Law School

Do Law Schools Undervalue Their Graduates?

Posted on February 05, 2008
Yes, because of their steadfast commitment to the metric "average starting salary" (I will avoid the more fun acronym and go with AS). In theory, AS is an objective metric that counters the most objective metric of obtaining a J.D.--cost. In practice, AS has proven itself an unreliable metric...

No MoneyLaw Here

Posted on February 04, 2008
I may work for a living, but I'm no MoneyLawyer. Since Jim Chen told me that he left the key to MoneyLaw under the back door mat, I decided to sneak in and see if I could add my 2 cents to the mix. Two cents may be overstating my worth.As a criminal defense lawyer, foolish enough to blawg under my real name, chances are that there's not much I have to say that will interest a bunch of scholarly folk like lawprofs...

Law Schools in Jeopardy of Failing ABA's New 75% Bar Passage Accreditation Standard

Posted on February 04, 2008
On Saturday, I blogged on TaxProf Blog the ABA's expected approval, at its meeting this week in Los Angeles, of a new objective bar passage standard for law school accreditation. Under the proposal, over a five-year period, 75% of a school's graduates must have passed the bar and the school's annual first-time bar passage rate in its home state must not be more than 15 percentage points below the average first-time bar passage rate in that state...

Lagadeild Háskóla Íslands

Posted on February 04, 2008
In commentary on Wrath versus envy, an "anonymous bad speller and horrible typist" observed:Law is often a profession for the ambitious but undirected or risk-adverse ("I really want to create my own internet dog grooming business but am scared of failing so I will go to law school instead")...

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Wrath versus envy

Posted on January 31, 2008
In commentary on Bliss, an anonymous but wise reader observed:I am a recovering lawyer working at the law school where I took my degree (I am staff, not faculty). I couldn't help but think how one makes a law school more like Iceland and less like Moldova...

Both sides now

Posted on January 31, 2008
Jesse the Utah Law student tells it both ways:Hat tip: TaxProf Blog.

The cathedral, the bazaar, and the School of Law

Posted on January 30, 2008
Editor's note: This column is reprinted from the January 2008 edition of Bench and Bar, the official newsletter of the Louisville Bar Association, and draws heavily from Law 2.0 and The cathedral and the bazaar, posts previously published in The Cardinal Lawyer...

It's happening here

Posted on January 29, 2008
It's happening here, courtesy of the University of Louisville's new branding campaign. Come see how a university-wide marketing campaign looks on the official weblog of a law school dean.

Introducing MoneyLawyer

Posted on January 29, 2008
And so a practicing lawyer joins the ranks of MoneyLaw. I practice in a litigation boutique where I represent a broad range of clients. Frequently my firm is local counsel for major companies, which gives me the benefit of working against and with law firms of all sizes on a daily basis...

Bliss

Posted on January 28, 2008
Bliss, by Eric Weiner, is the title of a book about happiness. It is the pop psychology version of the much more serious work being done by economists, psychologists and neurologists.Reading it reminds me of the recent discussion about unhappy law professors...

Mission: Impossible?

Posted on January 26, 2008
Cinematic experience notwithstanding, Bill Henderson is far, far hotter than Tom Cruise. In a thoughtful and persuasive blog post, Benchmarking Law School Performance: Why Law Professors and Deans Should Care, Bill makes a compelling case that law schools should use the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) as a key tool in educational administration...

Senate Asks Why Colleges Earn 17.6% on Endowments But Spend Only 4.6% on Students

Posted on January 25, 2008
The Senate Finance Committee yesterday sent a letter to the 136 U.S. colleges and universities with endowments of $500 million or more, requesting the schools to respond within thirty days to more than fifty questions dealing with finances and tuition...

Ranking of Online Colleges

Posted on January 24, 2008
Online Education Database has released a ranking of 41 online colleges, which equally weights eight variables: Acceptance Rate, Financial Aid, Graduation Rate, Peer Web Citations, Retention Rate, Scholarly Citations, Student-Faculty Ratio, and Years Accredited...

The market for deans ... and two markets for deans

Posted on January 23, 2008
By way of MoneyLaw stalwart Paul Caron's home blog, I had the pleasure of reading Daniel B. Rodriguez, The Market for Deans, 16 J. Contemp. Legal Issues ___ (2007). Using "a loose admixture of anecdote, polemic, and preliminary data," Professor Rodriguez reaches the "especially vexing" conclusion "that the market for deans is — and will likely continue to be — more bear than bull...

Be true to your school

Posted on January 22, 2008
After almost exactly 52 weeks in Kentucky, I've learned a few things. To be a "real" Kentuckian, you need a home county. Besides Jefferson. Boone barely counts, but Boyd is bona fide. And to be a Louisvillian, you need the "right" answer to this question: "Where did you go to school?"My answer doesn't appear on my curriculum vitae...

Interdisciplinary Stuff

Posted on January 21, 2008
It's been fun reading the various posts on this topic but, for me, some of the analysis is a little fuzzy and some not fuzzy enough. Still, most of what follows may just reflect not being up to speed on what is happening in legal education at non elite schools (other than my own) so I am beginning this post with a preemptory "never mind...

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know/Read on Interdisciplinary Legal Scholarship

Posted on January 21, 2008
(Posts in bold are the "must read" posts)1. Original Post by Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization.2. Brian Leiter asks for comments . Read Matt Lister's and John Oberdiek's comments and Tamanaha's response.3. Dan Solove has a thoughtful response at Concurring Opinions about the benefits that do accrue to students from having interdisciplinary teachers...

Interdisciplinary legal education: the overt costs

Posted on January 21, 2008
Brian Tamanaha's Balkinization post, Why the Interdisciplinary Movement in Legal Academia Might Be a Bad Idea (For Most Law Schools), is an instant classic. I sincerely wish I had written it. Since I didn't, I'll be content (if only for the moment) to join the chorus of commentators who have chimed in...

Responses to Tamanaha on Interdisciplinary Legal Studies

Posted on January 17, 2008
1. Original Post by Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization.2. Brian Leiter asks for comments . Read Matt Lister's and John Oberdiek's comments and Tamanaha's response.3. Dan Solove has a thoughtful response at Concurring Opinions about the benefits that do accrue to students from having interdisciplinary teachers...

Tamanaha on Interdisciplinary Scholarship

Posted on January 16, 2008
I'm an avid reader of Balkinization, which offers such incredible legal analysis that I wonder if I should be paying for the privilege. But while I would have eventually caught this on my RSS feed, Brian Tamanaha was nice enough to alert me to his post expressing skepticism about the current trend of interdisciplinary legal scholarship, at least with respect to the benefits that would accrue to non-elite law schools and their students (and thus the future legal profession)...

Stats For Poets

Posted on January 16, 2008
I have decided to take a refresher course in quantitative methods, designed for legal academics and lawyers. It's designed to be a basic intro to multiple regression analysis and to teach me how to use STATA.The last time I took a statistics course I did pretty well, but it was seven years ago, from Fall 2000-Spring 2001...

The Blind Side

Posted on January 15, 2008
I just finished MoneyLaw Icon Michael Lewis's book "The Blind Side" which describes an outstanding high school left tackle and the evolution of the position for which nature has ideally suited him. It's a great and quick read for those interested in race and class in the United States, the state of intercollegiate athletics, or, most relevant to readers of this blog, the evaluation of untested talent...

The Unbearable Lightness of Rankings

Posted on January 15, 2008
We are all familiar with experiments in which subjects cannot tell the difference between a high priced wine and and low priced one. Now comes a study showing that knowing the price ahead of time affects the ranking. Not surprisingly, subjects rank a wine as better if it is more expensive...

Steven Pinker on morality and on academic culture

Posted on January 14, 2008
Anything Steven Pinker writes is worth reading and heeding. When you've finished reading what Jurisdynamics has to say about Pinker's latest, an essay on "The Moral Instinct," come back to MoneyLaw to watch the adjacent video summarizing Pinker's thoughts about academic culture.

Bees

Posted on January 13, 2008
A reader sent this letter to me and I think it is more of a moneylaw than classbias issue and almost certainly something about which people have different views.Prof. Harrison,I'm a reader of your Class Bias blog, as well as your posts on Moneylaw (which is where I found you first)...

So Much for The Wisdom of Crowds

Posted on January 12, 2008
A lot has been made, in James Surowieicki's The Wisdom of Crowds and elsewhere, about the power of futures markets (such as the Iowa Electronic Market or IEM) to outperform polls in predicting the outcomes of elections. For example, in his book, Suroweicki wrote: "The IEM has generally outperformed the major national polls, and has been more accurate than them even months in advance of the actual election...

The Itinerate Law Professor: So What's Wrong with That?

Posted on January 11, 2008
For a long time I have thought that being a law professor is only the second best job in the world. The first is the traveling lecturer. This person is paid a salary and wanders from state to state and school to school and drops in on any class anywhere to give a lecture or just to say what is on his or her mind...

Take the long way home

Posted on January 10, 2008
In times hard and good, but especially the hard ones, it's worth reminding ourselves that we do this not because of the money, but in spite of it:I've put food on the tableAnd a roof overheadBut I'd trade it all tomorrowFor the highway insteadNorah Jones, The Long Way Home, on Feels Like Home (2004)Well I stumbled in the darknessI'm lost and aloneThough I said I'd go before usAnd show the way back homeIs there a light up aheadI can't hold on very longForgive me, pretty baby, but I always take the long way homeMoney's just something you throwOff the back of a trainGot a headful of lightningAnd a hat full of rainAnd I know that I saidI'd never do it againOh, and I love you, sweet baby, but I always take the long way homeI've put food on the tableAnd a roof overheadBut I'd trade it all tomorrowFor the highway insteadWatch your back if I should tellYour love's the only thing I've ever knownOne thing for sure, sweet baby, I always take the long way homeYou know I love you babyMore than the whole wide worldI?m your womanYou know you are my pearlLet's go out past the party lightsWhere we can finally be aloneCome with me and we can take the long way homeCome with me, together we can take the long way homeCome with me, together we can take the long way home

New Hampshire Recap -- Your Depressing Thought for the Day

Posted on January 09, 2008
So as a bandwagon-jumping Obama supporter, I was trying to figure out how things went so wrong so fast for my guy. Both Obama's and Clinton's polls had her losing by double-digits in New Hampshire last night. Yet, as we now know, Hillary won and is re-energized heading into South Carolina and Super-Duper Tuesday...

How Surfing Saved My Sabbatical

Posted on January 08, 2008
What motivates tenured law professors to write? I suppose that some do so as second nature, as automatically as lesser scholars breath. Perhaps other law profs write out of a heroic sense of duty, confident that what they publish will change the world for the better...

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