Monday, December 5, 2011

Crisis and denial

 Updated below

Every January, the Association of American Law Schools holds its annual conference at big hotel in a major city, at which a couple of thousand law faculty from around the nation gather together to participate in and attend dozens of panels, as well as to do the other things academics do at professional conferences, i.e., “network” in the halls, explore the local restaurant scene, etc.

A couple of months ago, I was one of a half dozen legal academics who were asked to participate in a proposed panel that would be part of the conference’s “Hot Topics” sessions.  These sessions are put together relatively late in the conference planning process, and are intended to deal with topics that have become particularly timely in recent months.

The proposed panel, which the organizer went to a good deal of trouble to put together, was entitled “Beyond Transparency: The Crisis of Confidence in Legal Education.”  The other panelists were all people who have published serious critiques of the state of the contemporary American law school. These critiques come from a variety of perspectives, but broadly speaking all share the view that, given the changing economics of legal education and legal practice, American law schools need to make major changes in the way they operate, and that the sooner legal academics acknowledge this, the better.

Last week the AALS committee in charge of such things rejected the proposal, giving as its reason the existence of a full day workshop  on “The Future of the Legal Profession and Legal Education: Changes in Law Practice: Implications for Legal Education.”   According to the committee, the proposed panel was seen as conflicting with that program.


On a personal level the committee's decision comes as something of a relief, since I wasn’t planning on attending the conference until I was asked to participate in the panel, and I had no desire to fly half way across the country -- the conference is in Washington DC -- in the middle of the winter to hang out with a couple of thousand other law professors.
  
On a more important level, this outcome gives some indication of how serious the AALS is about encouraging any real discussion of the crisis facing American legal education.  After all, the AALS is essentially a trade association, organized for the purpose of protecting the perceived economic interests of its members, and as such it will be as enthusiastic about encouraging serious critiques of the basic structure of legal academia as the National Cattleman’s Beef Association would be about a proposal they distribute free vegetarian cookbooks to the American public.

It's true that in the long run this kind of thing probably makes very little difference – it’s not as if the AALS’s bureaucratic  denialism is going to improve the job prospects of law graduates or lessen their debt loads – but it’s worth noting as a small instance of just how much resistance there is among the official representatives of legal academia to any discussion of the crisis facing law schools.

That crisis, it bears repeating, has two major components (as well as many more minor ones):

(1)   American law schools are graduating around twice as many prospective lawyers per year than there are jobs for new lawyers, and this ratio is unlikley to improve in the foreseeable future.

(2)    For many years now the ever-increasing cost of legal education has ensured that an ever-increasing percentage of those graduates who do manage to get law jobs will be unable to earn enough to justify the cost of their legal education.

If both of these assertions are even roughly correct – and I have yet to see any plausible argument for a claim that they’re not – it would seem to follow that American law schools should be graduating far fewer people than they do at present, and that they should charge, on average, far less than they currently charge for the privilege of acquiring a law degree.

Again, it’s not surprising that the people who run the Association of American Law Schools don’t really want to talk about any of this if it can possibly be avoided.  If I were them, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either, since a candid analysis of the state of American legal education tends to lead to the conclusion that perhaps half of the AALS’s member institutions should go out of business, while those in the other half need to start providing the services they provide at a much lower cost.

Update: 

(1) Since he's identified himself in the thread, I'd like to thank Jim Milles for the work he put into trying to make the proposed AALS panel happen.  I also agree with Paul Horwitz that it's a sign of progress that various legal academics are beginning to signal they believe the current problems with American legal education require much more than status-quo-regarding tweaking at the margins.

(2) I'm going to start taking a more aggressive attitude toward trolling in the comments.  Troll Detective's comment  regarding this subject is largely on point.

83 comments:

  1. There is no hope for a voluntary change from within.

    Any change is going to have to be dragged out of the law schools, with the administrators (and many professors) kicking and screaming in the process.

    Did you expect any less?

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  2. To summarize the progress of this "movement."

    Goals
    ----------
    1. Transparency
    2. Loan reform
    3. Reform of US News Rankings
    4. Reform of legal education to move towards practical training
    5. Address 40% rate of depression in 3Ls as opposed to 4% rate of depression in 0Ls

    Goals being worked on in any tangible way (other than whining)
    -----------
    Nothing.

    Achievements
    -------------
    Nothing.

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  3. Forgot goal #6. Slow rate of increase in tuitions.

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  4. How does the AALS operations, and the "annual conference" get its funding?

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  5. 7:34: Good question. I assume member schools have to pay an annual fee to the AALS but I don't know. Schools generally fund the attendance of faculty at AALS events such as this one by giving faculty a professional development budget, that covers things such as conference attendance up to X dollars per year.

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  6. For what little it's worth, a colleague at another school (who I haven't met before) and I proposed a hot topic on teaching legal ethics during a recession, a subject on which I've written on my blog, and one that would have featured a variety of speakers. The topic was obviously different from the panel on which Prof. Campos would have spoken, but would have touched on related issues. It was also rejected. Regardless of the AALS's reasons, on which I prefer not to assume bad faith, I was disappointed by the rejection. One may take a measure of both good and bad news from the fact of two such proposed panels and their rejection: surely it's bad news that they were rejected, but it should be somewhat encouraging to know that a number of law professors are interested in adding to public discussion of these issues, and in encouraging their colleagues to think and talk about them as well. I understand the distrust that many commenters here have with respect to law professors, and I'm not trying to make any extravagant claims here or dissipate that distrust; only to point out, for whatever it's worth, that more than one group of professors was interested in making sure these issues were discussed at the AALS.
    -- Paul Horwitz

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  7. Professor Horwitz, why do you not assume bad faith?

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  8. Not for any reasons specific to the AALS. Where I'm not in possession of unique knowledge about a situation, I generally prefer to assume remain agnostic about questions of good or bad faith and evaluate a situation on its merits. I understand others take different views about such presumptions.
    --PH

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  9. Professor Horwitz, such moderation and reasonableness will earn you no friends here!

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  10. Doesn't discuss tenure;will not read

    --AALS

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  11. Usually, people don't make changes until it is too late for these changes to have any effect. It looks like the law school crisis won't be any different.

    Older professors see no problem. They don't understand that the world is different now than when they went to school. They're also close to retirement, so it's not like their going to change everything in the few years before they cash out.

    Younger professors might see a problem, but they can't risk a tenure denial to speak out against it.

    So instead we just sail on full steam into the iceberg.

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  12. Why is it clear that these topics will not be discussed at the workshop? Will the
    attendance be limited? Is so, how?

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  13. I would suggest that if you want to accomplish something you write or email Senators Grassley and Boxer. They are thinking about holding hearings, and a few letters might push them over the edge.

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  14. 9:11,

    Nando, LawProf, BL1Y, DJM and a few obsessive but anonymous commenters do not make a crisis. One legal writing section in one law school has more people than the entire "law school scam" movement combined.

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  15. Who needs to attend a conference where a bunch of pompous, out of touch academics sit around a table and debate the theoretical vs. practical, while they have their heads shoved up their rear-ends?

    It's really quite simple. Your typical law school graduate (who pulls in 50-60k a year) cannot be expected to pay Sallie Mae $2,000 a month. It is economically unsustainable. It does not work. IBR helps paper over this problem, but as more people join the program, Congress will begin to take a second look as the costs begin to accrue.

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  16. "If I were them, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either"

    You are them. :-)
    The difference is that you do want to talk about it.

    I don't think law professors in the top 100 schools should feel threatened by this discussion. Those are the schools that will likely survive.

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  17. Of course, all of the lawprofs in the TTT and TTTT range would obviously be extremely worried about any serious changes to the law school scam. Those are the people expected to resist any change.

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  18. 9:38, you forgot methodology guy, tranparancy boy, and benchpress bro.

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  19. Yet another reason to avoid the AALS meeting. And here's a kicker: One of the featured speakers at the "overlapping" workshop on the future of legal education is Rick Matasar, Dean of New York Law School.

    I think I will spend the days of the AALS meeting refining some data I'm putting together about the legal job market and working on the in-depth study I've started on some 2010 grads. Maybe those would be good days for LST or another group to conduct their own national survey of recent grads?

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  20. In 2002, there was 1 legal industry job for every 256 people. In 2007, at the height of the bubble, that had grown to only 1 for every 253 people. ie: The market simply didn't add jobs, though it made some existing jobs more lucrative.

    The recession has taken the number to 1 job for every 281 people. Ouch!

    If the legal industry had merely matched population growth, we would have another 100,000 positions. You can't blame it on a cyclical economy, because even in boom times, hiring doesn't increase.

    100,000 missing legal jobs. Nearly 10% of the entire industry, gone. How is this not a crisis?

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  21. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  22. I'll be sure to pass on your thoughts to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which we all know, is of course, in the pockets of Big Scam and will just published whatever data we want to support our....ohhhh, you're trolling.

    Ha, now I get it. Well done. Well done.

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  23. @ DJM
    Would you like any help?
    As an unemployed grad, I'd enjoy being able to help out - it would give me something to do.
    If you think I could in some way, just say so and I'll send you an e-mail

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  24. @10:36am What a croc. How you have deluded yourself into thinking that 99% of law graduates are all happily working in legal jobs and have no bone to pick about any of this! In addition, you must assume that all the lawsuits, blogs, and NY Times articles are merely the ramblings of a few unfortunate few. When your firm lays you off and you are scrambling to get by off of mommy and daddy's East Coast ties and wealth, we will all rejoice in karmic laughter.

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  25. 11:14,

    I counted the number of people in the scamblog movement (somewhere between 5 adn 20 depending on how many are sockpuppets), multiplied by 10 to be safe, and came up with a number that is still trivial when compared with the number of law school graduates working as lawyers.

    You people just don't have the numbers, because there is no scam. Just a small group bunch of bitter losers complaining on the internet.

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  26. @11:14: Please don't feed the troll.

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  27. @11:23 LOL. I counted the number of people saying there isn't a scam, multiplied by a number I pulled out of my ass...oh...say...12.....and came up with 36 as the number of people who-in vain-attempt to refute the validity of this movement.

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  28. If you weren't such a bunch of bitter losers, you'd stop sitting on your behinds and do something. What happened to the CBS story? Answer: none of you cowards were willing to stick your necks out. Stop whining and do something.

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  29. What's wrong with being a bitter loser?

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  30. As one of the people who volunteered to be interviewed for the CBS story, I'm pretty sure that's not true.

    And, using our new accounting method, 10 of me volunteered!

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  31. Why don't you volunteer 11:44?

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  32. I don't think you can discount the argument that the "scam movement" is really, really small.

    I've often wondered the same thing--why are there only the same handful of people who comment on all of the scamblogs--much of the comments are actually from one scamblogger to another in the comments sections of each others blogs!

    I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of un/under-employed JDs out there, but what I AM saying is that not very many of them seem to be speaking up or willing to do anything (EVEN do anything on the internet...so what does that say for doing something substantial?!)

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  33. Here is a post by anti-finance law professor James Kwak, along with two comments I wrote on his website (that I will post in the comments below this one).

    Mr. Kwak's post

    Thoughts on Law School

    with 17 comments


    By James Kwak

    A number of friends have asked me what I thought about David Segal’s article in the Times a couple weeks ago on law schools, so I thought I would share my thoughts here. The short answer is that I thought it was pretty silly. . . .

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  34. My response #1

    I disagree with your contention that procedural rules do not matter when in reality those make or break most cases. Most cases are not decided by knowledge attained in law school because that knowledge is easily attainable by reading a study guide or outline or one of thousands of other easily googlable sources. You don’t need to go to law school to learn the difference betwee involuntary manslaughter and murder. One google search, or one half hour watching commentary on the Michael Jackson trial can teach you that. You do, however, need to know the procedural steps involved in trying such a case – from the jury selection process, to the evidentiary process, to the argument process, to the deposition process, to the post trial process, to the appeals process — I could go on and on. Cases are decided based on knowing these procedural rules, and these are not taught in law school. They are taught on the job, if you’re lucky enough to work under a competent attorney.

    But going back to your article Mr. Kwak. What’s most astonishing and troubling about your piece is the author, specifically your hypocricy. Here you are, a person who chastises the financial industry for lack of transparency and fraud, yet when your industry – the people who butter your bread – do it you turn a blind eye, or you attempt to deflect the blame onto US News. Why are you allowed to blame a law school’s fraudulent career placement numbers on US News rankings, when financial institutions are not allowed to blame fraud on the need to get investors? (Something that – unlike you – no financial institution has had the gall to do, ever).

    I hope the public remembers this, and reminds you of it the next time you run your mouth about the problems in the financial industry. Even assuming you are right and that they are stealing, at least they steal from the wealthy. Your industry – law school – steals from poor 22 year olds looking for a job.

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  35. My response #2

    For those who do not know, Mr. Kwak teaches at Connecticut Law School – a low ranked law school.
    http://www.law.uconn.edu/people/4388

    His law school charges about $45,000 in annual tuition (not including living expenses, books and such) – tuition that students pay based on their fraudulent claim that 87% of its graduates are employed with an average salary of almost $90,000. See the statistics here
    http://www.law.uconn.edu/career-planning-center/current-students

    However, if you dig into the numbers, you see that about one half the respondents did not report a salary. Those who did are clearly a ***biased sample*** and should not in any way be used to represent the group. The true average salary for the group is much less than $86,000.
    See more here at Law School Transparency, an organization designed to combat law school job placement numbers fraud. http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/?school=uconn

    This is as outrageous as an investment manager claiming to earn 20% per year, as measured by half of his investments! It is such blatant and despicably misleading analysis that it brings shame to Bernie Madoff. Yet Professor Kwak’s school – Professor Kwak Mr. “stop financial crime” – Professor Kwak Mr. “the banks steal” – Professor Kwak’s school does this shamelessly, as do all low ranked law schools.

    You should be ashamed of yourself Mr. Kwak. A wise man once said that only God has the wisdom to spot the hypocrites. But in some cases it’s so easy that even us mortals can do it.

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  36. Link to Kwak's article http://baselinescenario.com/2011/12/05/thoughts-on-law-school/

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  37. This is a subject worth deeper exploration, I think.  Why are so few law school grads active among the scam blogs?  I think our troll friend is probably correct that the number of very active people, active enough to leave comments here and elsewhere, is pretty small.  200 at most?  Maybe fewer than that.

    I have a few ideas about this.  If you do have a decent job with a decent salary, chances are you won't be interested in this movement.  For one thing, you don't want to be told that you must hate your law school.  People want to like their alma mater.  They want to remember it fondly and they want to remember their professors fondly.  Nobody wants to think about how they were "scammed".

    If you don't have a decent job with a decent salary, then this sort of thing might be too depressing to handle.  Optimism can be a survival mechanism, and many of the hopeless people out there want to believe that things will change for them, that that great job is right around the corner.  They want to believe all of the myths about the value of the law degree, they need to delude themselves.  Afterall, embracing the truth about law school probably won't actually help you get a job. 

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  38. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  39. Most job statistics fail to mention that most legal jobs offer nothing in the way of benefits.

    According to the BLS, your average American earned $29 per hour, if you include their benefits. How many legal jobs outside of biglaw pay more than $29 an hour? Certainly not shitlaw. Maybe a few doc reviews near the high cost NYC/DC metro areas still do, but that is quickly changing due to outsourcing.

    That is why I hate law professors. Even not accounting for all the debt and lost opportunity cost, the longer you spend with them the dumber (and less marketable) you become. Most JD's earn less than your average American.

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  40. Everyone make sure you go on hypocrite Kwak's blog and comment. That a-hole has the nerve to talk about the CFPB as it relates to mortgages and such, but what has he ever offered in terms of consumer protection for poor kids scammed out of law school loans? Law school loans are far more harmful than a mortgage, which can be discharged by sending a little jingle mail.

    Again, Kwak's post is here.
    http://baselinescenario.com/2011/12/05/thoughts-on-law-school/#comment-91537

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  41. Or, the more likely explanation is that few people participate in online communities.

    On the first day of its release, Skyrim had 230,000 people playing all at once. In less than a month, it had sold over 7 million copies. Now, we can assume that some of these will be kept boxed until Christmas, but odds are the majority of people who bought the game are playing it.

    Reddit is easily one of the world's largest online communities, however, the Skyrim subreddit has only 66,000 members.

    Could it be that many of the players hated the game and don't want to talk about it? That they're too busy playing to surf the web?

    No, it's just that people don't really participate much online. If you went by comments on ATL, you'd think that they only had about 2 dozen readers.

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  42. That's still 1% participation. Do we get that?

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  43. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  44. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  45. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  46. These panel names makes no sense from AALS' perspective. I would suggest:

    “Beyond Information Assymetry: The Crisis in Sustaining the Law School Business Model in the Age of the Blogosphere."

    At least it's honest no?

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  47. Any attempt to evaluate the number of people whom are unsatisfied with their choice in legal education and law as a career by looking at the comment section on this and similar blogs is like trying to count the number of people whom are underwater on their mortgages by looking at a drum circle in Zuccotti Park.

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  48. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  49. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  50. Scamblogging has been going on since 2005, and it has acheived quite a bit. National recognition, for one. Because of scamblogging, there is a cover story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and Grey Lady about every two years or so. Hopefully, greater media attention will lead to greater Congressional oversight. Scambloggers understand that this battle will take years, and not months.

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  51. Law schools have been getting bad press since The Paper Chase and 1L. Don't take credit for something that went on long before scamblogging existed.

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  52. (1L the book by Turrow)

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  53. It's not true that law schools are having no trouble filling seats. My understanding is that most schools (outside of the top whatever-number-you-choose) are seeing the average LSATs and GPAs of applicants going down, with the result that they're having to accept less qualified students to fill those seats. (Yes, I know that LSAT and GPA are imperfect measures of qualifications, but they're the measures we've traditionally used.) That means that many of those students entering are less likely to pass the bar, less likely to find jobs, and less likely to pay off student loans.

    Incidentally, I'm the one who submitted the Hot Topic program proposal with Paul and several other excellent law profs. To be fair, the description of the Workshop that supposedly "conflicted" with our program does address many of the issues here, but none of the speakers include those on our panel--Paul Campos, Bill Henderson, Jeff Harrison, Larry Ribstein, Brian Tamanaha, Lucille Jewel--who have written extensively and critically about the fundamental problems with legal education. The Workshop seems to focus on incremental tinkering with the model rather than acknowledging any need for basic reform. Perhaps that's the "conflict" the AALS letter referred to.

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  54. First of all a drop in GPA/LSAT doesn't equate to having trouble filling seats, but I doubt what you say is true regardless. So I must ask, link?

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  55. Wow Campos, Henderson, Harrison, Ribstein, Tamanaha and Jewell was a great panel. I can't believe they cancelled it. Just goes to show you how irrelevant you people are, even six huge academic names can't help you.

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  56. @shaggyredhair--I'd love to have your help, as well as help from any others who are interested. Please email me at merritt52@gmail.com if you're interested.

    I'm working on a few ideas, including collecting information about recent grads from several schools through social media and "snowball" requests from one classmate to another. Some of you recent grads could advise on how to structure that, and might also be able to help with some of the work. I also have a few ideas about how to do more with the info that USNews has about individual schools. LST has done a great job publishing those data, but I think there is even more we could do to present those data in easily readable form prospective students. Other ideas are welcome too!

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  57. When you read a simplistic comment about everyone being a pussy and a nobody = steroid boy troll. Ignore him.

    When you read a simplistic comment that accuses someone of supporting the ABA because you have a nuanced argument about transparency or because you support student loan reform = transparency boy troll. Ignore him.

    Facile attack on methodology = methodology boy troll. Ignore him.

    Will make these comments easier to read. Also really surprised about Kwak. I've always admired his stance on the financial industry. Shows how much misinformation is out there.

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  58. There have been a number of commenters here stating that this is not a problem, the crisis in legal education, by the amount of people who consistently post on these types of blogs. I would beg to differ. The fact that this "crisis" has received front page attention in every national newspaper for the past year or so speaks the opposite of a few "pissed off trolls." Many people in law school, having been one myself not that long ago, do not visit these websites, not because they are happy, but by visiting these blogs, they are acknowledging the severity of the problem/crisis.

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  59. Every movement in history started small. People are lazy, non-confrontational creatures of habit. That is why change of any sort is terribly hard. The heroes of any movement are not the people who jump on the bandwagon after society is already changing. They're the people who stand up alone to face the status quo when no one else is speaking out. Some may say LawProf and other bloggers haven't accomplished much yet in their critique of legal education. But at least they're trying. I may not have the energy to start my own blog, but I'll sure support those that do and spread their message every time legal education comes up in conversation. Eventually, one conversation, one new person checking out this and similar websites at a time, this movement will grow to a size where it can make a difference.

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  60. Today, the LA Daily Journal reported that last month the legal industry added only 100 jobs IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. This seems relevant to the discussion.

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  61. James Kwak is getting owned in his comments.

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  62. top-law-schools.com forums are in severe denial. They have gone so far as to block links to blogs like this one. They do not even want discussion on the concept that law school might be a bad decision.

    Twits like VanWinkle (a moderator) are on a mission to ban anyone who brings up this type of discussion.

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  63. @5:11: TLS has a simple message:
    any score below 170 > retake
    the only schools worth the sticker are t14
    schools below t14 should be giving you big scholly

    I did not know they were subject-matter moderating, when I read TLS they openly acknowledged the issues with law schools that is why they have the simple message.

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  64. Thanks Lawprof! Just read your update...but did you know I was also described by you as the guy "obsessed" with countering transparency boy a few posts ago? You're welcome. Someone has to do the dirty work around here.

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  66. @8:34 p.m.
    You are wrong and very badly wrong. I have waited 20 years for such blogspots as this and for the opportunity for a credible forum and a voice that the mainstream news media such as the NYT and WSJ listens to and reports about. Law school was a very bad investment for many, likely a majority, of my classmates 20 years ago. Law schools lie and report misleading job and salary data while charging a fortune for what they deliver. That situation has only worsened over the last two decades, not improved. Tens and hundreds of thousands of lives have been ruined or significantly negatively impacted by buying a law degree. The first step towards reform is to provide as much publicity as possible to the lies, the fraud, and this scam. I used the term "scam" to describe law schools and legal education two decades ago. Thank you to our moderator, someone in a position of power with credibility, for having the courage to speak the truth.

    I am not a loser. I have worked in 3 NLJ250 law firms and make a lot of money currently if that is any indicator you use to distinguish a loser from a non-loser, likely more than our moderator. I have spent months at expensive hotels in distant cities for clients and have traveled to Europe repeatedly on client matters. I suppose I could even retire now. Yet, still, I have seen the lies, and I have seen the harm they have caused. I know there are way, way too many lawyers. I remember the fight, the struggle, the terror to find a first job to pay off 63K in student debt nearly 20 years ago. I remember going to a first job knowing nothing about the practice of law from my academic accomplishments and law review contributions and being abused terribly because of my ignorance though I was top 5% of the class, and I know I made in the top 7% of the multistate bar examination by virtue of waiver to certain jurisdictions.

    No, this site is not about five losers fighting with each other. It is about winners trying to expose the truth, to provide light and truth where there has for far too long been darkness and lies. It is not about insignificant nonsense, it is about lives, about the wellbeing of human beings. It is about caring for the wellbeing of others. It is about providing information to potential victims and calling for social change, calling for truth, calling for justice. On a broader level, this site is also about allocation of our society's resources and dissuading the migration of people into a field that is saturated and where their talents are not needed. On another broader level, this site is about the efficient use of society's resources since a sizable percentage of law school graduates are not going to be able to repay their huge student loans. Those are some of the things that this site is about my friend.

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  67. Delusions of Grandeur much?

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  68. "(1) American law schools are graduating around twice as many prospective lawyers per year than there are jobs for new lawyers, and this ratio is unlikley to improve in the foreseeable future."

    Not every law graduate works as a lawyer. The last time I went to a law school reunion, there were lots of successful graduates working as consultants, hedge fund managers, businessmen, etc. That's the beauty of a law degree.

    As a law professor, I haven't practiced in years. And yet I still make a good living with my law degree.

    "(2) For many years now the ever-increasing cost of legal education has ensured that an ever-increasing percentage of those graduates who do manage to get law jobs will be unable to earn enough to justify the cost of their legal education."

    Law school tuition has gone up, just like the price of gas and housing have gone up. And yet we don't see people whinging that gasoline is a "scam." If it's too expensive for you, don't buy a car and take the bus instead.

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  69. Re: participation rates in the comments section

    I remember reading a post once by the owner of a popular news aggregating website (fark or digg or boing boing or something) who said something like less than 1% of site readers ever clicked on the comments sections of the stories, and of those clickthroughs MUCH less than 1% of people comment. Assuming that the readership here is even close to that, having 10-15 regular commenters means Professor Campos is getting, at the minimum, thousands of regular readers.

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  70. @4:35AM you, my friend, are a troll or a terrible person. Probably both.

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  71. "Not every law graduate works as a lawyer. The last time I went to a law school reunion, there were lots of successful graduates working as consultants, hedge fund managers, businessmen, etc. That's the beauty of a law degree."

    Did you go to NYLS or Pace?

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  72. That's all great 10:08pm, but other than mentally masturbating your hubris all over this comments section, will you do any other act?

    No?

    I didn't think so.

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  73. lol @ hedge fund "managers." Working at hedge funds would have been sufficient for trolling purposes, but you went too far with that manager thing.

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  74. NYC is a troll, he's just trying to bait the gullible.

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  75. I work as very low paid staff at a Tier 2 school. Last week in a conversation with an administrator, this administrator admitted to me that our school only places around 60% of grads in jobs. Our website claims a 95% placement rate nine months after graduation.

    What is to be done about such bold-faced liars? Administration knows the truth. But they will not correct the lies on our website.

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  76. They're probably worried that if they tell the truth, when everyone else lies, they'll see a dramatic drop in enrollment.

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  77. NYC -

    Don't even bother. I don't agree with everything you say, but Prof. Campos has indicated he's not interested in divergent views or nuanced criticisms, and is now endorsing the self-proclaimed "Troll Detective's" call to "aggressive[ly]" delete them. Meanwhile, Prof. Campos rejected earlier calls to moderate comments implicitly endorsing violence against law professors and explicitly comparing the situation of unemployed law school alums to Holocaust victims - on the grounds of free speech and encouragement of diverse views, of course.

    As his effort gathered steam, Prof. Campos' choice was whether to become a leader of a big-tent movement of well-intentioned reformers presenting diverse interpretations of the crisis, or to become the celebrated ringleader of a smaller, but louder, group of angry unemployed recent law graduates too cowardly to show their face on CBS with him but big and strong enough to call for law professors' heads in anonymous internet comments. For reasons best known to him (guilt? vanity? a convert's zeal?), he appears to have chosen the latter path. Just read his posts for defensiveness and pettiness. I sympathize in that he's probably getting weird looks in the faculty lounge these days, but almost everyone posting here is trying to help him, and he's biting our hands in the name of fealty to the cause.

    There are many injustices in the world, and many movements to remedy them. While the cause of preventing fraud to prospective law students is just, I'm not sure the path this movement is taking is. Indeed, it seems it is intolerant of dissent and criticism of anything except The Common Enemy. I like to be part of things that tolerate - even encourage - diversity of opinions and moderation, not conformity and extremism. The movement does not seem interested in attracting those, like me, who have no vested interest in the outcome (practicing lawyers with good jobs) but are genuinely sympathetic to those for whom the current system isn't working.

    How many comments before this one will be (a) deemed trolling and/or (b) deleted?

    -Methodology

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  78. Meth Head: he was deleting comments that were abusive to other commenters and meanspirited, not those that merely disagreed. Go clutch your pearls and concern troll somewhere else if enforcing basic decency and respect for others is not your thing. Prof. Campos' moderation was "content-neutral". Your points on tightening up arguments for reform are valued, but this is just whining.

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  79. Meth, NYC has fooled even you. He has no views, he is strictly messing with people.

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  80. NYC is obviously a troll,and not a very good one. I'm not going to delete him at the moment since I'm not in the mood for more of Method Man's meta-whining about deletion policies.

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  81. Just to add to what Paul Horwitz says, the AALS seems to specialize in making sure that law professors who want to meet to discuss a topic of mutual interest at an AALS event cannot do so. So I would interpret rejection by the AALS as an indicator about the AALS, not about the interests of law professors. Also, too bad this panel proposal was rejected: I would have liked to attend.

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  82. good information is given to us. it is very useful for us.

    ReplyDelete

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