Archive for the ‘Law School’ Category

Happy 10,000th Post!

posted by William McGeveran

I was just working on my next guest post when I noticed a little statistic in the dashboard: there have been 10,007 posts to Concurring Opinions. Which means this lil’ ol’ “blawg” passed a significant milestone about a week ago that deserves some celebration — and heartfelt  thanks to Dan Solove and the cadre of other permanent bloggers who keep it going.

By my count, post number 10,000 was a pointer to a new essay about the Kirtsaeng decision in the Stanford Law Review Online. That’s appropriate, because spreading the word about interesting and timely legal scholarship — especially stuff that appears in less traditional places like the journals’ online supplemnets — has been one of ConOp’s many services to the rest of us for years now.

  May 11, 2013 at 12:37 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Blogging, Law Rev (Stanford), Law School   Print This Post   2 Comments

Continuous Assessment

posted by William McGeveran

Thanks so much to the Concurring Opinions gang for having me back for another guest blogging stint. My semester has ended, so let the blogging begin!

Except … even though I have not received my students’ exams from the registrar yet, I am grading. Why?  Because I assigned group projects during the semester and have not completed marking the last one. This raises an uncomfortable question for me: have I done the students any good by giving them a graded assignment during the semester if they don’t receive feedback on it until they are on the cusp of taking the final exam?

That really depends on the reasons for requiring “grading events” such as group projects, short papers, quizzes, midterms, or oral presentations during the semester. Like many of my colleagues, I have increasingly moved away from the traditional law school model that based the entire course grade on a high-stakes final examination, perhaps with some small adjustment for class participation. It seems clear to me that this is a good decision — even though it has meant a lot more grading (every professor’s least favorite task) and even though the institutional incentives for law faculty don’t really encourage or assist us to do depart from the tradition of the all-or-nothing final exam.

But I have to confess that my views of the reasons for continuing assessment are unsettled and even a little muddled. Here are the main candidates in my mind:

• Earlier graded events give students feedback about their understanding of the material and performance in the course while there is still time to correct it.
• Basing the course grade on more than one event reduces the “fluke factor” of a student who is ill or overtired or just not in top form the day of the final exam.
• The events themselves — say, a group project — serve valuable pedagogical goals and making them part of the grade ensures that students will take them seriously.
• Educational research shows that students learn more effectively if they synthesize knowledge as they go along rather than just doing a big outline at the end of the course, and graded events spur them to synthesize earlier.
• Basing the grade on different types of exercises rewards varied abilities beyond the particular (and slightly bizarre) skill set that excels at law school issue spotter exams.

 

Only the first of these requires me to return students’ grades sooner than I’ve managed to do for this group project. Of course, I am saying this partly to assuage my guilt over my own tardiness. But I also wonder how well we articulate the reasons for continuous assessment to our students — or even, frankly, to ourselves. I have now more carefully engaged in the sort of reflection about these goals that I should have gone through before the semester started. Now I know for next time that my answer is: all of the above.

Uh oh. I better get back to grading those group projects right now.

  May 8, 2013 at 2:12 pm   Posted in: Education, Law School, Law School (Teaching), Teaching, Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Is it better for one student to get a job than n students to fail the bar?

posted by Dave Hoffman

A student’s final law school GPA predicts bar passage better than other independent variables. But the relationship isn’t causal: raising the mean GPA of all students does not promote bar passage.  Indeed, some investigators have suggested that the inverse is more likely to be true. When GPA rises for all students, individuals at the bottom of the class aren’t sufficiently signaled that their grades are really and truly bad, and consequently such badly-warned students don’t approach bar study with the requisite degree of seriousness. That is, if a school has a mean of a 3.3 at graduation, the bottom 20% of the class probably has GPA of around a B-.  B- students may well say to themselves “sure, I’m at the bottom of the class, but I’m not a C student!  I’m not in danger of failing the bar!”  But they are.  In this perverse way, raising the mean increases the rate at which weaker students fail the bar, even as overall, grades are positively correlated with passing!

The puzzle deepens. Students often argue that employers focus on mean GPA to the exclusion of class rank.  Given that students are competing with other schools (nationally and regionally), there are race-to-the-bottom pressures on each law school’s curve generated by employment markets.  A school that produces students at the 50th percentile with a 3.5 mean will obtain better employment outcomes than one that produces students at the 50th percentile with a 3.0 mean. All else equal, schools should reduce barriers to employment.  (Of course this result depends on employers indeed acting in the irrational manner described – ignoring or downplaying class rank and focusing on absolute GPA.  This would be very, very difficult to test empirically, though I imagine someone could give it a shot using nifty studies.)

You see the tension, right?  A higher mean simultaneously could boost employment in the middle and higher end of the class while also depressing bar passage at the lower end of the class. These contrasting outcome effects turn on psychological biases resulting from overemphasizing raw grades over percentile rank, but simply providing class rank instead of grades would cause employers to balk. The tension may lead administrators and faculty to an uncomfortable question: when the two conflict, should we privilege bar passage over employment? What is the appropriate calculus? Could we live with one additional student failing the bar if two got a job?

My own view is that the price for bar failure is so high that the number of jobs won in this calculus would have to be unrealistically high.  Consequently lower means are to be preferred to higher ones at some schools.  What do you think?

  May 1, 2013 at 2:22 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Teaching), Uncategorized   Print This Post   13 Comments

Summer Law Review Submissions

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’m trying to compile a list of law reviews that will accept submissions during the summer.  (I’m the Associate Dean for Research at my school.)  If anyone can point me to a source or if law review editors want to contact me directly, I’d be much obliged.

  April 22, 2013 at 4:28 pm   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Faculty and staff

posted by Aaron Saiger

The proximate cause of Danielle’s inviting me to guest-blog at Concurring Opinions was a celebration we had at Fordham of my colleague Robert Kaczorowski‘s publication of “Fordham University School of Law: A History,” the publication of which she had blogged here. The  first half the book analyzes decanal administrations prior to those of Dean John Feerick, who remains an illustrious and beloved member of the Fordham faculty. This section of the book is remarkable for being the very opposite of “law porn“: it tells the story of several decades of a law school’s decline. This decline, Kaczorowski convincingly argues, was driven largely by the insatiable voraciousness with which the central university plundered the law school’s revenues (read student tuition) for its own, non-law purposes. Today, we call that plundering the “central services charge.” At many universities, not just my own, central charges are a major driver of law school costs.

The central services charge is related to the explosive growth of the administrative sector within universities. Read the rest of this post »

  April 9, 2013 at 9:40 am   Posted in: Book Reviews, Corruption, Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Snapshot Of The Legal Market

posted by Ryan Calo

Like a blog barnacle, I continue to hang on to the good ship Concurring Opinions.  At least for another month.  Thank you for inviting me to stay on.

Today, an observation about the legal market (and a plug for a friend’s start up). Len Gray is a former Latham & Watkins associate who, prior to law school, worked as a headhunter in Atlanta.  Even so, Len was turned off by legal headhunters, whom he regarded as too aggressive and often insensitive to finding the right fit. Read the rest of this post »

  April 1, 2013 at 6:08 pm   Posted in: Law Practice, Law School   Print This Post   No Comments

Sunday Night Monday Morning music

posted by Deven Desai

I’m re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon now on Kindle by the way). Finished V. Finished Crying of Lot 49. Tried to pick up Vineland which I loved. Wanted the difficult, mad, beautiful language. Back to Gravity’s Angel. For fans I post a song I knew before I read the book. It is Laurie Anderson’s Gravity’s Angel. Honestly, she’s not for everyone. Maybe not for most. But if you dig experimental music and complex lyrics give it a shot. The album Mister Heartbreak from which the track comes is fun too. Again fun for some. It has William Burroughs on Sharkey’s Night. I quoted it at my Cal graduation. That is below too. Shorter.

Where’s the law? Not sure. As Burroughs intones, “And sharkey says: hey, kemosabe! long time no see. he says: hey sport. you connect the dots. you pick up the pieces.” OK for a bit more, as I have said here before, life beyond the law matters. And it turns out that knowing life beyond the law might make you a better lawyer. That, by the way, is why empathy for a judge is important and a good thing. If you can’t walk in someone else’s shoes, at least read more, listen to more, watch more. Great writing, great communication opens the door to the world beyond yours and mine. At least those are the dots I connect. The pieces I pick up.

  March 25, 2013 at 12:11 am   Posted in: Culture, Just for Fun, Law School, Weird   Print This Post   No Comments

Upcoming Conference

posted by Gerard Magliocca

The Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law is pleased to announce that its second annual conference will be held on April 18-19, 2013, at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, Indiana. The purpose of the conference is to highlight, develop, and promote the scholarship of new and younger comparativists, defined as scholars who have been involved in comparative law for fewer than ten years. More than 130 younger scholars from around the world submitted abstracts in response to a Call for Papers issued in September 2012. Over 80 younger scholars who have been involved in comparative law for less than ten years as well as a select group of graduate students are slated to present their research at this conference covering a wide range of topics in comparative private and public law.

More information about the conference and a preliminary agenda are available on the following website:  http://indylaw.indiana.edu/YCCconference/.

  March 21, 2013 at 8:37 am   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Warren Buffett’s Institutional Imperative and Law Schools

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Warren Buffett minted a concept he calls the institutional imperative to describe a nettlesome phenomenon in business organizations that can introduce costly and enduring mistakes. The concept may explain something about how law schools got themselves into the difficulties they are in today, and why it may be so hard to escape them.

Buffett’s concept is encapsulated in the following series of attributes, adapted suitably for law schools. Their cumulative effect is to cause rationality to wilt in institutional decision making:

(1) as if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction.

(2) just as work expands to fill available time, academic projects or appointments will materialize to soak up all available resources.

(3) academic cravings of the Dean, however foolish, will often be quickly supported by committees charged with bold tasks reflected in names such as Strategic Planning and Self Study and platoons of Associate Deans and Program Directors eager to produce glossy brochures boasting of the latest academic achievement.

(4) the behavior of peer schools, whether in changing the first year curriculum, adding clinical programs or other experiential learning, renovating the third year, adding new specialty journals, making splashy lateral appointments, reducing course loads, paying summer research grants or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set schools on these courses, which are often misguided. Deans today and faculty seeking to hire new deans would do well to think hard about Buffett’s institutional imperative and organize and manage their schools in ways that minimize its influence.

* See The Essays of Warren Buffett (ch. II.F: Cigar Butts and the Institutional Imperative).

 

  March 1, 2013 at 10:13 am   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   One Comment

What is the Point of Symposia?

posted by Dave Hoffman

Over at the Faculty Lounge, the estimable Michelle Meyer argues that it’s possibly inconsistent to take account of race, gender, and sexual orientation in symposia invitations but not to do so when selecting articles in law reviews.  Her post is thoughtful and well-written, though I believe it rests on a false premise.  Go over there and read it and then come back to find out which one.

Read the rest of this post »

  February 17, 2013 at 9:46 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   One Comment

The Blue Book and its Times

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Yale Robinson, a student in my Corporations class, today told me about his law review note topic, which happened to be in the same field as my Note, published back in 1987. After class, Yale went and found my Note and emailed me a report about it.  In the email, Yale added:

As an aside, it is amusing to see that the Table of Contents in the Cardozo Law Review of that time does not list the author of a Note, only the title, and the first page of the Note also does not give the author’s name. You have to go to the last page to see the author’s name. I don’t know why this was done, but it appears that this omission was rectified beginning with the April 1991 issue.

I replied as follows:

The curious style you mention was the standard practice at all law reviews at all schools for [decades, since 1926,] up through 1991 when the Blue Book announced the change. Before 1991, notes were “unsigned” and citation was merely to Note, . . .  rather than Cunningham, Note . . . .

Another practice changed around the same time: in the old days, only an author’s last name was used (Cunningham or Robinson etc); thereafter the first name and initial are included.

I think these changes reflect things about the times, such as elitism that wore away in the case of naming Note authors and a sense of full identity . . . in the case of the full name.

The keepers of the Blue Book keep citation practice up with the times.  Looking back at the styles of earlier eras can be amusing.  I wonder what other amusing anachronisms are to be found in the old style books.

 

You can see the covers of a dozen different editions of the Blue Book, from which the two in this post are taken, here.  

 

 

 

  February 11, 2013 at 3:47 pm   Posted in: Culture, Law Rev Forum, Law School   Print This Post   2 Comments

Masters Degrees at Law Schools

posted by Gerard Magliocca

One trend that will probably become pronounced in legal education over the next five years is the development of masters degrees in law.  These would be geared towards folks who want some legal training for one year but are not interested in becoming attorneys.  Some schools already have specialized versions of this (say, for journalists), but one can imagine interest in these degrees from scientists, doctors, corporate human resource departments, or folks in business.  This type of program is attractive from the law schools’ perspective because it (1) would generate revenue; (2) would lead to a more diverse student body; and (3) is  unregulated by the ABA.

The question that these programs raise, though, is whether they would undercut the JD degree or a JD education.  In other words, would some people inclined to get a JD substitute to the masters if they could?  Will JD students be upset at the prospect that some jobs could be taken from them by masters graduates?  And how about alumni–would they feel like their degrees would be diluted if their school offers a masters?  Thoughts are welcome.

  February 11, 2013 at 11:57 am   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

Zombie Law Schools

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I thought I’d try my hand at some posts on the state of legal education.  I’m not sure that I have anything original to say, but maybe I’m wrong.

Here is the first observation that I want to make.  Everybody knows that law school applications are way down.  You would think that this would lead to a contraction in law schools.  But that has not happened.  Instead, MORE law schools are opening.  How can this be?

The answer is that law schools are profit centers for universities, and therefore there is a powerful interest in creating them or keeping them going.  Most university departments lose money.  Revenues are concentrated in professional schools or a handful of departments that generate grants–sciences and engineering. Moreover, many universities want a law school because, as one administrator told me, it makes the campus “look better” for undergraduate and graduate applicants.

What this means is that any law school that is connected to a university will not be allowed to fail, even if the same school standing alone would.  These zombie law schools are going to prevent the market from clearing, with adverse consequences for faculty and students.  More on that later.

  February 6, 2013 at 8:49 am   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   10 Comments

The AALS in New Orleans

posted by Gerard Magliocca

For all of you law professors out there, please let me know if you will be in New Orleans next week, as I’d like to chat with as many people as I can.

  December 28, 2012 at 3:41 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   No Comments

Recalling Cardozo Law Review’s “Bork Book”

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

I never knew Robert H. Bork (1927-2012) but as a rising 3L and law review editor at Cardozo in the summer of 1987, my classmates and I met his intellectual heft and political salience. Just after President Ronald Reagan announced his nomination of Bork to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in late July, it was obvious that the country was headed for a passionate debate on justice writ large (e.g., abortion, antitrust, civil rights, free speech, you name it).

Sensing an opportunity to discipline the discourse, we decided to collect and publish a dozen essays and four reports assessing Judge Bork’s jurisprudence from every angle. Well-advised throughout by our professors, David Rudenstine and Monroe Price, we solicited extant or original pieces by such luminaries as Ronald Dworkin, Steve Gillers, Mary Ann Glendon and Michael McConnell, as well as reports of the White House, Public Citizen, a research group commissioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee (led by Christopher Schroeder and approved by Floyd Abrams, Clark Clifford, Walter Dellinger and Laurence Tribe) and a DOJ response thereto.

Fifty of us, new 2L staff and 3L editors, spent an intense two weeks collating and editing the contributions. Then four of us (Jim Nobile, Allen Applbaum, Jeff Stamler and me) flew to Lincoln, Nebraska, site of the leading printer of law reviews, Joe Christensen Inc.  We spent several more days and sleepless nights scrutinizing the page proofs before giving the print order. After 10,000 copies were printed, Jeff and I flew back to New York while Jim and Allen drove a rented U-Haul to Washington D.C. where the town was abuzz with debate and Senate hearings would shortly begin.

Meanwhile, back in the nation’s capital, another classmate, Barbara Braucher (who later married U.S. Attorney General Ted Olson and still later perished aboard one of the hijacked airplanes on 9/11) had been making her rounds in the Senate, where Barbara had many connections. She alerted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including its chairman Joe Biden, that our law review issue, addressing every important topic and viewpoint in a compact 530 pages under a single two-inch spine, was on its way.

Upon their arrival in Washington, Jim and Allen toted several boxes directly to the awaiting Senators. Standing on the steps of the Capitol when delivering the books, the New York Times interviewed our classmates about this effort.  The story (here) ran the next day, along with a cute quote from Allen and a photo of the group.

The special issue, released in early October ahead of the hearings, sold briskly at many book shops around Washington and New York that fall.  It was clear during the hearings that many Senators had read our product.  In the years after, it was even clearer that Judge Bork had, as he cited to our “Bork book” often.  The issue was volume 9, no. 1 and was a great start to our third year of law school and one of many innovative academic undertakings for which the Cardozo Law Review became known over ensuing decades.

  December 19, 2012 at 3:53 pm   Posted in: Current Events, Law School, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Dave Brubeck – A great has died

posted by Deven Desai

Dave Brubeck has died at age 91. I grew up on jazz from Miles Davis to John Coltrane to the Marsalis family and more. I was fortunate to have seen Brubeck in concert. In the odd coincidence world, yesterday I was listening to one of my favorite albums, We’re All Together Again for the First Time, as I got into a groove for an article I am writing. I thought I should post one the great tracks to encourage students and professors to dive into the song and their work. Perhaps I felt a tremor in the force. Anyway enjoy.

  December 5, 2012 at 12:56 pm   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

Incorrect Citations

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Wonderful as it is to be cited, being cited incorrectly poses a dilemma.  If your article is referenced for a proposition it does not support, what should you do?  Should you alert the author of the piece or the editor of the journal?   Should you ignore it?  Should you correct the reference the next time you publish on the topic?

Perhaps the ideal response varies with the degree of error.   Scholars delight to participate in the discourse, after all, and sometimes a citation that seems incorrect to an author is really  a way to advance the conversation.  A reference in ensuing scholarship explaining that contribution would be apt.   Sometimes a piece is cited for a general point that an author rather than a reader would recognize as a bit afield. No response at all is okay.

But what about a statement that is clearly wrong? Suppose someone makes an assertion that European accounting law is principles based and cites my Vanderbilt Law Review article challenging the whole notion of principles based accounting.   It infuriates me.  I want to write to the author and editor to object.  But should I? Should  I care?

The problem is even worse than appears, because while I am particularly sensitive to incorrect citations to my own work, I also see incorrect citations to the work of others with which I’m familiar.  It appears that many writers and editors today cite things without really reading them.  It seems as though someone should say something.  But who?  And to whom?

  November 12, 2012 at 11:12 pm   Posted in: Accounting, Law School, Law Talk   Print This Post   5 Comments

Classroom Minutes and Syllabus Design

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

I am dividing my Corporations casebook to fit the fourth different classroom schedule I’ve had this decade.  It is a taxing but valuable exercise, from a pedagogical standpoint.

At Boston College from 2002 to 2005, my 3-credit class met twice weekly for 90 minutes and I tailored my syllabus accordingly.  From 2007 to 2010, at George Washington, my 4-credit class met thrice weekly for 75 minutes, and I re-sliced, and slightly expanded, my course.

Visiting at Fordham this term, my 4-credit class is meeting twice weekly for 100 minutes; the syllabus I’m designing this week is for my visit at Cardozo in the Spring, where my 4-credit class will meet once per week for 110 minutes and twice per week for 50 minutes.  And at Cardozo, the Corporations course includes a mandatory separate sequence on Accounting, so the syllabus design is a bit more complex yet, as I incorporate material from another book.

In each exercise, the task entails assigning a set of materials, each defined as a teaching unit.  The pros and cons of the various combinations emerge, revealing how a given topic can be either expanded or contracted or linked in new ways with other units.   The exercise adds perspective on the materials for the teacher which should enrich the student experience.

Particularly interesting is how, at least as the book is designed, some topics are best suited for 50 or 75 minute units while others are better suited for the longer 90 to 110 minute slots.  That  knowledge will help me as I revise the book for its 8th edition next summer, trying to provide materials that can be readily sliced into separate series of 50 versus 75 versus 100 minute blocks.

As you can guess from the fact that I just diverted 20 minutes to writing this post, syllabus redesign to accommodate teaching minutes is not the most stimulating of activities. It is less interesting and less valuable than switching books, and is hardly as taxing.  Still, the exercise shows the value of variety.  Time to get back to it.

  November 8, 2012 at 2:54 pm   Posted in: Law School, Teaching   Print This Post   2 Comments

Why don’t law schools offer bar review courses?

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I don’t know the answer. Since Bar/Bri uses law professors to teach classes and often uses law school classrooms, why don’t law schools just do this themselves?

There are some advantages to this idea. First, law schools might raise their bar passage rates (and rankings) if they put together a good bar review program. Second, schools could raise some revenue from these programs (especially if they are good). Third, some schools could tailor their program to the particulars of their state bar exam in a way that Bar/Bri can’t.

I suppose the reason this doesn’t happen (aside from neglect) is that it looks like a concession that the school did not do a good job of training its students for 3 years. But this is wrong. Teaching to a test is different from teaching.

  October 13, 2012 at 9:04 am   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   7 Comments

Recommended Reading: Robert Kaczorowski’s “Fordham University School of Law: A History”

posted by Danielle Citron

Ever since the inception of the recession, we have been embroiled in a conversation about legal education–its costs, value, and flaws.  There has been much controversy, some informed and some uninformed about the need for reforms in legal education and ways forward.  Amidst this debate, legal historian Robert Kaczorowski has written a brilliant and engrossing history of Fordham Law School, one that highlights, among many issues, the struggles that law schools have with their universities about the funds they generate.  As Kaczorowski’s book “Fordham University School of Law: A History” highlights, universities see their law schools as cash cows, siphoning away their funding for the main university and taking away those funds from the law school.  Legal reform amidst that continuing state of affairs is a fraught enterprise, indeed.  Of the book, esteemed legal historian William Nelson (NYU) writes:

One of the best books ever written on American legal education.  Besides documenting the history of Fordham Law, Kaczorowski makes three major contributions to the knowledge of legal education’s history.  First, the book documents why large numbers of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century immigrants and their children needed the founding of a Catholic law school.  Second, it documents the factors that produce greatness in a law school.  Third, it traces a conflict over the funding of law school.  No other work has addressed these issues in depth.  Kaczorowski has done a remarkable job.

  September 30, 2012 at 2:19 pm   Posted in: Book Reviews, Bright Ideas, Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

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