Thursday, August 1, 2013

Whittier Law Professor Seval Yildirim asserts that bodies are important, but does that include Whittier's student body?

Bodies are very important, no question. From the tip of your nosie, down to your ten little toesies, bodies can do many wonderful things, such as potently and crucially challenging the State and other power structures.
 
Consider the following insight from tenured Whittier Law Professor Seval Yildirim:
"I have been thinking about the human body as the most potent and crucial site of resistance against the State. I have written about the Muslim woman’s hair as a site of struggle between different political narratives. . . but the recent rise in protests around the world, especially since the Arab uprisings of 2011. . .have highlighted that the human body is increasingly the primary means of any sustained protest against power structures, including the State."    
Prof. Yildirim promises to "expand more on this" as her thoughts "crystallize," so who knows what else we may learn about our bodies? Thank goodness that Yildirim has a law professor’s six figure salary, plus ample free time to contemplate these matters. And thank goodness that Professor Yildirim has tenure. For, as Yildirim movingly explained in this thread (comment at  April 05, 2013 at 09:04 AM): "Many of us self-censor before tenure in our writing, at conferences, during faculty meetings, or on blogs like this, because we are fully cognizant that we are already swimming upstream because of who and/or what we are. In the midst of the current anti-intellectual climate where educational structures are being critiqued solely from an economic angle, I find even the thought of dismantling tenure extremely scary for those of us who are peripheral to academic power structures (for various and varying reasons)."

Prof. Yildirim does not seem to have ever held an actual legal job. She got a JD from NYU in 2002, then a LLM from NYU, and then did a year as a visiting scholar at NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near East Studies. In 2005, she landed a law professorship at Whittier, where she remains. According to her faculty bio, Yildirim's research focuses on secularism in comparative contexts, international human rights and issues of human dignity, specifically regarding minority religious and sexual identities, and law’s effects on identity formation.
 
Prof. Yildirim’s faculty bio asserts that she "maintains a pro bono practice." It elaborates that "She was pro bono counsel to Kimberlie Webb in Webb v. City of Philadelphia, 562 F.3d 256 (3rd Cir. 2009), seeking recognition of Webb’s free exercise right to wear a religious headcovering under her police uniform hat. An account of Professor Yildirim’s experience litigating the appeal can be found in the Law and Religion volume of Cases in Context series by Aspen Publishers."

 However, if you look up  the Court's opinion, you discover that Yildirim is only one of three listed attorneys on the Third Circuit appeal, and did not handle the oral argument. See Webb, 562 F.3d at 257 ("Jeffrey M. Pollock, Esquire (Argued), Abbey T. Harris, Esquire, Fox Rothschild LLP, Lawrenceville, NJ, Seval Yildirim, Esquire, Costa Mesa, CA, for Appellant"). Jeffrey Pollock happens to be Yildirim's husband. From Yildirim's own account in Law and Religion: Cases in Context, it seems likely that Yildirim's main contribution was to  read about Webb's request for a pro bono appellate lawyer on a listserve and then ask hubby, a litigation attorney with Fox Rothschild, to handle the case pro bono. See Leslie C. Griffin (2010-03-10). Law and Religion: Cases in Context (Law & Business) (p. 302). Aspen Publishers (Wolters Kluwer Legal). Kindle Edition. ("Seval Yildirim (this author), a professor at Whittier Law School, came across the [listserve] message. . . .This police officer’s struggle was of great interest. She called upon her spouse, Jeffrey M. Pollock, a litigation partner with Fox Rothschild, L.L.P., a Philadelphia-based law firm").

Writing a single appellate brief, even a tricky and important one, is only a few weeks in the work life of an appellate specialist. Moreover, the Third Circuit did not even address the constitutional arguments advanced in Webb v. City of Philadelphia, but deemed them to be procedurally forfeited because they were not raised at the District Court level. So how did Yildirim manage to yap about Webb for about 35 pages in the chapter she wrote in Law and Religion: Cases in Context? While far from the worst aspect of the scam, it is not charming when a law professor does a little pro bono dabbling, or joins the legal advisory board of a public interest organization, or litigates a single appeal under the tutelage of his or her spouse and then uses that to try to create the impression that he or she is an experienced lawyer.
 
Maybe Yildirim, in crystallizing her thoughts, will consider issues of human dignity as they relate to another "body" --namely, the student body of Whittier Law School, the kids who dump a borrowed fortune into the pockets of Yildirim and other dubiously qualified law professors in the trust and expectation that they will be trained to be lawyers. Maybe she will note that her unfortunate students will be brutally scammed even relative to law students elsewhere. The average debt load (excluding undergrad debt) for a graduating Whittier JD is $143,536, the 10th highest among the 201 ABA accredited law schools. However, the percentage of Whittier law grads from the class of 2012 who obtained bar-required full-time, long-term, non-solo jobs within nine months of graduation (i.e. its Law School Transparency [LST] employment score) was a dismal 31.2%, which was the 11th worst outcome among the 201 ABA-approved law schools. And even that is a significant improvement over 2011, when Whittier ranked second from the bottom among the 201 schools, with an incredible 17.1% LST employment score.







 

33 comments:

  1. Of last year's 170 Whittier graduates, precisely 2 landed jobs in law firms with 50 or more lawyers and 1 got a federal clerkship. Good luck paying those loans!

    While at Whittier, you may as well double down and seize the opportunity to study law from Whittier professors abroad in Santander, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Toulouse, Mexico City, or Nanjing. You will never be able to afford the air-fare to visit these places again.

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  2. WhiTTTTier Law Sewer is a festering trash heap. Maybe the human body is so important to Yildirim, that she feels Whittier students should be charged $41,460 in full-time tuition for the 2013-2014 academic year. After all, by attending this dung pit provides them with an opportunity to take one of her courses.

    http://www.law.whittier.edu/resources/lawlibrary/tuition.pdf

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  3. That's right Lemmings. Step right up! Crack the bubbly and buy the bling with your student loan money, because that's your last shot at wealth!

    Go ahead, have your three years of lugging books around, bragging to your friends and family about how you're in law school and are heading for the affluent lifestyle. Go ahead, "study" in Rome or Barcelona for a semester, pretending you're going to be an world renowned International Lawyer.
    [I'm sorry. I had to take a break. I was laughing too hard at that last one].

    Party like a rockstar! Come to class hung over and brag about that girl or guy you hooked up with from Section C.

    When those doors close behind you the day after graduation, that's when the reality will hit home. That's when you know it's for real. A majority of you will not have jobs and most of you will be stuck with that crippling debt.

    Most of you lemmings don't want to hear this, but it would be wise to save some of that loan money for antidepressants and
    Popov.

    Let's see, what else do you need to know....
    Oh, make sure to buy clothes from the Junior League and not department or boutiques (nothing wrong with Junior League but be sure to wash them before you wear them).

    Oh, and McDonald's has free WiFi.

    And if you REALLY must have a car, consider an old police cruiser. You can pick them up for about $1500 or less and they run.

    Get familiar with various ways of cooking beans. They're cheap and nutritious. Forget about eating out.

    Be sure to get out and see people, but NEVER go out in your sweatpants.

    You won't need to worry about rent because most of you will be in your parent's basements.

    As far as medical insurance goes, I don't really have any good advice. Your certainly won't be able to afford decent coverage so try not to get sick.

    But screw it! That can't possibly happen to you! No. Not the way it's happened to hundreds of thousands of law school graduates already. You're special!

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  4. The sad thing is, she is probably not even the most absurd specimen of legal academia.

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  5. Eight years at that school, yet she doesn't seem to have become any more witty.

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  6. Why is there no way to comment to

    http://stephen-diamond.com/?p=5066

    on Stephen Diamond's page? He doesn't seem to want comments.

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    1. Stephen Diamond is making money off of the law school scam. As Campos used to quote Upton Sinclair:

      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

      The fact that he does not allow comments illustrates that he does not have the ability to refute the charge that law school is indeed a scam. That is a bitch move.

      Would you give much credence to a criminal who argued that criminals should not be sent to jail?

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  7. Go to the faculty lounge blog and post in the comments that this professor can read. Several people have already posted about Whittier in the comments and this prof just avoids acknolweding the comments, but its funny and off topic from her lenghty "istanbul" posts.

    http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2013/07/first-night-in-istanbul-thinking-about-the-human-body-as-the-site-of-resistance.html#comments

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  8. I really liked this deceptively simple post. It exposes the law school scam perfectly through this very specific example of a typical lawprof. She has never done anything in the law or performed any intellectually rigorous task outside of acing the LSAT and law school exams. She has no experience or knowledge to offer. Her bullshit academic musings come at the expense of bankrupting her students for life, as only a handful will ever have careers. She is the epitome of pretension.

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  9. Upon reading this post, I wanted to laugh at the ludicrousness of it all. But then I started thinking: this woman probably makes $180,000 a year or more. As a society, we have designated her contribution as important and valuable enough that we ensure she lives the lifestyle of the 1%.

    Me? I work w/ low-income clients everyday, usually spending 2 hours a day in unpaid overtime because my caseload is so high. I make $14,000 a year. Yeah, you all can see how much my contribution - helping low-incomed individuals - is valued. And I am lucky to have my job.

    And we pay $180,000 plus to individuals like her. Laughing? Not so much. Don't feel like it anymore...

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  10. What the people here do not seem to "get" is that (1) no one puts a gun to the head of any student and forces them to enroll at Whittier and (2) Whittier admits students that cannot get into any other law schools. If they have dismal future after graduation it is usually because most of these people do not take law school seriously, sit in class watching porn instead of engaging in learning, ask administration to dumb down the class work so that they can "pass" (yes, I have been asked this question) and do not bother to show up for bar prep classes and of course, fail the Bar. This has nothing to do with WLS but with the student/graduate and their lack of taking responsibility for their own education. I have witnessed all of this first hand at WLS. And BTW - the employment numbers for last year have been quoted in error. They had a 72% employment rate last year. If you are going to slam the school at least get your facts right. Check the ABA reports for verification of these facts. There are just as many Harvard, Stanford, UCLA grads who cannot find work either. It is called the state of the legal market and the economy which has nothing to do with WLS or any other school. And PS - last year WLS graduated 230 graduates, not 170 as you report. Again, before you slam anyone or anything, at least take the time to fact-check. Maybe the scam here is that the reporting on this site is more like the National Law School Enquirer rather than based on fact.

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    1. Maybe your points have some merit, but why does it cost over $40k a year to go to Whittier? If the Whittier students are lazy and unmotivated, then why did Whittier admit them in the first place? Similarly, the people that fall for "Nigerian Prince" internet scam are dumb, but that doesn't make the practice moral or legal.

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    2. Professor:

      You do realize that the 72% "employment rate" displayed on Whittier Law's website includes part-time jobs at McDonald's and such? Statistics like that are precisely the kind of deceptive PR bullshit that destroys lives and fuels the scamblog movement.

      The full-time legal employment rate is what we are interested in, and the percentages are as I stated. For the class of 2012, 170 graduated and, of those, a mere 59 obtained bar-required, full-time, long-term (a year or more, including clerkships) jobs within nine months of graduation.

      As for your PS-- Whittier's ABA report says 170 graduates for 2012. Feast your eyes on Whittier's 2012 ABA report, linked below. Under total graduates, it says: 170.

      http://www.law.whittier.edu/courses_upload/2012EmploymentStatistics.pdf

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    3. Radio silence coming from whittier law prof. To think that we were intimidated by these mental munchkins in law school during 1l. Ha ha their arguments are so nonsensical. Just rehashing garbage stats the the courts have held to be untrue. And reliance on them unreasonable. Scum.

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    4. At least he openly admits to being an employee of Whittier. If I worked there, I probably wouldn't admit it to anyone.

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  11. "Statistics like that are precisely the kind of deceptive PR bullshit that destroys lives and fuels the scamblog movement.

    The full-time legal employment rate is what we are interested in..."

    Dybbuk123:

    The good professor doesn't care about these things. He makes $150,000 NOT to care about these things...

    By the way, 'Professor,' why don't you, in your next class, let your students (you know, the ones who, because of them, you have a salary) know that you think they are all lazy, porn-watchers. I wonder how many more days Whittier would remain open if the students knew how stupid their professors thought they were and how much they despised them.

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  12. What a revolting liar this "professor" is. Exaggerating her legal experience. At most, her contribution to the case was "discussing" it with her husband over coffee in the morning. She knew what she was doing with that case - she needed a project to get tenure, so she finds some BS client with a silly issue and plumps it up into something she tried to get to the Supreme Court by making it "constitutional" in nature. Then she lets someone else do the legal work, and she milks it to make her role look bigger. She could not even defend a traffic ticket on her own, and I expect that this is the same for 99% of all law professors who list "appeals" on their resumes.

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    1. Me again. Forgot to add - dybbuk, this was a really great post! Nice work exposing this charlatan for who she really is, and for showing law applicants that their professors are wholly unqualified to teach.

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  13. I am an administrator at WLS and I can assure you that the employment stats do not reflect p/t employment at McDs. The ABA began a new form of employment reporting last year. Every law school must report every Spring the name of every recent graduate, where they work, if the job is law-related or not, if they work p/t or f/t and what the salary they earn is. This is the ABAs way of assuring that the false employment reporting stops. The 2012 ABA report is for stats from the 2011 class. The 2012 class gets reported in 2013 - which is due in October of this year. ABA numbers are a year delayed. When admitting these students, WHO could possibly know that they are lazy and unmotivated and think that they can cruise through law school just like they did undergrad. That is why the DQ rate is so high, they can't cut it. And WLS will NOT continue to take their tuition money if they cannot make the grade. Many schools continue to allow them to stay for the income. How does one "predict" the type of student they will be based on application data? We have folks with very high LSATs and UGPAs who are lazy and others with very low who excel. As far as your issue with the Profs go, yes there are bad profs in every school. Not just WLS. Tenure needs to go bye-bye so these folks can be gone also. But I would put many of WLSs faculty up against those at higher rated schools any day of the week. The ethics and quality teaching of faculty has to come from within themselves Like with any job, you can hire people who appear to be the best but you just never know what you have until you see them in action. Would you agree? I think this blog would be better served by discussing HOW to stop the system of tenure that is in place at every school on the planet and how to get rid of those faculty who rest on that tenure until they die. THAT is the issue.

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    1. I look forward to reviewing Whittier's ABA report in October, but you can hardly blame me for not knowing its contents before it has been issued.

      No problem with accepting a tiny number of low LSAT/UGPA students who have somehow indicated in other ways that they have potential. However, with Whittier, most admitted students have dismal scores.

      At the 25th percentile, the LSAT/UGPA of the enrolled class of 2015 was 148 /2.70. 148 for those who do not know, is at the 36th percentile of test takers. If you move all the way up to the 75 percentile the Whittier Class of 2015, you get an LSAT of 153-- barely above average for test-takers. (link below). It is frankly disgraceful that a law school would admit a class whose common feature seems to be that they bombed a standardized test designed to measure critical thinking ability, and got bad or mediocre grades in college.

      http://www.law.whittier.edu/index/experience/consumer-information/#dem

      As for flunking out students who can't make the grade, I am glad that Whittier does that. However, this is not to Whittier's credit-- most of these students should not have been admitted in the first place. Moreover, Whittier's ABA accreditation status has been called into question due to its low bar passage rate.

      http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/little_green_bar-pass_machines/

      We have common ground in opposing law school tenure practices. But professors who have no experience as lawyers, like Prof. Yildirim, should never have been hired in the first place.

      PS. One small clarification on my previous comment. I said that 59 out of 170 of the class of 120 obtained full-time, bar-required, long-term jobs within nine months of graduation. I should have subtracted the six solos, and stated the number as 53 out of 170.

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    2. This administrator is wrong about the employment data. The ABA now publishes employment data for the previous year's class in the spring, not in October. Dybbuk is quoting the stats for the class of 2012, just as he said.

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    3. Fascinating that we have common cause with the administrators on the tenure issue. My enemy's enemy is my friend?

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  14. PS - I am NOT a WLS professor....I do not possess tenure. I am simply someone who knows the facts - like them or not - as I work with this information daily. Sometimes the facts are quite ugly, I agree. But often times they are misquoted and erroneous. You need to look at some of the Top ranked Tier Two schools who have fallen to Tier 4 because of their poor and false reporting. I am also curious to know, why do you have a beef with WLS? Is this personal or do you just not have anything better to do with your time? Clearly you have not been able to find work in the legal field because if you had, you would not have time to waste your time on this blog.

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    1. I can't speak for the author of this piece, but the problem I see is that law profs are fiddling while Rome burns.

      The profession is crumbling, but law profs still draw huge salaries to teach 1-2 classes a semester and muse over things like "the human body as the site of resistance to the state" and "___ and the law."

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    2. "I am simply someone who knows the facts..." A little humility and careful consideration of facts would bolster your credibility. Professor Campos has already called you out on your misstatement regarding the ABA jobs report, which is published in the spring and which provides jobs data for 2012 graduates. (two misstatements there).

      Yyou write that the author needs "to look at some of the Top ranked Tier Two schools who have fallen to Tier 4 because of their poor and false reporting." Are you referring to Illinois and Villanova? Shameful conduct, but they have not fallen into "Tier 4." Another misstatement.

      "Clearly you have not been able to find work in the legal field because if you had, you would not have time to waste your time on this blog."

      The author can speak for him or herself. I'll speak for myself. Unlike you, I work in the legal field. As a lawyer. And unlike you, I've been forced to wade through hundreds of resumes from graduates with no legal experience. They have no hope. It is they who wasted their time (and treasure) in law school. Whittier is one of the great offenders.

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  15. I invite any of you to stop by the campus and witness the changes that have taken place. The new $2MM courtroom that was supported by many TOP WLS alumni who believes int he school. The amazing marketing that has come as a result and the people who are now flocking to a school that has been turned around by a new Dean who is there for the right reasons. The person that you need to skin is the former Dean. He ran the placeinto the ground.

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    1. Would you explain WHY a law school needs a $2MM mock courtroom? Do you really think that legal education is enhanced by such facades? You know, actual appellate lawyers do their mocks in their office's conference room or the cafeteria-- they just grab a mini-lectern, and move a few chairs around. They do not need a $2MM stage.

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    2. He already answered your question: "The amazing marketing that has come as a result and the people who are now flocking".

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  16. Classic diversion strategy. Don't pay attention to our terrible employment outcomes because I assure you through my total honesty that many of our graduates thrive (no need to provide evidence). Instead, focus on a minor side issue: tenure.

    Why don't you WLS administrators focus on not hiring these idiots in the first place? It would drop tuition immensely.

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    1. I've got to believe this "administrator" is no other than our favorite troll, Chris Knorps/Mr. Infinity. No law school staff/personnel would want to engage the scamblogs, even anonymously, nor disparage their students, as that just adds negative press and stirs the pot.

      Students looking at porn and lazy? Remove professor tenure? Previous Dean sucked? Scambloggers must by definition not be real attorneys? No, the condescending and holier-than-thou attitude towards the "loser more-ons," coupled with the need to white-knight any and all law skools because of his own fragile ego, is classic Mr. Infinity.

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    2. Yeah, I think you are right, dupednontraditional.

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    3. Umm...unfortunately I graduated from whittier. And I can tell you that the porn thing is true. My friend was in the class when it happens. So..... Yeah. This is me being embarrassed to be a Whittier Alum and quietly fading back into the background.

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  17. Anonymous, sounds like you are a Whittier grad who didn't get a job, who is prepared to completely distort the facts because you're sitting there eating donuts, and that the ad hominem attacks are made from a wealth of ignorance. Professor Yildirim is not only a brilliant scholar but a committed activist attempting to effectuate and evaluate social change. As to the Student body's valuation of Professor Yildirim--look at RatemyProfessor--her scores are off the chart excellent.

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