(2) The same journal contains my article The Crisis of the American Law School.
(3) Peter Zuckerman has published "Ending Student Loan Exceptionalism," in the Harvard Law Review (126 Harv. L. Rev. 587). The piece argues that student loans should be priced in a risk-based manner that would dissuade many people, including many 0Ls, from assuming unmanageable debt loads. It also calls for bankruptcy law reform to make such debt more easily dischargeable. (The author tells me the piece was inspired in part by some of the stories published at ITLSS).
(4) A revelatory glimpse into the uses and abuses of SSRN download counts: Paul Caron at Taxprof publishes regular updates on which tax law professors have garnered the most SSRN downloads. Ted Seto advertises on his CV that he is
Currently the 6th most SSRN-downloaded tax professor in the US (see TaxProf Blog at http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/tax_prof_rankings/index.html)Seto's high ranking is solely a product of the fact that three quarters of his SSRN downloads come from three papers that have nothing to do with tax law (this fact is significant in this context because tax papers are written for a highly specialized audience): the -- embarrassingly bad -- Journal of Legal Education piece discussed here yesterday, an article on how to game the US News rankings, and an article on tax LLM programs (which, like the JLE piece, puffs his own institution).
This is just one of an almost endless number of examples of the extent to which this business has been over-run by puerile obsessions about hierarchical status, that are both inimical to intellectual values, and prime factors in the increasingly absurd cost structure of legal academia (see (1), (2), and (3) supra)
Um, foist?
ReplyDeleteHarvard Law Review critical of the student loan scam. And Boom Goes the Dynamite.
ReplyDeleteHard for the academic intelligentsia to ignore that publication.
It's a student note, so I'm sure they'll dismiss it out of hand.
DeleteMost law reviews won't even consider anything by a student (except perhaps a student from their institution). Why should the identity of the author make a difference? It has nothing to do with the quality of the article.
DeleteThe answer is that the law reviews exist as vehicles for tenure. Students have to be kept out manu militari. It just wouldn't do for some dipshit professor with four names all in lower case to have his published tripe compared unfavorably to the article of a second-year law student.
The whole legal racket is a fucking swizz.
Come on. We know that the goal of law school isn't to train lawyers, or even to train students to think like lawyers. The goal is to serve the needs of law professors.
ReplyDelete+ 1.
DeleteThis all a nice theoretical debate, but delivery of legal education will not change much until schools start to decide lowering their tuition is in their best interest. People in the Ivory Tower somehow think enrollment will bottom out in the next few years, and they can maintain the status quo. My question to them would be when is the last time a market bottomed out when price was going up?
ReplyDeleteI think eventually law schools will adopt a two-tier model. Those schools at the top playing the same old U.S. News ranking game, and all other law schools competing on cost. There is not really a demand for a cheap lower ranked schools now because people from those schools are not getting jobs, but that will change as law school enrollment continues to plummet, and the supply of law school graduates begins to get close to the demand for them.
Shark Sandwich accurately and concisely described this damn indu$TTTry.
ReplyDeleteYou made various nice points there. I did a search on the
ReplyDeletesubject and found mainly
persons will go along with with your blog.
my site :: litotic
Paul, a note on your UMich.L.Reform article (which I am just now reading).
ReplyDeleteIt states, "A generation ago, the typical American law school featured large classes, rare to
non-existent clinical programs, a high tenure-track faculty-to-student ratio..."
Shouldn't high faculty-to-student ratio have rather said LOW faculty-to-student ratio?
No, what are you not understanding?
DeleteOne of us is not reading it correctly. It could be me, but I don't think so (of course).
DeleteI see what you mean, but for this specific example it could be true that there is a growing number Adjunct professor's, and decreasing number of tenure-tract faculty.
Delete^^^ Bubba say wut? (What you've just expressed is a decreasing tenure- to non-tenure-track ratio.)
DeleteI expressed a decreasing number of tenure track professors.
DeleteSure, Bubba, sure.
DeleteBut in any event, the opposite was true (and the opposite was meant by LP's paper - it just didn't say that).
More below. I think that in a number of places in your article, you said "faculty-student" ratio where you meant "student-faculty" ratio.
ReplyDeleteThis example begins the third graf of part II(A):
"In fact, faculty-to-student ratios have dropped dramatically at law schools, not merely since 1978 but over the past decade."
When the faculty to student ratio drops, there are more professors and/or fewer students - meaning that either class sizes are smaller or that professors are teaching fewer classes. This is exactly what has happened. If the original faculty to student ratio was 30 to 1, and now the faculty to student ratio is 15 to 1, the change would be characterized as a drop in the faculty to student ratio, correct?
ReplyDeleteFor goshsakes, would you read what you just wrote?
Delete30 to 1 faculty to student ratio? 30 teachers per student??
You're doing it, too.
You've obviously never completed a legal math class. The way the ratio is expressed in words is always the opposite of the way it is expressed in numbers.
Delete^^^ LOL, thanks.
DeleteIt's like the post the other day, where LP wrote that a Cal Western's grad's chances of becoming a biglaw partner were 200 to 1, where (presumably) he meant the chances were 1 in 200...
"200 to 1" is correct. Notice it uses a different word than "1 in 200."
DeleteBut hey, nothing wrong with lawyers being bad at both math and English.
Looks to me like it's a 200 to 1 chance AGAINST becoming a partner, not chance OF becoming partner.
Delete@10:41, FWIW, "200 to 1" means the odds are very low, not high.
DeleteBut even he had made a mistake: were you really confused what he meant?
And now you people don't understand plain English as well as plain math.
DeleteDo you understand that the chance of something happening differs from saying the chance against something happening?
A 200:1 chance against something happening is a very low likelihood.
A 200:1 chance of it happening is a high likelihood.
"even he had" = "even if he had".
DeleteI don't want the very capable wordsmiths here to suffer an aneurysm.
@11:28
Delete"were about 200 to 1".
No one, other than perhaps the inhabitants of Mars, would assume that that language meant anything but very low odds.
Why should one have to assume anything about the language? Why shouldn't it speak for itself?
DeleteAre you the one who believes schools have 30-to-1 faculty to student ratios?
Dude: this is the common usage . Everyone understands this ratio the way to was expressed by lawproff
Delete^^^
DeleteNeighbor, you are either just plain FOS, or just plain lying.
Chances of getting cancer: 1:13000.
Chances of a woman over 45 having a miscarriage: 1:32
Chances of winning the lottery: 1:55,345,682.
Nobody says your chances of winning the lottery are 55,345,682 to 1.
PC's use of the term "puerile obsession" in his last para also describes this discussion.
Delete(although I did like the "Neighbor" touch. That's the way they do it in Iowa, no?)
On a related but somewhat different note - presige -
ReplyDeleteWord comes today that the legal job market in some norteastern cities is saturated with non-HYS T6 grads who are begging for any type of work, including temp work and doc review. These lawyers are not being placed. There are not enought jobs for them. Don't wait to sign up for Columbia or NYU, guys, this could be you.
This is where the huge number of transfers Columbia and NYU take aggravates an already bad situation. You not only have the unemployed Columbia and NYU law grads who started at the law schools as first years. You also have a group of mostly unemployed transfers from Columbia Law and to a lesser extent NYU Law (who did not start these schools as first years) flooding the northeast job market.
Great for the repuations of Columbia and NYU Law - producing lawge numbers of unemployed attorneys struggling for doc review after BigLaw stints. Just keep up the hefty transfer classes guys!
Source?
DeleteAnother blow to the "versatility" of a law degree. I wonder how many law professors will even know of this change when they offer alternative career paths such as "Real Estate" to prospective law students...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dre.ca.gov/files/pdf/faqs/FAQ_AB1718.pdf
Anyone who calls it "Juris Doctorate" should have the degree revoked. The degree is "Juris Doctor" (which means 'teacher of law').
DeleteGeeze you lawyer types are bad at math...
ReplyDeleteReuven Avi-Noah has almost twice as many SSRN downloads as Set, and Avi-Noah's papers are all real tax papers.
ReplyDeletehttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=208790