  I predict that the school that feels its market share threatened is Texas Tech, set in my hometown of Lubbock.  Downtown Dallas will offer more clinical opportunities, more part-time work opportunities, more on-campus interview opportunities, and simply a bigger market for graduates.  Dallas also offers applicants' spouses more career opportunities.  That being said, Lubbock has a very low cost of living and a lot of other great things to offer, but I'm sure this new school has not gone unnoticed by the administration at Texas Tech.

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Two years ago, I was asked to offer some advice to then-incoming Dean Erwin Chemerinsky as he builds the law school at UC-Irvine. Paul Caron asked me to be provocative, so I obliged, advising the Dean to "concentrate your resources on what law schools (should) do better than legal employers – classroom instruction." That may not seem so provocative, but the corollaries -- eliminate the legal writing program, moot court competitions, student-edited law reviews, clinics, or any other co-curricular offerings -- inspired a lively discussion on the blog, and I have been told by more than one legal writing instructor that the discussion continued in other fora. All to the good, in my view.

With regard to legal writing, I say a bit more here, but that is not the focus of this post. Here I am more interested in the continuing debate about skills training. In a particularly thoughtful follow up to my original post, Steve Hurley at Wisconsin wrote this:

With that background, I was particularly interested in this story about Drinker Biddle and this story about the Howrey law firm, both of which are creating a new skills training program for young associates. The idea is to pay new associates a smaller salary in exchange for a much lower number of billable hours. Instead of billing clients, new associates will be able work on pro bono matters and receive skills training from experienced lawyers.

These changes were prompted by the recent economic downturn (ATL: "Instead of just firing associates, deferring first years, no offering summers, or instituting across the board salary cuts, Howrey seems to be trying to do a little more than waiting for the recession to end."), but I hope they portend a movement by firms to take greater responsibility for skills training, rather than blaming law schools for not doing something that we are ill-equipped to do well.

Thanks to my colleague Cliff Fleming for bringing these developments to my attention.

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As a follow-up to my post below on the surplus of funds earmarked for investor restitution from the 2003 $1.5M Global Settlement on Analyst Conflicts, I wanted to circle back to the amounts that were earmarked for "investor education."  Three years ago, it had become clear that this huge fund was not being used particularly well by the states or at all by the federal government.  Around that time, the  SEC successfully petitioned the court to allow it to give it to the NASD (now FINRA) for use by its foundation.  However, according to Judge Pauley's rebuke this week, FINRA has done no better, using only a pitiful fraction of its $55M investor education fund ($6.5M in substantive uses, $800k for administrative uses in past 3 years). 

One of the proposed uses of the $80M surplus of investor restitution funds was to give it to FINRA to be used for investor education.  Judge Pauley's response to this proposal was very negative, noting that the average grant from FINRA was $200,000 but cost $21,000 to process:  "To put it mildly, the FINRA Foundation's performance has been disappointing."

Perhaps more interestingly, several law school clinics focusing on aid to harmed investors proposed that the surplus money be donated to law school investor aid clinics.  However, Judge Pauley explained that he could not do so because none of the parties to the consent decree would consent to that plan, however attractive.  In fact, Pauley went on to say:

The history of this case suggests that those clinics might have been better shepherds of an investor education program than the SEC or the FINRA Foundation. One of the clinics [Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law] advises the Court that its grant request was denied by the FINRA Foundation because the Foundation is apparently barred from "funding ongoing clinical activities." (citation omitted) The FINRA Foundation appears to be having difficulty identifying investor education programs deserving support. If such a restriction exists, perhaps the SEC can prevail on the FINRA Foundation to amend its guidelines to fund grants to qualified law school clinics. Moreover, this Court invites the SEC and the FINRA Foundation to collaborate on proposals with realistic time lines to administer investor education projects so that the funds in these cases will be disbursed by the 10th anniversary of the September 2, 2005 Order.

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In cleaning up my home office today, I stumbled over a half-read series of "thought papers" from the ABA Section on Legal Education -- Out of the Box Committee. So I decided to finish the task.

The Committee describes its work as "the legal academy's most recent attempt at broad-ranging critical introspection," and though I haven't read their previous publications, I enjoyed reading the thought papers. Not because they are terribly original (they aren't), but because they are not watered down by the need to achieve consensus. The papers have an attitude. A few highlights:

• Globalization: "Given the inescapable march of globalization and the pervasiveness with which the law permeates the U.S. society, law schools have a unique obligation to prepare their graduates to practice in a global environment. It is unfortunate for the students and disastrous for the country that most law schools have failed so miserably. Our efforts have been shameful."
  Suggestions for improvement include ...
  • Valuing international experience as much as PhDs among new faculty hires
  • Changing tenure standards to affirmatively encourage international and comparative scholarship
  • Recruiting foreign-trained academics for faculty positions
  • Changing accrediting standards to allow for more innovative affiliations between U.S. and foreign law
  • These changes would lead to changes in the curriculum: more international perspectives in the classroom and more opportunities to study meaningfully (i.e., not in a typical summer abroad program) outside of the U.S.
• "Law and ...": In a very sarcastic entry, the author chides law professors for being dismissive of traditional legal analysis, which is said to be "fine for mere lawyers and judges, but is beneath the dignity of the true academic." If you believe this diagnosis, then you might worry about the implications: bright law students do not receive sufficient encouragement to pursue academic careers, appointments processes place too much weight on serious post-law school scholarship, and law faculty are "increasingly dominated by ... people [who] are brilliant neither in the 'law' nor in the 'and.'" And for reasons unexplained, these "law and" professors "are not interested in teaching their students (almost all of whom will become lawyers) the 'law,' and even when they are interested in teaching the law, they're often not very good at it." (That's a fine piece of reasoning right there.) The cure here is obvious: hire more brilliant lawyers and let them pair up with scholars from other disciplines, if that sort of work would be helpful to anyone.
• The four-year law school: No, I am not kidding. One of the papers makes the case for extending law school to four years "to retain the competitive advantage of American lawyers in an increasingly globalized world." It seems to me that globalization pushes the other way. Given that law is an undergraduate degree in other countries, U.S. lawyers are already spending 1-3 more years in the classroom than their counterparts in Europe, for example. If globalization knocks down barriers to law practice among nations, I suspect we will observe more pressure to reduce the length of law school, especially given concerns about student indebtedness.

The basic points here are quite well worn and together they add up to a unified complaint: law schools do not adequately train law students. People both inside and outside the academy are forever complaining about various supposed shortcomings of legal education, but the longer that I work in legal education, the less patience I have for these complaints. The reason? The complainers seem to have no concept of opportunity cost.

More this and more that inevitably means less of something else. Of course, we could expand the length of legal training, as suggested by one of the thought papers, but that proposal has its own opportunity costs, and they are substantial. Moreover, as noted, it's just not going to happen. So this is what I want to know: given three years for law school, if you want more globalization or more ethics or more skills training, what are you going to sacrifice to get that thing? If you can tell me that, then we can have a decent conversation.

With respect to the Committee's thought papers, one proposal was to have fewer interdisciplinary professors/courses and more professors/courses focused exclusively on law. Would law graduates be better in any meaningful sense if we made that trade? Another way of asking that might be whether law graduates in the 1960s were better than law graduates today.

Another proposal would encourage more time on matters related to globalization, presumably at the expense of time spent on domestic law or under the tutelage of a master of U.S. law. What's the baseline here? When I was in law school, I took classes from a Swedish professor, a German professor, and a British professor. And I wrote a paper on the EU Merger Regulation under the supervision of Diane Wood. All of that was in the 1980s. So we want to ramp up from that to something more inclusive of global concerns? When do we know that we have enough globalization in the curriculum?

By pushing back on the would-be reformers, I am not suggesting that law schools have no need to improve, but rather than "improvements" are largely a matter of taste, involving difficult trade-offs with no clear metrics for evaluating the effect of changes. The condescending tone of many of the thought papers suggests that the authors have not come to terms with the difficulty of assessing these trade-offs.

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All you need to know about these rankings is that BYU and the University of Chicago are tied ... and there are 11 of 102 schools below them.

Ok, maybe that's not all. Also, BYU has the "most dateable student body" (tied with, among others, Yale?), even though half of our students (just a guess ... maybe I should have written "a lot" instead of "half") are married. And BYU is tops in one other category: least alcohol consumption. That makes sense, but what is going on at Rutgers-Newark? Not much alcohol drinking, apparently.

The only T-14 school ranking below Chicago on the overall party rankings? Penn.

The least dateable student body -- determined by survey questions relating to "attractiveness, douchebagginess, bitchiness, 'just friends'-iness, and personal dating success"? Well, I will let you look for yourself on this one.

And for those who cannot see a survey without thinking about correlations, here is one off the cuff: the school with the highest overall party ranking is ASU, which also has the happiest students, while the school with the lowest overall party ranking is Baylor, which also has the unhappiest students.

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Five years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts entitled "So you want to be a law professor ..." You will have to trust me on this, but it was a fairly novel idea at the time. Since then, of course, every new lawprof blogger has had the same idea.

Anyway, after talking to a student today about a teaching career, I realized how hard it had become to find my posts because they were buried in archives. If you are interested in reading them, have a ball:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

I read through the posts again quickly and noticed that some of the links are broken. Sorry about that.

Otherwise, it seems like pretty solid advice. If I would change anything, it would be to emphasize research skills and research agenda even more than I did then. Every credible candidate nowadays has publications, but do you have the potential to say something important and interesting? That's what I want to know, and I draw my conclusions based primarily on what you have already written. If you tell me that you have a world-beating research agenda, I should be able to see at least some glimmer of it in your published writing.

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