Law School

Legal Education Overvalued?

Posted on April 09, 2008
You can become a Supreme Court Justice without having taken Bankruptcy in law school. But it helps to have gone to Yale. Justice Samuel A. Alito gave the keynote address to at the American Bankruptcy Institute's Spring Meeting in D.C. last Monday. He conceded that he never took a course in bankruptcy as a law student but explained that bankruptcy courses were not offered at Yale...

Madame X et des succès de scandale

Posted on April 09, 2008
I wish to revive a theme I raised eighteen months ago in Puny Anonymities: Why are academics, generally speaking, such cowards? Aside from a commission as a federal judge, an academic appointment (at least in theory) may be the only way you can make a bourgeois living without fear of ideologically driven retribution...

MobBlog at Madisonian.net: What Kind of Institution Do We Want a Law School To Be?

Posted on April 08, 2008
Deven Desai kindly emailed me the following (as if I wasn't reading Madisonian.net religiously, but I appreciate each and every personal email and link tip):As you have followed and pondered the way in which legal education works, I wanted to let you know that Madisonian...

A mobblog on legal education

Posted on April 08, 2008
You might want to check out the mobblog on legal education, over at Madisonian.net (here). There are a lot of intriguing posts there. Enjoy!

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MoneyLaw in an altogether different sense

Posted on April 07, 2008
GREED I$ GOODThis news item went almost entirely unnoticed, but three Big Ten universities' student newspapers were on the story and took proper notice. (Going east to west: Penn State, Illinois, and Minnesota.) According to a survey of recent MCAT and LSAT takers by Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, premedical and prelaw students differ noticeably in their motivations...

How To Announce Your (Positive) Tenure Decision

Posted on April 07, 2008
Brian Donovan is so awesome. His book looks very interesting, too.Heck, I'd do this just for landing a tenure-track job! Maybe with slightly less fanfare. Maybe with only one squad of cheerleaders. I have to learn some cool moves though, like Brian's...

I can has tenure now?

Posted on April 04, 2008
With thanks to the LOLCats of  I Can Has Cheezburger? , by way of Historiann

Nancy Rapoport and the ABA Journal

Posted on April 04, 2008
MoneyLaw's Nancy Rapoport appears in the cover story of this month's ABA Journal. True to her talents as a scholar, a dancer, and a movie star, Nancy performed brilliantly. Congratulations, Nancy!

USN&WR Un-Ranks Tiers 3 & 4

Posted on April 02, 2008
Prof. Geoffrey Rapp recently noted that this year, for the first time, U.S. News & World Report's website revealed the rankings of law schools in the 3rd and 4th tiers. He and his commentators wondered whether that was deliberate or a fluke. When I discovered today that the website no longer offered that feature, I wrote to Bob Morse for an explanation...

Slamming the door, part II: Who needs the Ivy League?

Posted on April 02, 2008
Slamming the door:Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matterA two-part MoneyLaw seriesPart II: Who needs the Ivy League?Slamming the door: Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matter, a two-part MoneyLaw series, examines College Admissions: A Game of Privilege?, a Justice Talking program that "takes a look at the ugly side of the economics of higher education...

Slamming the door: Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matter

Posted on April 01, 2008
Slamming the door:Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matterA two-part MoneyLaw seriesBy way of Luke Gilman, one of my blogging affiliates at First Movers, I've learned about College Admissions: A Game of Privilege?. In this production by the National Public Radio program, Justice Talking, host Margot Adler "takes a look at the ugly side of the economics of higher education...

Relative Wages and How to Get There

Posted on March 29, 2008
If anyone has any doubt that, above a certain level, it is all about relative wages as opposed to absolute wages, visit a law faculty in the days after someone has acquired the salary list and distributed it. I have been around law faculties on 4 occasions when this has happened and it can get emotional and often for good reason...

Buffalo, Iowa, Minnesota & UNC Deans React to Decline in U.S. News Rankings

Posted on March 28, 2008
David Lat collects school-wide emails sent by these deans in response to their school's decline in the just-released U.S. News rankings: Buffalo (#100, down from #77), Iowa (#27, down from #24), Minnesota (#22, down from #20), and North Carolina (#38, down from #36)...

Putting my money where my mouth is....

Posted on March 27, 2008
Over at my own blog, I muse a bit about possible improvements to the USNWR rankings (here).

Maximizing the audience / Motives for writing

Posted on March 27, 2008
Wim Mertens, Maximizing the AudienceWith apologies to Tom Petty, any serious scholar knows that the writing is the hardest part. As spring deadlines mount, I offer a little musical distraction. A nine-minute video of Maximizing the Audience appears above; samples from Motives for Writing appear below...

Cool for cats

Posted on March 26, 2008
MoneyLaw's feline theme continues . . . .Freedom to say whatever you want! Bourgeois salaries! Lifetime tenure! Accountability to no one!What sort of business gives all this to its employees, plus the opportunity to conduct "self-governance" without regard to the company's real stakeholders? This is why many people call law teaching "the best job in the world...

Can a Dean Make You Do It?

Posted on March 25, 2008
So here is the problem. The Dean or Associate Dean at your School is making up the schedule for the fall. Nearly everyone wants to teach in the time period from 10-2 on Tuesday - Thursday and so indicate on a form that asks for their preferences. There are not enough rooms and, even if there were, there would be conflicts that mean students would have to make choices...

Cat Hatter II

Posted on March 24, 2008
Meow! Roar!Ever fond of cats, Jeff Harrison asks, "What's a dean to do?" Jurisdynamics answers: And a jaguar shall lead you.[T]hink deeply about what is right and then put all [your] energy into doing it.—  Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (1994)

A MoneyLaw move by Murray Gell-Mann

Posted on March 23, 2008
Physicist Murray Gell-Mann, along with George Zweig, predicted the existence of quarks. For this feat Gell-Mann won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He also demonstrated his affinity for literature by drawing the name quarks from a passage in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"A Jurisdynamics post describes how Gell-Mann's autobiographical and lyrical book, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, spans this broader weblog network's subjects of interest...

Nike: Goddess of victory, marketing, and academic management

Posted on March 22, 2008
???? was the Greek goddess of victory, a connection made more obvious by the name of her Roman counterpart (Victoria) and her contemporary corporate namesake. These days she serves primarily as the goddess of marketing, whose feast day is Super Bowl Sunday...

Being Who You Are

Posted on March 19, 2008
I am in Vienna right participating in one of the best things my Law School or any law school can do for its students. The event is the annual Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot. Over 200 teams are here from over 50 countries. For many students it is life changing, magical if there is such a thing...

It's tournament time

Posted on March 19, 2008
  March  madness! It's time for the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and I'll be pulling for three teams: the Louisville Cardinals, the Georgia Bulldogs, and the Belmont Bruins.Louisville is my present; Georgia represents my past...

With pug all things are possible

Posted on March 18, 2008
Any dog owner knows that this is a very serious disturbance in the canine Force:Here in the world of MoneyLaw, what might be as implausible as a dog volunteering to be vacuumed? Here's a suggestion from my Saint Patrick's Day correspondence: The idea that law schools might actually fulfill their "fiduciary duty to their constituents (students and alums and the public)," as opposed to exploiting the legal academy's "monopoly position as an entry-point to the profession to preserve high [faculty] salaries...

Lay Down, Sally

Posted on March 17, 2008
Okay, so Eric Clapton can't conjugate. But Lay Down, Sally is still one of the coolest songs ever, and shockingly simple in its underlying musical structure. Enjoy!Lay Down, SallyThere is nothing that is wrongIn wanting you to stay here with me.I know you've got somewhere to go,But won't you make yourself at home and stay with me?And don't you ever leave...

Industry 1, intelligence 0

Posted on March 15, 2008
How often do you see something like this? The 1L from a compass-point state college beats the Ivy League alumna. The C-average graduate, not the law review's editor in chief, eventually donates $1 million. The tier-four law school graduate becomes the faculty star, while the Supreme Court clerk hired the same year is grudgingly voted tenure and becomes an unproductive curmudgeon dedicated to guarding his sinecure...

Reverse auctions for entry-level law professors

Posted on March 14, 2008
At the end of a spring break that I spent, in significant part, staring at budget numbers and thinking about law school finances, I've finally come around to responding to a neat post by Rick Bales called Getting what you pay for.Rick made good MoneyLaw use of Michael Dorff's newly posted article, The Rational Choice Myth: The Selection and Compensation of Critical Performers:Some positions within an organization wield unusual impact over the entity's success...

Everyday I write the book

Posted on March 12, 2008
If Every Day Is a Winding Road is academic administration's theme song, then Everyday I Write the Book should be the research faculty's response:Elvis Costello, Everyday I Write the Book, Punch the Clock (1983):Don't tell me you don't know what love isWhen you're old enough to know betterWhen you find strange hands in your sweaterWhen your dreamboat turns out to be a footnoteI'm a man with a mission in two or three editionsAnd I'm giving you a longing lookEveryday, everyday, everyday I write the bookChapter One we didn't really get alongChapter Two I think I fell in love with youYou said you'd stand by me in the middle of Chapter ThreeBut you were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and SixThe way you walkThe way you talk, and try to kiss me, and laughIn four or five paragraphsAll your compliments and your cutting remarksAre captured here in my quotation marksDon't tell me you don't know the differenceBetween a lover and a fighterWith my pen and my electric typewriterEven in a perfect world where everyone was equalI'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequel.

I'z the Cat Hatter

Posted on March 10, 2008
I'z the Cat Hatter. I wearz 3 hatz!Click here to read about me @ ClassBias!» With apologies to the LOLCats of  I Can Has Cheezburger?  «

NY Times: Moneyball and Charitable Giving

Posted on March 10, 2008
Interesting article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine: What Makes People Give?, by David Leonhardt:What makes people give their money away? [John List and Dean Karlan] considered the usual answers (to make the world a better place, to see your name printed in the back of an annual report and the like) too pat, too simple ? and sometimes just wrong...

Then face to face

Posted on March 08, 2008
Top: Edgar Degas (French, 1834?1917), The Dancing Class (ca. 1870). Bottom left: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner(German, 1880-1938), Woman at the Mirror (1912). Bottom right: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973), Girl Before a Mirror (1932).I am fresh off a weekend in Washington and Baltimore, where I took part in University of Louisville alumni events in connection with a shootout for the Big East men's basketball regular season title and in the University of Maryland's Constitutional Law Schmooze...

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