The Yin Blog

Say, is "Survivor" winner a JD advantaged job?

As far as I know, Harvard Law School's employment numbers are strong enough that there's no need for it to play games. That said, you have to wonder how tempted HLS is to take advantage of the most famous member of its graduating class -- that being John Cochran, aka the winner of "Survivor: Caramoan."

Of course, Cochran isn't even the only winner with a JD (technically, I don't think he's been awarded his JD yet); Yul Kwon, who won "Survivor: Cook Islands," has a JD from Yale.

Anyway, Cochran also has a job already . . . as Entertainment Weekly's "Big Brother" recapper. Hmm, as far as I know, "Big Brother" only airs in the summer, so will Cochran still count as employed 9 months after graduation? Then again, winning "Survivor" and the $1 million has got to count somehow, right?

One reason I write new exams every class

Writing exams can be kind of fun. Grading them, much less so. But in any event, horror stories like this about old exams being recycled and found by some students would be enough to make me write a new exam every time I teach a course.

As for old exams, I put them up on the TWEN site for my course. That way, every student has access to them. Well, if they bothered registering for the TWEN site.

Lawyers and math

One of my students shared this photo with me:

A sign of the new school year?

It's the first day of upper division law school classes today, and instead of the hot sunshine we've been greeted with every morning the past few weeks, it was gray, drizzly, and pleasantly cool when I went outside to get the newspaper. Do you think it's a sign?

Really good advice for 1L law students

My friend Paul Horwitz has some great advice for incoming (and current) law students.

$25K to 100K cost per law review article?

That's the estimated cost to a law school for a law review article by a faculty member:

Neumann’s estimate assumes the professor spends up to 50 percent of his or her time on scholarship and writes one article a year. The figure is based on salary, benefits, possible research grants, and the cost of research assistants.

This strikes me as analytically wrong. A faculty member who writes one article a year probably does the vast majority of that work during the summer, which means that the cost is largely confined to the summer research grant.

How much faculty time is wasted because of the ABA?

Just got out of a faculty meeting, the last 30 or so minutes of which were essentially wasted time because of figuring out how to satisfy a well-intentioned but needlessly nitpicking ABA requirement.

It makes you wonder how much collective faculty time is lost each year because of the ABA. And yet the one thing that AALS decides to stand up to the ABA on is the self-serving issue of the ABA's proposed elimination of tenure as a requirement of accreditation.

My former student quits Big Law, decides to walk across the country

It's always interesting to see former students make the news.  Here's a pretty unique former student story:

And sometimes you get… this, which was sent to everyone at Sidley Austin yesterday by an associate leaving the Chicago office:

Today is my last day at Sidley. You may keep in touch with me at [email protected], through Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/tyler.coulson, or via Twitter, @ibuildnosystem.

Beginning next week, I am walking from Delaware to California with a tent and my dog, Mabel. I will have limited access to email, but will check messages frequently.

– Geo. Tyler Coulson

Hey, the low-tech cross-country trip worked out well for John Kroger.  He biked from the East Coast to Oregon, fell in love with this state, started teaching at Lewis & Clark Law School, and then won election as the state Attorney General!

 

On that Larry Tribe column . . . .

Harvard law prof Laurence Tribe says:

But the predictions of a partisan 5-4 split rest on a misunderstanding of the court and the Constitution. The constitutionality of the health care law is not one of those novel, one-off issues, like the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, that have at times created the impression of Supreme Court justices as political actors rather than legal analysts.

In other words, Tribe thinks it's obvious that the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate is constitutional.

This kind of reminds me of an incident from my 3L year of law school.  I was taking Jesse Choper's Supreme Court Seminar, in which pairs of students got to "play" Supreme Court Justices.  We examined actual cases before the Court that Term, voted on them, and drafted opinions.  My buddy and I were Justice Kennedy, and one of the cases that I opted to write an opinion in was United States v. Lopez.

I drafted an opinion upholding the Fifth Circuit's decision to strike down the Gun-Free School Zones Act essentially on a limitless Commerce Clause theory.  It should have been the majority opinion, but for some reason, our "Justice Thomas" voted with the liberals.  This all took place before the Supreme Court issued its decision.

Also before the actual decision came down, we had our upper class moot competition, the finals of which were judged by three well-respected U.S. Circuit judges.  I had written the bench memo for the moot court competition, and at the banquet before the final argument round, Choper introduced me to the most prominent of the three judges.  Choper mentioned that I was playing Kennedy in the Supreme Court Seminar and that I had predicted that Kennedy would strike down the Gun-Free School Zones Act.

This circuit judge -- a conservative -- told me, "You got Kennedy's vote wrong.  It's going to be 9-0 to reverse the Fifth Circuit."

Whoops.

Now, obviously, the fact that Lopez came out 5-4 the opposite way from the judge's prediction doesn't mean that the Supreme Court will similarly hold that the ACA is likewise beyond the Commerce Clause.

But it does suggest that a dose of predictive humility might be called for.  I'm not saying that I, as a 3L, was so smart that I was right about Lopez and that a prominent federal appellate judge was wrong.  After all, this was just a class assignment and maybe I knew just enough to be dangerous.  But it's a useful reminder that many people thought Lopez was going to be an easy reversal of the Fifth Circuit, and they were wrong.

Applying SOX (or something like it) to law schools

A comment that I saw on Steve Bainbridge's blog sounds like an interesting way to respond to the claim that law schools all too commonly mislead students about the schools' employment data:

[A]pply Sarbanes-Oxley to college admissions, bursar, and career placement offices, with university presidents having to certify the data.

Now, I'm not a university president, so I suppose it's easy for me to get behind this idea.  It has a lot of appeal to me, and not in the snarky way that it did to the commenter, whose full comment evinces glee at the idea of academics being hoisted by a (bad) law that they support being imposed on businesses.

Lots has been written recently about law school debt and declining job prospects for JDs.  Indiana (Bloomington) law Professor William Henderson was quoted as saying:

Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm.  Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.

His solution?

Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close. But nobody inside of the legal establishment, he predicts, has the stomach for that. “Ultimately,” he says, “some public authority will have to step in because law schools and lawyers are incapable of policing themselves.”

I'm not sure this solution necessarily follows from the diagnosis.  If the problem is that there is a bunch of misleading information being put out there by law schools, including misleading or even false employment data, why isn't the more narrow solution to penalize dissemination of such false or misleading information?

Congress could presumably enact a law that requires law schools to provide accurate and detailed data about the employment prospects of their students (for the summers) and graduates, and to have those reports certified by the university president, chancellor, etc., with violations punishable by fines and other penalties.

By focusing on the quality of the data, this approach would, if successful, render law schools more accountable to the market.  No more sending survey letters to graduates that say, "if we don't hear from you by X date, we will assume that you have found fulltime employment" (not something that took place at the two institutions I've been employed by, but which I've heard about elsewhere).  No more lumping all non-law work with legal employment.  (To be sure, there may well be JDs who by their own choice take non-law-related work, but that's still useful information to law school applicants.)

If anything, it seems to me there's arguably a stronger call for enforcing these sorts of disclosure and accuracy provisions on law schools (and universities in general) than on corporations. After all, the cost of corporate malfeasance with regard to balance sheets and the like is diffused across a huge number of investors, who are presumably not taking out huge loans with which to invest in said corporate stock.  (I guess there are margin traders, but really, they seem a less sympathetic group for concern than poor students with huge education debt.)  The cost of law school malfeasance in terms of misleading or false employment data is visited upon a (relatively) small number of students who are saddled with $50,000 or more in student debt.  Shouldn't they be entitled to at least the same level of informational protection that stock investors now get?

(cross-posted at Prawfsblawg)

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal law blog liked my post:

Regulation? all you free-marketeers are asking. Really? Won’t regulation further drive up the cost of education, which is already stunningly high?

Perhaps. But the way Yin ends his post is compelling, we thinks[.]