Friday, November 4, 2011

National Law Journal story on this blog

The National Law Journal's Monday print edition will run this story.

A point of possible interest: of the three law professors quoted in the story with critical things to say about the blog, two signed the Law School Transparency Petition after reading about it here (that is, without a personal request from me). The third hasn't, and in fact didn't even bother to respond to my personal email asking him to consider it.

39 comments:

  1. From the article:

    Campos has made legitimate points about the need for more transparency in postgraduate job statistics, said University of University of Alabama School of Law professor Paul Horwitz, but those arguments are obscured by his decision to cater to the angriest voices in the law school debate. Inside the Law School Scam readers never hear about the reform discussions already happening within the legal academy, he said.

    Maybe Horwitz could start a blog called "Inside the Law School Non-Scam," where he could lay out all these extensive proposals for law school reform that don't entail telling prospective law students what their real salary ranges and real chances of legal employment are. It could cater only to the most satisfied voices in the law school debate.

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  2. In the article, University of Alabama School of Law professor Paul Horwitz says the readership of this blog is "extremist". I don't feel like I am an extremist. I am on my eighth year as an attorney with a pretty decent job and salary, but my law school loans are still having a huge effect on my family's standard of living. I have fellow former classmates who have basically suffered financial hardship for eight years, and will continue to do so for another twenty. I believe things are much worse now for current graduates then they were for me, and my experience is that I was misled. I firmly believe that law schools are giving intentionally misleading information to prospective law students, and that cognitive dissonance is keeping most law professors from agreeing with that. I believe these beliefs are generally consistent with the readership of this blog, and I don't believe these beliefs make me an extremist, and I think that there are a large number of people, attorneys, who agree with LawProf's take on the current state of legal education.

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  3. lol at "extremist."

    If the people on this blog had the courage of an "extremist" there would be no law school scam.

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  4. You need to find ways to ***tangibly*** put pressure on the law school system. Comments on blogs aren't going to do it.

    I have one very easy suggestion: Prepare a website listing every law school professor and administrator and whether they signed the law school transparency position. We have a right to know this information.

    Someone has already started it:

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlrNMgX7bX3MdHVLZU5NcGFmX3FaNnZJb3VZYnpwQUE#gid=0

    Until you do something more than post comments on blogs, absolutely nothing will change.

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  5. I've been reading this blog almost from the very beginning, including virtually every comment. I'd estimate that over 90% of the commenters here are not extremists or any angrier than their (in some cases dire) circumstances warrant. And LawProf does not cater to the few extremists -- quite the contrary.

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  6. I would actually argue that most people who read this blog and the scam blogs are actually in the majority. Law professors seems to think that the vast majority of people who attend law school are happy with the choice they made and are working away, thinking to themselves that law school was a great decision. These professors think that the ones complaining are the bottome 5-10% of the class who don't find work. In reality, the opposite is true. Nowadays it's the exception for somebody to graduate law school and feel like they made the right choice.

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  7. I always tell people to fill the bottle up 2/3 of the way with fuel. Is that moderate, because it's not filled up all the way? Or extremist, because I'm aiming for maximum effect?

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  8. BL1Y, you're obviously an extremist, because Horwitz would have deleted that comment from his blog. QED.

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  9. Anger is more useful than despair.

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  10. Any prize for correctly guessing the identity of the Third Man?

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  11. law school scam - 3 ppl attacking and calling this blog vulgar words like disusting and extremist.

    good guys - no support for campos (except for anonymou comments)

    this is a battle between aggressive criminals and cowardly and frightened victims. my money is on the criminals.

    good

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  12. A slap fight between clueless dopes in ivory towers. Its so funny to me that these same dopes, err profs, would defend all and any victims except for the ones they helped create.

    Terminator above is completely right.

    And Lois, please tell us all who I am...I'll let you know after your guess - Ive been all over this blog but usually under the Anonymous tag.

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  13. ....unless your guess is Harry Lyme.

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  14. I was referring to the third professor (a well-known pompous blighter, I'm guessing) mentioned in the last sentence of Campos's post, not the third commenter. I neither know nor care who you are.

    And anyway that's Harry Lime -- spelled like the fruit, not the disease.

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  15. Its my movie, I know damn well the name of my main antagonist. It was spelled with a Y in Graham Greene's original draft. OK...maybe not.

    And no sadly I am not a vampire squid sucking the life out of newbies (what in the world did I type that led you to believe that?!?)....just another sucker in a long line of them...and I have the loans and a decade of quiet desperation to prove it.

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  16. the day any of you cowards get the courage to enter that "slapfight" then you can talk.

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  17. My only comment this morning is as follows:

    Extremist is the new normal.

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  18. Whatever you say steroid boy...we're right behind you waiting for you to lead that charge.

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  19. That his approach has been provocative was by design, he said, intended to shake legal educators out of complacen­cy. This includes, for example, calling specific law deans "outrageously clueless" and "fantastically dishonest," or claiming that "there was already a massive oversupply of J.D. degree-holders relative to the market for legal employment prior to the present crisis."

    Contrary to the article, it's the substance, not the "tone," that's bugging LawProf's colleagues. Leiter has written far worse things than anything LawProf has said here, yet Leiter's not a pariah.

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  20. I am actually curious: does anyone know if Leiter has come under intense criticism for his blog, and if so, does anyone have examples?

    In some ways (no offense Law Prof), Leiter and Law Prof are similar in taking relatively controversial topics and putting them right in the public view, and they both have somewhat similar sensationalistic styles (I tend to view these as GOOD features, except when sensationalism interferes with accuracy and substance).

    Of course, they're completely different in their subject matter and stances. Leiter's obsession with prestige takes a subject that students, academics, and employers obsess about in their everyday conversations and decision-making. He complete embraces it and tries to feed that hunger. He lavishes praise on the Emperor's tailor; he's the Washington Post Editorial Page of legal academia.

    Of course, Law Prof's topic is the direct opposite: something that no one in positions of prestige wants to discuss and that they all, by their very nature, do not personally relate to.

    I'd be curious to hear about people's reactions to Leiter.

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  21. My reaction to Leiter is that he's a prize wanker.

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  22. Aside from anonymous blog comments, I've never seen or heard an academic call out Leiter for his rudeness and arrogance.

    Here's one example of his handiwork, from the autumn 2001 issue of The Green Bag. In the text, he writes that "more than half of what appears in top law reviews purporting to deal with philosophy or philosophical topics is sophomoric, the kind of writing that would prevent an undergraduate from getting into a PhD program." In his footnote to that sentence, he cites as examples an article by James Boyle in the Stanford Law Review and an article by Pierre Schlag in the Texas Law Review.

    And he has the nerve to criticize Campos's tone.

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  23. Remember when he tried to silence Lawprof by threatening to out him? He told him that if he stopped now, everything could just remain "our little secret." That sure scared Campos. Leiter is 100% dipshit.

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  24. This isn't seriously calling Leiter out, but I thought you guys might enjoy the Leiter cracks in this Prawfs thread: http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2011/10/imaginary-about-faces-by-law-professors.html#comments

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  25. I’m posting here to support the already stated idea that it is false to say that this blog only caters to the “extremists” and people who are having “extremely difficult personal experiences.” Some would consider me part of the “upper class” in law: I was accepted to Stanford (Dean Kramer’s letter makes me even happier I chose not to attend) and was offered substantial scholarships at many of the T14. It was easy for me to get a job in biglaw right out of school.

    This blog is the most “academic” thing I’ve seen in law school. You’ve already made the world a better place for writing it.

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  26. Demanding truth and transparency from legal educators is extreme?

    Can we official rename the Ivory Tower to the Riker's Tower already?

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  27. did ANY of you write or call Horwitz to express your disagreement? no of course you did not, because that would require a backbone.

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  28. I love how Lois accuses a commenter of being a prof and then uses google to spell check a character from a film she had zero knowledge of before hand.

    Lawyers - douches from top to bottom.

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  29. Leiter has great positives and great negatives. On the plus side he is correct that the US News and World Report system for ranking law schools uses a system highly succeptable to manipulation, and his analysis of the weakness of the 12 categories they use is almost spot on. My two disagreements with him an this matter are: 1) While volumes in a law library is an objective criteria, it really doesn't matter beyond a certain minimum volume level because of westlaw and nexis which reduces the need for physical books.

    2) while Leiter does have a better system for having academics rate their fellow law faculty. (they have to read information on each law school's faculty first) He does not go far enough in pointing out how broken the present USNWR system of evaluating law schools by having judges and practicioners evaluate their graduates actually is. We practicing lawyers generally do not ask opposing counsel which law schools they attended, and neither do judges. The result is circular process which simply repeats previous results.

    Leiter's big drawbacks are that he is status crazed, and he never really practiced law with actual clients leaving him very thin skinned and petulent. Threatening to turn Campos in for ethical violations was to put it mildly, childish and a horrible over-reaction.

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  30. "extremist"

    This is an old lawyer trick. Paint the messenger and the those who agree with him as unreasonable and let that judgment flow over everything about them.

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  31. @5:41,

    Actually, "where did you go to law school?" is my #1 piece of small talk in settlement conferences...

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  32. 12:21, to each his own, I have rarely if ever seen it mentioned in the criminal pretrials I attend.

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  33. Horwitz has real balls. Saddle recent grads with $100K+ in nondischargeable debt, no real employment prospects, and then hurl insults at them by calling them extremist.

    Horwitz: Maybe the readers are extremists. But just what do you think this recipe creates? And given that more and more recent grads find themselves in this position, expect the numbers of extremist to rise.

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  34. Horwitz does have balls, as do most of the legal academia criminals. That's why they're where they are and that's why you're where you are.

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  35. I have a friend who is a career counselor, its sad, but his biggest (and best) piece of advice to kids is to simply abandon america, if able flee to a country that actually gives a crap about their people.

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  36. @7:20 - I'm strongly considering that and have been reading up on what it takes to get work visas overseas.

    I would feel not the slightest ethical compunction about leaving the whole system behind.

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  37. Paul man you are to be commended for what you do. You have some serious cojones to out the whole bunch of them.. My son went to a top 50 Tier One, school cum laude graduated In May 2011 and he is still looking. Had a bunch of interview, but I will say the salaries are crap. In looking at the Universitities employment figures, they must have pulled them out of their asses.

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  38. Why not just take over the ABA? The Delegates to the ABA are selected in state bar association elections. With the increase in young lawyers, we now have a powerful voting bloc that outnumbers older lawyers because of the class size. If everyone gets together and votes in a bunch of recent grads (how many practicing lawyers actually vote in these things anyway?) we can force reform in the section of legal education.

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