tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post9180387686176264694..comments2023-10-30T08:41:06.178-07:00Comments on Inside the Law School Scam: Labor Day Special: The Second-Best Job in AmericaLawProfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05174586969709793419noreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-88065735708670148212011-09-07T12:44:13.741-07:002011-09-07T12:44:13.741-07:00Oh hell. I've been catching up on this site a...Oh hell. I've been catching up on this site after being busy the last five or six days and just realized my comment above is pretty much exactly what Law Prof wrote in his own subsequent post... Sorry for that.Crux of lawhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06572986619859564280noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-51498762894404395872011-09-07T12:41:48.989-07:002011-09-07T12:41:48.989-07:00@ 8:44
I lack the intellectual heft of many other...@ 8:44 <br />I lack the intellectual heft of many other people leaving comments, but I will try to make this as clear as I can. The problem with categorizing those that complain as mere underachievers for whom failure is due is that the numbers simply do not work out. If only the top ten percent (or so) of graduates form only the top 15 (or 20 or 50) schools have any real shot at decent employment, then nine of ten graduates are doomed no matter how hard they work or what they achieve. It is a zero-sum game. The conclusion I draw is that nine of those ten should never have enrolled (or graduated).Crux of lawhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06572986619859564280noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-71046218133723768292011-09-06T13:34:36.115-07:002011-09-06T13:34:36.115-07:00@ 8:44
There are way too many law school graduate...@ 8:44<br /><br />There are way too many law school graduates in comparison to the amount of renumerative work requiring a JD. That's the bottom line. And that is the scam at work. Even if every student graduating from law school were a proverbial 170+ LSAT top law student, there would be many failures "there are way too many law school graduates in comparison to the amount of renumerative work requiring a JD".<br /><br />To suggest that the students are the ones primarily at fault for failure rather than the law schools pumping out too many grads is simply ridiculous.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-88448052630186429272011-09-06T08:13:42.376-07:002011-09-06T08:13:42.376-07:00Here's another thing to lose in addition to th...Here's another thing to lose in addition to the holocaust references: passing descriptions of academic theories about which you clearly know nothing. The MacKinnon "all sex is rape" thing is a long-standing BS myth. She does NOT say that. What she says is much more complex concerning the spectrum of sexual coercion. But for years, people who have never read a single thing she wrote have repeated the myth that she says "all sex is rape" and joked and criticized it without ever having read a word of her work! Please stick to what you know and leave the holocaust analogies and the critiques of theories you've never read at the proverbial door.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-55615794777878598622011-09-06T08:09:53.140-07:002011-09-06T08:09:53.140-07:00Oh dear Lord, I just realized the "all hetero...Oh dear Lord, I just realized the "all heterosexual sex is rape" person was ALSO a law professor.<br /><br />Legal academia, the retards of the intellectual world. Can you imagine how some actual academic must feel when he discovers a new medicine, and looks over at his legal colleagues and hears they saying nonsense like "all sex is rape" and "wives take money from their husbands like prostitutes" IN CLASS?!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-34762949264056650582011-09-06T08:02:18.936-07:002011-09-06T08:02:18.936-07:00"Wives take money from their husbands just as..."Wives take money from their husbands just as prostitutes take mony from their johns." <br /><br />Law school, where you get paid to say shit everyone else says drunk at bars.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-5242466327894681992011-09-06T07:22:49.008-07:002011-09-06T07:22:49.008-07:00Rutgers alum here as well.
I didn't take Fran...Rutgers alum here as well.<br /><br />I didn't take Francione, but his pedagogical style is notoriously shambolic. I had several friends who took his Jurisprudence class as an elective knowing that it was going to be a lot of hyper-combatitive drivel towards an easy A-B. Among the gems that we're relayed to me were such observations as, "Wives take money from their husbands just as prostitutes take mony from their johns." This was in the context of something Catherine MacKinnon-related (she of "all heterosexual sex is rape"), but how this squared with the study of jurisprudence was kind of a mystery to me. <br /><br />Supposedly, Francione was very vocal about phasing out (or minimizing) the Clinical Program at Rutgers (one of the most-established and comprehensive in the coutnry, also the only worthwile reason for going to school there) in favor of more emphasis on "theory and scholarship". Apparently, he must not have found clinical programs particularly apposite to the practice of law.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-65210544613927384622011-09-06T06:21:18.421-07:002011-09-06T06:21:18.421-07:00What law school should really do is offer students...<i>What law school should really do is offer students insights into what the law should be. It should enable students to challenge the values held by practitioners, so that students will have different, countervailing perspectives to use in judging their experiences, and the senior partners they work for.</i><br /><br />That is exactly what most law-school classes consist of now.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-54493302059053588352011-09-06T05:22:59.068-07:002011-09-06T05:22:59.068-07:001) Those that clerked for SCOTUS would bore us wit...<i>1) Those that clerked for SCOTUS would bore us with insipid stories about playing tennis with Rehnquist . . . <br /><br />2) My CivPro professor published a subpar text . . .<br /><br />3) I had a professor who was so lazy that he administered a final as a multiple choice exam. . .<br /><br />4) I had another professor who only wrote about animal rights topics (he equated animals and roaches with humans). . . "I clerked for a SCOTUS justice, you are only a wet behind the ears 1L."</i><br /><br />HAHAHAHA... wonderful.<br /><br />It may be bad form to name names, but I don't give a rat's ass--all four points you made above fit neatly in the package of a single professor, Gary Francione, at my dear ol' Rutgers Law.<br /><br />He's one of the highest paid (if not the highest paid) professor at the school, and I'm not a fan of saying bad things about him, because if you talk to him one-on-one he's actually a really nice guy.<br /><br />The thing is, he's this raging egomaniac who tells 1L's in his Crim Law classes he will literally give you an "F" in the course if you go on the internet at all while in his class (even to pull something off of Westlaw that is relevant to class).<br /><br />He clerked on SCOTUS and had the unmitigated gall to actually use the phrase "Rehnquist's foil" when describing himself as the stalwart progressive battle the Chief Justice. His final exam was a straight 100-question multiple choice test and the best part was that it was about 35-45% on topics (attempt, conspiracy, solicitation) that we spent ONE DAY on in class. <br /><br />He liked to foment daytime-TV-talkshow-like discussions, primarily about rape. Which is all well and good but if you care so much about sex crimes, perhaps emphasizing them on the final would be appropriate.<br /><br />He's also got this "The Jurisprudence of Human and Animal Rights" class which is easily the biggest waste of time at the school. Students have to buy his book on Animal Rights and this other crappy freshman-undergraduate-quality "Ethics 101" book. Each day in class is the same endless spinning of wheels in which almost nothing meaningful is said, nobody's eyes are opened, nobody's mind is changed and if anything his arrogant and abrasive style makes students harden their positions AGAINST animal rights.<br /><br />In short, he's the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with the current law school system.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-86400117038510892072011-09-05T22:19:58.673-07:002011-09-05T22:19:58.673-07:00In my experience plaintiffs who complain about dis...In my experience plaintiffs who complain about discovery don't do so merely to find a smoking gun. Their primarily goal is to harass the defendant into settling.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-7289831649602727022011-09-05T21:56:02.721-07:002011-09-05T21:56:02.721-07:00One last thing theory, the "truth" is so...One last thing theory, the "truth" is something that exists in the real world and not in your short sighted imagination. This is an error made too often by academics.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-89348364829426995042011-09-05T21:47:23.567-07:002011-09-05T21:47:23.567-07:00Theory, you never officially confirmed the fact th...Theory, you never officially confirmed the fact that you are a law professor (and you never addressed the two other points in the reply to you namely that the other side would never trust you to review documents for their needs and the client would never pay you to find and highlight documents that help the other side; you never said whether you would be willing to work for free to prepare a "these are the key documents" index for the other side.) If you're going to make a proposal be ready to respond to real world critiques. You are not talking to some 2l law review editor who has never practiced law.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-87454158431784433112011-09-05T21:38:51.882-07:002011-09-05T21:38:51.882-07:00Such points can be made in academia la la land whe...Such points can be made in academia la la land where they make their living by scamming kids out of student loan funded fortunes, but in the real world there is no living for associates who want to have such discussions. That is yet another problem with turning grads into indentured servants, they have absolutely no freedom to do the "right" thing.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-23292720591655791062011-09-05T21:38:44.433-07:002011-09-05T21:38:44.433-07:00LawProf: are you deleting comments that you don...LawProf: are you deleting comments that you don't like/disagree with your viewpoint? My comment briefly appeared on the site, then disappeared.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-52610401840392562212011-09-05T21:15:53.160-07:002011-09-05T21:15:53.160-07:00You make my point, Anon. The ethical system you t...You make my point, Anon. The ethical system you think is clear-cut and call the adversarial system is far more complex and nuanced. It is, and it should be, open to reasoned debate about the relative value of vigorous advocacy and promoting truth -- debate that should be renewed by each crop of newly-minted lawyers. If law practice were more theorized, that debate would be more possible. This is what I hope law schools can provide, so that we can introduce more questioning and more transformation in daily practice.Theory!noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-24284884349643816112011-09-05T20:44:54.086-07:002011-09-05T20:44:54.086-07:00To the person (people, if one counts the comments ...To the person (people, if one counts the comments on other posts) who apparently believes him/herself a Holocaust victim and believes it appropriate to compare law school to the Holocaust/concentration camps: stop. I'm a practicing attorney reading this blog. When I started reading, I thought that it might contribute constructively to the dialogue about legal education reforms, with some strong and usefully-radical proposals. I've now concluded that most of its points are overstated, oversimplified, strident, and at times hysterical. (One sample oversimplification is this post's characterization of 3/4s of law review articles as written by "people who almost literally can't write coherent English." I'm not sure what law reviews Prof. Campos is reading, but I'd respectfully suggest that he should perhaps revise his reading list.)<br /><br />In any event: comments about Auschwitz/"arbeit macht frei" (as appeared in a previous post's comments) and this post's comments about the SS are further undercutting this blog's points. Many of the commenters appear to be commenting from the less-than-credible vantagepoint of disaffected failure: they failed to get into good law schools because of their collegiate failures; they failed to do well on the LSAT; they failed to do well at the law schools they did manage to attend (leading them to disparage law school exams as poor measures of success, rather than more honestly evaluating their own lack of success) ... and then, utterly unsurprisingly, they failed to secure worthwhile legal jobs, or any jobs at all. So now, their solution is to moan on the Internet about it -- which undoubtedly will lead to every bit as much success as their previous endeavors.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-90254334381692493972011-09-05T20:39:12.410-07:002011-09-05T20:39:12.410-07:00Partner: If you have any other issues, document th...Partner: If you have any other issues, document them in an email so I can fire you for insuboordination and then security will escort you out of the building. Due to the greed of law schools, I have 10,000 law review resumes begging for your job.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-9976862913477932462011-09-05T20:28:56.176-07:002011-09-05T20:28:56.176-07:00Partner: Ignoring the ethical issues with your pro...Partner: Ignoring the ethical issues with your proposal (do you understand how the adversarial system works?), and ignoring the fact that the other side would never believe that we gave them all the critical documents even if we did and would demand everything so they could review it for themselves, ignoring all of that, our client won't pay for us to sift through the documents and find the items that help the other side. Are you willing to do that task for free? You don't expect us to pay you for work we can't get paid for, do you? If you are willing to work for free, then please feel free to take your two weeks vacation now and spend that time going through the documents and preparing a helpful guide sheet for the other side that we will send them along with the documents. If you want you can quit your job and provide this service, unpaid, full time. But I thought that due to the scumbag greedy law professors who trained you, you have to make a $2,500 student loan payment this month. <br /><br />Any other question, Theory!? By the way, can I PLEASE ask what you do for a living? I haven't heard such astonishingly absurd theories since I left law school.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-35892523850554527582011-09-05T20:13:46.364-07:002011-09-05T20:13:46.364-07:00Partner: We need to bury them in boxes and boxes ...Partner: We need to bury them in boxes and boxes of documents, so that they'll never be able to sift through all the discovery and find the critical documents that will doom our wrong-doing client. <br />Properly Educated New Lawyer: No, we have an obligation to do the right thing and only hand over the documents that are truly responsive. If our client deserves to lose on the merits because of what the evidence shows, it should lose on the merits. We should not manipulate discovery to hide the truth. Our obligation to the truth, and to the court, trumps that to our client in our system.<br />Partner: Non-sense. We should follow the rules to the letter and take every advantage possible to help our client.<br />Properly Educated New Lawyer: You're advocating the Holmsean "bad man" theory of the law, and that's not the best vision of our legal system.Theory!noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-11244588771606525772011-09-05T20:00:04.585-07:002011-09-05T20:00:04.585-07:00"What law school should really do is offer st..."What law school should really do is offer students insights into what the law should be. It should enable students to challenge the values held by practitioners, so that students will have different, countervailing perspectives to use in judging their experiences, and the senior partners they work for."<br /><br />Yes, I'm sure partners and judges will love hiring those grads who want to debate the nucleus of every issue with them.<br /><br />Judge: What's this case about?<br />Clerk: Grand larceny.<br />Judge: Can you summarize it for me?<br />Clerk: The indictment is another example of our patriarchal and misguided focus on ownership, with your standard Hobbs and Hume battles in there. I think we should take a stand and rewrite the law with this opinion.<br />Judge: You realize that due to the greed of the scumbag professor who taught you all that bullshit, I have 1,000 resumes from unemployed graduates on my desk, right?<br />Clerk: Right. Mr. Smith stole his roommate's IPOD but was filmed doing so with a nannie cam. The entire case comes down to this evidence issue that . . .<br />Judge: That's better.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-52581413733598487942011-09-05T19:48:26.326-07:002011-09-05T19:48:26.326-07:00I think the problem with law school teaching is ac...I think the problem with law school teaching is actually the opposite of what I'm reading here. Namely, the problem is not that law school doesn't prepare students for practice. Training for particular tasks is what early practice is for.<br /><br />The problem, rather, is that law school is insufficiently theoretical -- that it's a muddle of crude doctrinalism and spoon feeding of bar review material. What law school should really do is offer students insights into what the law should be. It should enable students to challenge the values held by practitioners, so that students will have different, countervailing perspectives to use in judging their experiences, and the senior partners they work for. Otherwise, practice will never change for the better.Theory!noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-33582547767758647472011-09-05T19:48:12.489-07:002011-09-05T19:48:12.489-07:00Video of what would happen to kids WITHOUT law sch...Video of what would happen to kids WITHOUT law school. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e87_1313872192Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-56029458145508181612011-09-05T19:26:41.883-07:002011-09-05T19:26:41.883-07:005:38, The students who run law reviews decide what...5:38, The students who run law reviews decide what gets published and the primary factors are (a) the prestige of the school at which the author teaches, (b) the prestige of the school that the author attended, (c) whether the article covers a hot current case, political topic, social issue . . .<br />The peer review consists of the student reviewing the logic and citations of your article. It seems absurd that students review the work of seasoned professors, but it's actually harmless. There is no risk or harm from the lack of peer review, because law review articles don't purport to make a medical, scientific, engineering . . . something that matters discovery. As LawProf says pull out any law review and you'll see mostly, well, here look for yourself http://www.brooklaw.edu/intellectuallife/lawjournals/brooklynlawreview/generalinformation.aspx? (selected completely at random).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-79779762069637658262011-09-05T17:38:40.146-07:002011-09-05T17:38:40.146-07:00At 3:02 Dan said this "We had one super famou...At 3:02 Dan said this "We had one super famous prof send us an article that was minimally coherent and had barely any sites. We were to clean it up and we did, because we'd get the prestige of publishing it. The other profs' stuff was only marginally better."<br /><br />Okay, this strikes me as about as ridiculous as a physics Master's student cleaning an article by Steven Hawking. It has me curious about the standards being exhibited by the law school sector of the academy (I'm not hating the player Dan, just hating the game).<br />What goes into choosing and editing law review articles anyway? What kinds of stuff did you chose to publish? and Why did you choose what you chose?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5164886390834386622.post-82432276604806478902011-09-05T16:33:33.062-07:002011-09-05T16:33:33.062-07:00I'd say instead that most law profs are people...I'd say instead that most law profs are people who went to law school and then discovered that you can make 6 figures with a lot less work by teaching law rather than practicing it. And a lot of law profs are people who then discovered that you can "do scholarship" with a lot less work by writing novels or "law and" near-beer rather than researching and writing about the law.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com