Archive for the ‘Law School’ Category

The Summer Before Law School

posted by Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder

Concurring Opinions is pleased to welcome this guest post by University of Missouri – Kansas City Profs. Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder, co-authors of the recent book “The Happy Lawyer.”

So you’re going to law school this fall. Congratulations! Getting in wasn’t easy. Last year 155,000 people took the LSAT. The 201 ABA accredited law schools across the country received about 88,000 applications. Only 49,700 students matriculated.

Obviously you’re a hard worker (or you wouldn’t be coming to law school and you wouldn’t have read past the first paragraph), so you may be wondering what you can do the summer before to prepare yourself for law school.

First, let’s get the legal disclaimers out of the way. There are no guarantees, warranties, or promises of any kind; there is no magic bullet for preparation. There are, however, a few tips toward a happier and more productive beginning that we will offer you.

Get Situated

More than one-third of you will be going to law school in some place other than your home or college town. It is important to have housing set up so you can move in at least several weeks in advance. Find the stores you’ll need, arrange your banking, stock up on supplies and grocery staples. Students struggle when they land suddenly in a new town and promptly start law school. Law school requires more focus than other forms of education. It starts immediately, and is difficult at first because students may be called on to speak in class or have writing assignments due. If you get behind in the first few foundational weeks, it will take a lot of work to catch up later. In undergraduate lectures, you were free to fall asleep perusing Facebook. Not anymore.

A colleague of ours, Dean Barbara Glesner Fines, has posted her wonderful Orientation speech online, emphasizing that there are better and worse times to begin law school, and the worst time to start law school is at the same time that you start (or end) a marriage, or have a new baby, or are newly diagnosed with a chronic illness. In other words, any time you’re facing significant personal challenges. Arrange for your law school computer or any upgrade at the beginning of the summer, so you have plenty of time to become familiar with it. In short, get the distractions out of the way.

Related to the issue of getting situated is the idea of establishing residency for both bar and tuition purposes, depending on your state’s and your school’s rules. Top-Law-Schools.com has posted a guide to “Law School Residency Issues by State,” covering 23 states.

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July 8, 2011 at 12:19 pm Posted in: Law School Print This Post 3 Comments

Age Is More Than a Number: Viewing Our Students Through Generational Research — Book Reviews of Twenge’s Generation Me and Twenge and Campbell’s The Narcissism Epidemic

posted by Heather Garretson

Jean M. Twenge & W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic (Free Press 2010).

Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before (Free Press 2006).

As any good lawyer knows, successful communication depends on knowing your audience. Are today’s law students really more demanding than ever, or are professors becoming part of the old get-off-my-lawn mind set? Are we sending law firms self-absorbed graduates who refuse to sacrifice a social life for a career, or are law firms hiring graduates who are simply more confident in vocalizing the need for a work-life balance? Many of the answers to these types of questions may be found by understanding the character of our students. Jean Twenge’s book, Generation Me (Free Press 2006) and the follow-up book with co-author W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic (Free Press 2010) examine the dominate age group of our students – twentysomethings. While the books are not about the character of law students per se, Generation Me is specifically about the character of those who make up a majority of our classrooms. As a disclaimer, I note that I too am(barely) a member of the group Twenge researches and names “GenMe.” As a member, reading Generation Me did more than educate me on my students’ influences and attitudes. It also revealed much about the forces that were likely influences on my personal and professional decisions.

Generation Me is a thoroughly researched book, full of statistical information that tells us what we already know about our students and so much more. It gives insight into the beliefs, biases, and behavior of its subjects and is therefore worth reading for anyone who deals with members of GenMe. One of the observations Twenge highlights is that informality in school and the workplace is the new norm. This finding is backed by studies and illustrated through anecdotes – like the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team wearing flip-flops to the White House (p. 17-18). This is not to say that you have to allow baseball caps in your classroom, but it does give a reference point to professors who encounter students who are surprised when baseball caps are not allowed. Many more findings provide relevant context for our student population. Cheating in school is on the rise (p. 27), as is the use of shocking language (p. 40), and grade inflation (p. 62). In decline is the use of titles, calling a boss “Linda,” for instance, rather than “Mrs. Smith” (p. 29) and the belief that there is one right way to do things (p. 26). This last finding may explain why there is resistance when teaching students to “think like a lawyer.”

Generation Me makes wide brush strokes about its members but backs its findings with research. Much of the book’s allure comes from these detailed statistical findings. It does not provide a light cultural observation – there is no “kids these days” aspect to it. Rather, Generation Me outlines specific data that walks the reader through thirty years of cultural changes and how those changes affected people who grew up in this timeframe. Particularly enlightening to educators is Twenge’s demonstration of the affect of the self-esteem curriculum (p. 53). Self-esteem, once an “obscure academic term,” has not produced its desired outcome. Teaching self-esteem, the theory went, would increase student performance. Actually teaching self-esteem, however, has not produced increased ability, only increased self-esteem. Data collected from students born in the 1980s shows a sharp uptick in self-esteem. The average kid in the 90s, smack in the middle of GenMe, had higher self esteem than 73% of kids in 1979 (p. 53). This increase in self-esteem is attributed to self-esteem curriculum and cultural messages that tell students they are, regardless of their actions, lovable, great, and important (pp.53-60). The message was inundated into the culture in the 90s and as a result, we have young adults who were raised to find value in themselves rather than in what they provide. The statistics show that these students tend to find value in their performance simply because they provided it and not because the performance itself has intrinsic worth (pp. 62-65). GenMe received a message that feeling good about yourself is more important than good performance (pp. 56-57).

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June 7, 2011 at 1:48 am Posted in: Book Reviews, Law School, Law School (Teaching) Print This Post 3 Comments

The Price of Law School Cost Transparency

posted by Dave Hoffman

Higher-education cost transparency is all the rage. In a recent article in Slate, Annie Lowery argued that:

“It is true that we have tremendous amounts of data about higher education. But it is also true that too often students end up misled, overwhelmed, or confused attempting to gauge the different options. Big, expensive purchases require smart, educated customers. That is why the government created the new fuel-efficiency labels. It is also why the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is rolling out simplified, standardized home-mortgage forms. It should not, after all, take a Ph.D. in statistics to get through the college application process.”

This intuition drives politicians like Sen. Boxer to attack the ABA for failing to push law schools to disclose more data, and to crowd-sourced work like Law School Transparency.

In general, I absolutely think that law schools ought to compete on the transparency of their disclosures about student job outcomes, and that the ABA’s highest and best accreditation purpose would be to audit such data for its accuracy. However, I thought I’d caution proponents of cost transparency of two specific & unanticipated costs of their proposals.

First, think about what cost transparency entails. To my mind, real law school cost transparency doesn’t mean that we on a clear form provide prospective students a series of blanks: ”tuition + anticipated tuition growth” plus “living costs + anticipated cost increases” minus “expected three-year scholarship”. We’d also need to disclose our predictions of the student’s chances on the summer job market – law school cost is for some students significantly defrayed by summer employment. If you look nationally, graduating law student debt has spiked in the last two years. That rise doesn’t follow largely from tuition increases, though that’s part of the story. Rather, it’s the collapse of the firm job market in 2008 -2010 that did the trick: students lost $10-$30,000 of expected income that would have offset or repaid borrowing.

The problem is that although law schools could get a handle on some of these numbers, disclosing them in a way that’s going to meet students’ ever-rising expectations isn’t exactly an easy task. Think about the average administrator in charge of this disclosure — how likely is it that they will be able to do so in a way that meets Lowery’s standard of clarity, accuracy, and replication? Even when they are excellent at their job today, this kind of data-organization and display task would demand a fundamentally new set of skills. Bringing in a new body is a fine idea, although many law schools are operating under hiring freezes to control tuition growth. Moreover, as Gordon Smith observed some years ago with reference to curricular change, legal education reformers often discount opportunity costs severely. So if law schools spend more time on figuring out the expected costs of law school education, they are going to spend less time on something else. (And, likely, less money.) What’s that to be? My guess is: library resources, clinics, and research support. Maybe that’s a worthwhile trade-off, but it strikes me that discussions of cost transparency are really just proxies for complaints about cost, period. Real law school cost will fall if and when the legal job market recovers.

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May 29, 2011 at 4:30 pm Posted in: Law School, Psychology and Behavior Print This Post 2 Comments

Law Schools and the Curve

posted by Solangel Maldonado

The New York Times has published yet another article accusing law schools of misleading students, this time of failing to inform admitted students with merit scholarships contingent on maintaining a certain grade point average of the possibility of losing their scholarships. I agree with many of the article’s points and the comments in response. For example, I completely agree that law schools should inform admitted students of the curve (it varies from a 2.67 at some schools to a 3.4 at others) and provide them with their grading guidelines. I found the following information on the websites of four law schools:

Law School 1

A+ 1%

A 8%

A- 15%

B+ 25%

B 20%

B- 12%

C+ 7%

C 4%

C- 4%

F 4%

Law School 2

A or higher No more than 10 percent

A- or higher No more than 25 percent

C+ or lower At least 15 percent

C- or lower At least 6 percent

Law School 3

A+ 0-2%

A 7-13%

A- 16-24%

B+ 22-30%

B Remainder

B- 4-11%

C 2-5%

D/F 0-5%

Law School 4

At least 20% of grades are A- or above and at least 20% of grades are C+ or below.

***

Given that grading guidelines vary from school to school, knowledge of a law school’s grading system may help merit scholarship recipients assess their likelihood of retaining their scholarships. However, I disagree with the article’s suggestion that the curve is the main reason why many students lose their scholarships. The curve is generally not the reason why a student who never had a grade lower than a B+ in college may earn a B- or C in law school. In my experience, the curve does not lower a student’s grade but instead bumps the grade up or has no effect at all. In other words, in the absence of a curve, many more law students would earn B minuses and Cs in their first semester (or first year). The reason is that few first semester law students write good exams. This is understandable. Law school exams are generally very different from the exams students took in college or other graduate programs, and it takes a while to figure out how to take a law school exam. A student may have memorized the “black letter” law, but lack the skills to apply it to a complex fact pattern with numerous legal issues. As the article acknowledges, law students, especially those with merit scholarships, assume that because they performed well as undergraduates, they will automatically perform well in law school—even in their first semester. However, this is not the case. Many students do not learn how to apply the law to a new fact pattern or how to advise a client of “all the potential claims and defenses” (a common law school exam question) until after their first round of exams when they meet with their professors individually to review the exam. Maybe law schools need to do a better job of providing students with feedback before they take exams and with formative assessments, as the Carnegie Report on Legal Education recommends, that focus “on supporting students in learning rather than ranking, sorting and filtering them.”

May 4, 2011 at 9:59 pm Posted in: Education, Law School Print This Post 8 Comments

Innovation in Law School Education

posted by Dave Hoffman

A number of law faculties have sent out resolutions that attack the proposed new ABA Accreditation standards. The basic claim is was articulated by the AALS: the proposed standards would decouple accreditation and tenure, thereby making it possible to run an accredited law school without a tenured faculty. (Tamanaha memorably fisked the AALS here.) Last week, Temple’s faculty joined the chorus against the changes in the rules. In light of my priors on this issue, I voted against the majority’s resolution, and I am happy to report that eleven of my colleagues joined me in supporting the ABA’s proposed new standards. [Yes, friends, I'm proud of losing 2 to 1. I thought the vote would be different.] For me (and I guess for the other dissenters), it would be better to live in a world where schools could offer different kinds of legal education – presumably at different prices – so long as they produced students qualified to be lawyers. The majority may have been motivated, by contrast, by a fear of a “race to the bottom.” Once a single law school offers cheap legal education without tenure (and without incumbent-protecting rules such as those that prohibit law students’ outside employment), we’ll all circle the drain and become diploma mills. I think that argument depends on an odd view of applicant behavior. Prospective applicants assess multiple variables when deciding which law schools to attend. If they picked price alone, the admissions market would look quite different. (Just as an example, more students would pick Temple over Penn. Now, I happen to think that for many students, that choice would be value maximizing. But it’s not the path that many applicants take.)

It’s easy enough to believe that this is precisely the kind of symbolic display that isn’t worth engaging in, let alone repeating on a blog. I am strongly tempted by that view. After all: what difference does it make if one faculty (or ten, or one hundred) votes against the ABA’s standards? The relevant decision makers aren’t the subject of regulation (law schools) but rather members of the ABA’s general assembly. Why not similarly announce the faculty’s opposition to global warming? Or dislike of the generic Republican ballot entrant? Or move in favor of kittens and sunbeams? Or, heck, against grading exams?

That all said, if you are on a faculty that is considering one of these resolutions, or if you are a student at a school that hasn’t yet passed one, I urge you to argue for the ABA’s proposed rules. The package of changes proposed would move the ABA moderately away from its current regulatory mode – which tends to tell a law school how it must organize its program of education, physical plant, and employment relations. The changes would instead (mildly) emphasize outcomes and (mildly) back away from mandated employment rules. This is a better way for an accreditor to act, and, not incidentally, it would bring the ABA more in line with the way that every other regulator of American higher education behaves. I think that on balance the proposed changes would reduce the cost of legal education and thus make it more likely that graduating students can choose their own paths, rather than the one dictated by their debt service obligations. The proposals on net promote innovation, and reduce the monocultural model of American law schools.

In the end, faculties, who benefit from the current system at the expense of their students, and therefore at the expense of consumers of legal services, shouldn’t be given a free pass to lobby for their own job protections.

April 9, 2011 at 5:06 pm Posted in: Law School Print This Post 8 Comments

What’s Your Tenure Policy?

posted by Kevin Maillard

Thanks to Dan and Angel for inviting me to post. This is my first post-tenure post, and also my first guest post. I am a perma-blogger at The Faculty Lounge, so it will be fun to see how things work around here.

A number of schools are facing the question of how to structure their tenure calendars. It seems that in many places within the legal academy, tenure and promotion are combined into a 5-7 year, one-time occasion where a professor goes from untenured Assistant (or initial Associate) to Tenured Full Professor. And in many other places–often those schools following a traditional university model–like my home school of Syracuse University College of Law–the tenure process is much longer. Promotions: Assistant–>Associate–>Full Professor. And Untenured to Tenured, with no default attachment of promotion and tenure. Some schools may be a hybrid of the two: at promotion from Assistant to Associate, tenure is automatically granted. Read the rest of this post »

April 5, 2011 at 7:12 pm Posted in: Law School, Teaching, Uncategorized Print This Post One Comment

What Difference Presentation?

posted by David Udell

David Udell is the Executive Director of the National Center for Access to Justice and a Visiting Professor from Practice at Cardozo Law School.

In my line of work, I have seen many efforts in the political realm to shut down civil legal services for the poor, and have continually worked to combat such efforts. In 1996, when the Gingrich Congress barred federally funded legal services lawyers from bringing class actions on behalf of the poor, I left Legal Services for the Elderly in order to finish a lawsuit on behalf of widows and widowers who were suing to compel the United States Treasury to fix its practices for replacing stolen Social Security payments. When I later moved to the Brennan Center for Justice, I helped bring a lawsuit against the rules that barred legal services lawyers from participating in such class actions, I filed another lawsuit against similar rules that barred law school clinic students from bringing environmental justice cases in Louisiana, and I built a Justice Program at the Brennan Center dedicated to countering such attacks on the poor and on their lawyers.

In their March 3, 2011 draft report, What Difference Representation? Offers, Actual Use, and the Need for Randomization (“the Study”), authors D. James Greiner & Cassandra Wolos Pattanyak are right about the importance of developing a solid evidence base – one founded on methodologies that include randomization – to establish what works in ensuring access to justice for people with civil legal cases. They are right again that in the absence of such evidence, both the legal aid community and its critics are accustomed to relying on less solid data. And they are smart to “caution against both over- and under-generalization of these study results.” But, unfortunately, the bare exhortation to avoid over- and under-generalization is not sufficient in the highly politicized context of legal services.

While the authors obviously do not have any obligation to arrive at a particular result, they can be expected to recognize a need to avoid statements that have a high probability to mislead, especially in light of the likely inability of much of the Study’s audience to understand the authors’ methodology and findings. In fact, because of the Study’s novelty and appearance in a non-scientific journal, it will be relied on to analyze situations where it doesn’t apply, and by people who have no background in social science research, plus it will be given disproportionate weight because so few comparable studies exist to judge it against. It is these factors, in combination with the politicization of legal services, that make it crucial that the authors’ assertions, particularly in the sections most likely to be seen by lay readers (the title and the abstract), do not extend beyond what the findings justify.

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March 28, 2011 at 8:04 am Posted in: Civil Rights, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Practice, Law Rev (Yale), Law School, Law School (Law Reviews), Symposium (What Difference Representation), Uncategorized Print This Post No Comments

What Difference Representation: Introduction to the Symposium

posted by Dave Hoffman

Should Law School Clinics Select Clients by Roulette?

I am delighted to announce that Concurring Opinions will be hosting a symposium next Monday and Tuesday on What Difference Representation? Offers, Actual Use, and the Need for Randomization, the forthcoming Yale Law Journal article by Jim Greiner and Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak. [Update: You can read all posts in the symposium by clicking on this link.] As you may recall, What Difference has already caused quite a stir in the clinical and legal aid communities. Given our shared interest in questions of empirical methodology, and Jaya’s background in clinical legal services, we decided that bringing that debate to CoOp would be an excellent use of our time and energy. Here’s the (revised) abstract) – though you should download the article if you haven’t already:

“We report the results of the first in a series of randomized control trials designed to measure the effect of an offer of, and the actual use of, legal representation. The results are unexpected. In the context of administrative litigation to determine eligibility for unemployment benefits, a service provider’s offer of representation to a claimant had no statistically significant effect on the claimant’s probability of a victory, but the offer caused a delay in the proceeding. Because a substantial percentage of the provider’s client base consisted of claimants who were initially denied benefits but who would later have that initial denial reversed as a result of the litigation, the offer of representation inflicted a harm upon such claimants in the form of an additional waiting time for benefits to begin, this with no discernible increase in the probability of a favorable outcome. In other words, within the limits of statistical uncertainty, these claimants would have been better off without the offer of representation. The size of the delay (around two weeks, depending on how measured) was not large in absolute terms, and would have been negligible in many other legal settings, but was relevant in the context of this particular administrative and legal framework, one in which speed has remained a special concern for decades. Moreover, in a small number of cases with a certain profile, the delay caused the unemployment system to continue paying benefits erroneously for a longer period of time, potentially imposing costs on the financing of the unemployment system. We were also able to verify a delay effect due to the actual use of (as opposed to an offer of) representation; we could come to no firm conclusion on the effect of actual use of representation on win/loss.

We hypothesize three potential explanations for our findings (and acknowledge that others are possible). First, it is possible that the client base that reached out to the service provider (and thus was subject to randomization) was a specialized subset of unemployment claimants, a subset that did not actually need legal assistance. This theory suggests special attention to provider intake systems. Second, it is possible that the administrative adjudicatory system at issue, with its semi-inquisitorial style of judging, is pro se friendly. Third, it is possible that the subject matter in dispute in these cases is less legally, factually, or procedurally complex than in other settings.

We caution against both over- and under-generalization of these study results. We use these results as a springboard for a comprehensive review of the quantitative literature on the effect of representation in civil proceedings. We find that this literature provides virtually no credible information, excepting the results of two randomized evaluations occurring in different legal contexts and separated by over three decades. We conclude by advocating for, and describing challenges associated with, a large program of randomized evaluation of the provision of representation, particularly by legal services providers.”

We have assembled a terrific group of symposiasts, mixing clinicians, academic empiricists and practitioners. Besides Jim, Cassandra, Jaya and me, the group includes twelve contributors, lauded in detail after the jump:

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March 23, 2011 at 11:23 am Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Practice, Law Rev (Yale), Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Symposium (What Difference Representation) Print This Post One Comment

Accreditation Sunlight

posted by Dave Hoffman

The Conglomerate Masters Forum on Legal Education is underway, and worth checking out.

In my post, I recommend that the ABA accreditation process should model itself after the SEC and move toward an exclusively sunlight model. David Zaring, perhaps surprisingly, favors regulation, though he admits that it makes legal academia “cozy.” Christine Hurt comes out against accreditation-driven tenure. Other folks are posting shortly, so head over to the ‘Glom and join the discussion.

March 22, 2011 at 2:53 pm Posted in: Blogging, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching) Print This Post No Comments

The ABA’s Ugly Table Fetish

posted by Dave Hoffman

The ABA's Proposed Table Is About As Ugly As This One

TaxProf reports on the ABA’s possible move toward more substantively revealing employment statistics. Key to the change would be a table that each law school would have to post on its website. The Table would list salaries and employment of law school graduates, and break it down into quartile percentiles.

What’s useful about this kind of disclosure is that it avoids the problem of misleading means and medians in salary– itself caused by missing data. That is, law schools aren’t able to collect salary information for each graduate. When schools calculate mean/median salaries, they exclude missing graduates, and thereby overemphasize the importance of high earners. As the relevant committee explained:

“Schools receive salary information from a fairly small percentage of graduates. Graduates reporting their salaries are skewed towards those earning the most . . . A school that touts median salary information, without appropriate qualifiers, is misleading prospective students. We propose that all salary information clearly indicate the number of respondents and percentage of all graduates . . . We would not require schools to disclose any salary information for a given category unless there are at least five respondents.”

To the extent you think that law schools are bad actors, and that the market won’t motivate disclosure, this is a good reform. I have a different perspective: it is a bad idea for an accreditation agency to micromanage the internal workings of law school business, especially when the data is then connected to the machinations of a deeply flawed, secretive and corrupting ranking magazine. I have particular doubts about disclosure of salary data. It seems to me that this is a classic example of a liberal policy that might have unintended consequences – salary collusion between market makers in the entry level job market. It’s also the case, as I am about to discuss in a Conglomerate Masters Forum, that the ABA’s meddling in the internal affairs of the schools can be seen as (yet another) attempt to increase the price of legal education & resulting consumer costs, while protecting incumbents. To be clear: law schools should be pressured to disclose more about outcomes (and inputs). But when that pressure comes from an accrediting agency that happens to be a guild, you have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.

However, let’s pretend like this exact disclosure requirement is welfare maximizing. How should it proceed? The ABA wants to mandate that schools produce & display a very, very ugly table. But, for Tufte’s sake, why? All of the information in that table could be better displayed in figures – Henderson’s bimodal distribution (using # of graduates on the y-axis), and then a few bar charts displaying where people work. I am quite confident that this is possible because I am putting the finishing touches on Temple’s self-study accreditation document, which liberally uses figures – instead of tables – to display data on employment, revenues, debt, and admissions. As Epstein, Martin and Boyd explained, Tables are ugly and are terrible tools to communicate data, especially summary statistics. If the ABA thinks that communicating this data is important, it should mandate that the data be presented in a clear way, not in an ominous, busy, 11 (!) column Table that no one, ever, will read.

Shucks, it is as if the ABA wants to pretend to care about disclosure, so as to maintain its accreditation monopoly, but to implement sunshine in a form that effectively destroys its utility.

March 20, 2011 at 2:17 pm Posted in: Law School, Law School (Teaching) Print This Post 9 Comments

University Faculty Unions

posted by Dave Hoffman

Whatever one might say about the entrepreneurial and equalizing merits of unions writ large, you can’t say it about the unions of University Faculty members. The evidence on the effect of unionization of faculty life suggests that it increases militancy, has a minor effect on wages, makes for more process, but does not have a net positive effect on job satisfaction. And, given that faculty salary often trades with students’ resources debt, the distributive arguments for faculty unionization are particularly tough to make. I appreciate that I’m happy at my institution, so I’m particularly ill-positioned to attack unions, which help dis-empowered and unhappy workers. Also, Temple Law School has a faculty union – separate from the university! – that has few of the normal impositions (dues, etc.) But still, aren’t faculty unions a luxury we can live without?

If I were a tough minded Democratic governor looking to show that I can demagogue against unions as much as my republican colleagues, but I wanted to pick a target that was particularly ripe for the picking, I know where I’d start.

March 1, 2011 at 3:29 pm Posted in: Law School Print This Post 6 Comments

Disrupting Law Schools

posted by Dave Hoffman

I’ve been reading CAP’s “Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education” There’s a bunch there to digest for law school faculty & administrators. The basic argument is that schools should embrace online learning (or be bulldozed under by it).

I wondered how tenable people think the distance-disruption line is between law schools and colleges. I take it that the usual argument is that law school graduates (like business school graduates) are buying social contacts in a particular place, and that the bar admission rules provide a strong set of barriers to universal distance learning/teaching. The strength of this argument probably would run with the JD, which is why LL.M. programs (in tax, trial advocacy, etc.) are increasingly moving toward distance teaching – in ten years, that LL.M. market will be totally disrupted, but the JD market won’t be.

But then I read Disrupting College. Isn’t this precisely the same form of argument that CAP demolishes?

March 1, 2011 at 3:12 pm Posted in: Law School Print This Post No Comments

GW’s Junior Scholars Finalists

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Thanks to my colleague, Lisa Fairfax, GW has finalized the program for this year’s Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop and Prize (detailed here). Of the more than 100 papers submitted, the following dozen presenters were chosen. [Commentators appear in brackets; I've shortened some paper titles.]

The workshop will take place at GW on April 1 and 2, 2011. We are delighted by the submissions, congratulate those chosen, and stress that making the selections was difficult because of the volume of amazing papers. We encourage everyone interested to attend and look forward to the weekend.

Adam Leviton (Georgetown), In Defense of Bailouts [George Geis (Virginia) & Art Wilmarth (GW)]

Jodie Kirshner (Cambridge), A Transatlantic Perspective on Regional Dynamics and Societa Eurpoea [Francesca Bignami (GW) & Theresa Gabaldon (GW)]

Alan White (Valparaiso), Welfare Economics and Regulation of Small-Loan Credit: Lessons from Microlending in Developing Nations [Michael Pagano (Villanova) & Lawrence Mitchell (GW)]

Nicola Sharpe (Illinois), Corporate Board Performance and Organizational Strategy [Deborah Demott (Duke) & Michael Abramowicz (GW)]

Julie Hill (Houston), The Rise of Ad Hoc Bank Capital Requirements [Anna Gelpern (American) & John Buchman (E*Trade Bank & GW Adjunct)]

Michael Simkovic (Seton Hall), The Effects of Ownership and Stock Liquidity on the Timing of Repurchase Transactions [Richard Booth (Villanova) & Henry Butler (Mason)]

Michelle Harner (Maryland), Activist Distressed Debtors [Donna Nagy (Indiana Bloomington) & Lisa Fairfax (GW)]

Saule Omarova (UNC), The Federal Reserve Board’s Use of Exemptive Power [Patricia McCoy (Connecticut) & Arthur Wilmarth (GW)]

Heather Hughes (American), Suburban Sprawl, Finance Law and Environmental Harm [Scott Kieff (GW) & Lawrence Cunningham (GW)]

Robert Jackson (Columbia), Private Equity and Executive Compensation [Norman Veasey (Weil Gotshal) & William Bratton (Penn)]

Brian Quinn (BC), Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Post Closing Price Adjustments in Merger Agreements? [Gordon Smith (BYU) & John Pollack (Schulte Roth)]

Mehrsa Baradaran (BYU), Reconsidering Wal-Mart’s Bank [Heidi Schooner (Catholic) & Renee Jones (BC)]

This is one of many events sponsored by GW’s Center for Law, Economics and Finance.

February 28, 2011 at 8:53 pm Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Talk, Securities, Securities Regulation Print This Post One Comment

The Representation Debate Continues

posted by Dave Hoffman

Jim Greiner and Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak have emailed me a reply to the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s comment on What Difference Representation. Since the topic has been the subject of several posts here, as well as some off-line communication from interested readers, I figured that I owed Greiner/Pattanayak a public space for reply. It consists of a bit of introductory text, and a longer (9-page) paper.

“We recently became aware that HLAB President Rachel Lauter and HLAB Faculty Director David Grossman had written an email to the clinical listserve addressing our paper “What Difference Representation?”. The email has been posted to various locations in the blogosphere. Because the email expresses criticisms of the paper that we also have received from one or two other sources, we thought we would take the opportunity the email presented to clarify certain issues. For example, President Lautner and Professor Grossman echo reactions we have received from another legal aid provider when they say that our study produced “only limited information,” and that more (and more useful) information would be available if we would just analyze the data properly. We explain here that the analysis the email (and one or two other legal services providers) have advocated is statistically invalid, and that in any event the data required for it do not presently exist and cannot at this time be ethically collected. As ought to be clear by now, we have the greatest respect for the students of HLAB, including President Lautner, and HLAB’s clinical faculty, including Professor Grossman. We are using President Lautner and Professor Grossman’s email as a convenient foil representative of a few other comments we have received.

The substance of our response can be captured in the answers to two questions.

1. Why study the effect of offers of HLAB representation? All agree that the effect of actual use of representation is interesting, although as we will explain, perhaps less so than one might think at first. But why study the effect of HLAB offers?

2. Why not compare those who got offers from any source, not just HLAB, to those who did not get any such offers?} This is what President Lauter, Professor Grossman, and a few others have suggested. Why not make this comparison?

We also answer one final question:

3. So how can we find out about the effect of offers from other service providers?”

To read the full response, click here.

January 31, 2011 at 6:20 am Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School, Psychology and Behavior Print This Post One Comment

Iowa Law Review, Volume 96, Issue 2 (January 2011)

posted by Iowa Law Review

Articles

The Coercion of Trafficked Workers
Kathleen Kim

IP Misuse as Foreclosure
Christina Bohannan

Consent to Retaliation: A Civil Recourse Theory of Contractual Liability
Nathan B. Oman

Automation and the Fourth Amendment
Matthew Tokson

Essay

No Middle Ground? Reflections on the Citizens United Decision
Randall P. Bezanson

Notes

(Potentially) Resolving the Ever-Present Debate over Whether Noncitizens in Removal Proceedings Have a Due-Process Right to Effective Assistance of Counsel
Walter S. Gindin

Princo, Patent Pools, and the Risk of Foreclosure: A Framework for Assessing Misuse
Phillip W. Goter

Holden Caulfield Grows Up: Salinger v. Colting, the Promotion-of-Progress Requirement, and Market Failure in a Derivative-Works Regime
John M. Newman

Is Senator Grassley Our Savior?: The Crusade Against “Charitable” Hospitals Attacking Patients for Unpaid Bills
Amanda W. Thai

January 20, 2011 at 12:39 pm Posted in: Law Rev (Iowa), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Law Talk, Uncategorized Print This Post No Comments

Pedigree and Sales Rankings of Contracts Casebooks

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Preparing a chapter on the digital casebook for a new book, I’ve become aware of the current rich state of offerings in the field of Contracts. Never before have there been so many choices. Today, you have more than 20 books to choose from, all rich, up-to-date, teeming with wonderful old cases common across the bactch, plus newer favorites and novelties. The books are replete with notes, questions and comments, scholarly excerpts, problems, statutory and restatement selections, interdisciplinary perspectives and more.

Those published in recent years and leading the country in amazon sales of the latest edition appear below. What’s stunning about this summary is just how impressive every one of these volumes is, how many tens of thousands of hours of high-wattage brain power has gone into creating these repositories of knowledge and stimulus of analytic development. It’s really hard to go wrong choosing a Contracts teaching book these days. From 1870 to 1940, there were from 1 to 10 choices and the variation across them far less than the variation available today: Langdell, Keener, Williston, Corbin, Costigan.

Variety began to sprout after the war, with very interesting books by Fuller (still available today thanks to Mel Eisenberg keeping it current); Patterson (still available today under the late Allan Farnsworth’s leadership); and Kessler and Sharp, and later Gilmore (maintained for a few years by Tony Kronman but not updated since 1986). Today’s other venerable books, offering surprising innovation and variation, enjoy impressive provenance too: 1959 (Dawson), 1970 (Speidel), 1976 (Knapp), 1978 (Calamari), 1987 (Summers & Hillman). Others are of more recent vintage.

Today’s editors all owe debts to earlier editors, but it would be a mistake to think that the greatest debts are to Langdell, father of the casebook, or even Williston or Corbin, who picked the best cases of the period, still taught today. The greatest debt really goes to Fuller, who should be seen as the father of today’s modern casebook, in contracts and other subjects. He added extensive notes, perfected the use of the squib cases, offered interdiscipinary and comparative insights, understood the importance of statutory and regulatory law alongside the common law, stressed the teaching of skills in addition to the study of doctrine and did nearly everything else that contemporary legal pedagogy endorses. And yet in the lore of casebooks, he’s most famous for putting remedies first in the contracts sequence.

Besides the 17 listed below published in the last few years, many other wonderful books with earlier publication dates remain in-print and available, though adoptions and sales tend to decline with age. Though teachers love the classic cases, students clamor for the latest. They want to know how hoary principles matter today, how to apply traditional knowledge to the latest breached promise they’ve heard about. Read the rest of this post »

January 17, 2011 at 4:48 pm Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Law School, Uncategorized Print This Post No Comments

Lighthouse No Good

posted by Dave Hoffman

Prompted by a tip from the civ pro listserv, I just read William Prosser’s wonderful speech, Lighthouse No Good, delivered at Temple Law School in 1948. In Lighthouse, Prosser talks about what it’s like to teach law, and to grow older in the profession. There are some wonderful – unforgettable - lines. Among them:

“On Teaching: At last the day comes when [the professor] confronts his first class. I wish I could convey to anyone who never has sat in that perilous seat the trepidation, the dismay, the feeling of helpless inferiority, which which a new professor looks into all those fresh young faces — younger, that is, by at least five years than he- which are regarding him with such manifest skepticism and disapproval.

On Grading: The examination is given, the great pile of bluebooks is brought into his office, and he attacks them with eager anticipation. It is then that the ghastly truth is borne in upon him, the consternation and the horror, and he finds out just how good a teacher he is. It is then he realizes the full underlying truth in that old lament of the French horn player in the little German band, ‘I blow in it so sweet, and it comes out so sour…’”

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December 16, 2010 at 9:43 pm Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School, Law School (Teaching) Print This Post 3 Comments

The Esperanto of Citation Formats

posted by Dave Hoffman

Why Hasn't ALWD Succeeded?

Prompted by students, I’ve been thinking recently about the ALWD Citation Manual. In doing so, I’m aware that I’m deeply in the weeds of legal-academic esoterica. Indeed, even thinking about writing about citation probably would be #2 or #3 on the list of things that distinguish airy and irrelevant law professors from grounded and practical lawyers. Regardless, the topic seemed a good fit for a blog post, so here goes.

As you probably don’t care to know, the ALWD offers a non-bluebook approach to legal citation, designed to be authoritative (being created by legal writing professors, not students), coherent, and easy-to-use. At various times, it’s been adopted by a large number of law school’s legal writing programs. The biggest problem with the ALWD is that it isn’t The Bluebook. Differences between the ALWD and the Bluebook aren’t always trivial in a world where minor differences in citation format can change a student’s first-year legal writing grade and determine membership on a law review. When graduating from law school, ALWD followers may thus experience the same frustration that confronts users of obviously superior Dvorak keyboard. Or, since the ALWD is pushed by a tightly-knit, organized, guild of legal writing professors, perhaps the better analogy is to Esperanto. If we all spoke the constructed language of peace and understanding, and cited our speeches using ALWD, we would better understand each other and be less aggravated by missing the commas between see and e.g. Alas, neither ALWD and Esperanto has gotten the market reception that their backers hoped for. Why not?

To inquire a little bit into this topic, I asked one of my LRW colleagues to circulate to the LRW-professor list a question about their experiences with teaching citation. I got a ton of responses, for which I’m quite grateful. They follow, shorn of attribution, after the jump.

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November 21, 2010 at 5:48 pm Posted in: Law School, Law School (Teaching), Sociology of Law Print This Post 7 Comments

Summer Programs in China and Croatia

posted by Gerard Magliocca

For all of you law students out there who are thinking about what to do next summer, I want to draw your attention to the terrific summer programs that my law school runs in Beijing and Dubrovnik. The links describing these programs are here and here.

November 15, 2010 at 10:46 am Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized Print This Post One Comment