I just wanted to take a brief moment and note that OTLSS has reached a page view count with a lot of zeroes in it, and as such wanted to congratulate everyone on this particular milestone.
The Scamblog movement has been a slow, steady climb from outright dismissal to passing consideration to (mostly) grudging acceptance. Some claim that the truth has been out there for decades - the false employment statistics, the brutal job market, the declining salaries, the hefty debt - yet that same truth seemed to be drowned out by a cocktail of societal fanfare, obfuscation by the Law School Cartel, and legitimate success on the part of some practitioners.
It all appeared to start as hushed conversations between practitioners, or the shame-filled silence of those who had a career and lost it, or never had one start at all. No one dared speak out, as that would be instant career suicide. Very little could be found in the media that contradicted the open road narrative of law school being a sure road to career and financial success. There were extremely rare and surprising articles in the newspapers, but for the most part they were too easily dismissed as the rantings of losers and nay-sayers.
While it sounds cliche to say that "The Internet has Changed Everything!!!11!1eleven!!1", there is some real truth to this. When people could commit the "egregious sin" (according to some LawProfs) of exercising their first-amendment rights anonymously and "telling it like it is" to a wider audience than they ever could in the main-stream media, the message got out in a way that it never could before. The Calico Cat, Tom the Temp, L4L, Law School Transparency, The Law School Tuition Bubble, Nando, and many, many others stated to speak out, and the web count kept growing as a result. By the time other important players with street-cred entered the scene (e.g. The New York Times, Campos, Tamanaha) there was fertile ground for ideas to take root.
We're not done yet. But as a reader and supporter (or even a constructive criticizer) of this cause, we here at OTLSS thank you for your participation, and we look forward to hearing from you as more and more interesting times come our collective way.
Good job guys!
ReplyDeleteScam blogs are step #1 in restoring the legal profession.
Shaming law school pigs is only the first step... We got ways to go before legal education actaully does what it is supposed to do.
ReplyDeleteThe nose-diving numbers of LSAT takers, applicants, and matriculants are proof positive of the effect of OTLSS, TTR, and similar sites. Every time a 0L comes here, reads the postings, and decides not to go to law school (or goes with eyes wide open) is a profound victory. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
ReplyDeleteLight is HEAT!
Delete"You can all go hang yourselves! Stupid, disgruntled, whiny, lazy complainers!"
ReplyDeleteSigned,
A Disgruntled Law Professor
(on Behalf of Disgruntled Law Professors, Everywhere)
How classy of you Professor. Only the finest teach at law schools these days.
DeleteDisgruntled now, but when law schools start to close, law professors will add "mega" as a prefix when they face the reality:
Delete1. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th rate schools have professorial talent of the same caliber, with the same "employability" prospects.
2. Just as graduates of such schools can't find jobs, professors from them will not likely have a book of business to move to a law firm and will find themselves unemployable.
3. Their duped students, though indebted, will have and extra 20 to 30 years to pay off their debt, unlike the professors who careers will largely be over, having no business to take with them. Some will find government work, perhaps.
4. Any city with a law school which lays off a fair percentage of their law professors will hardly be able to absorb the unemployed law professors, many of whom will have to incur the expense of moving, while being unemployed. Hoping to find a job somewhere.
5. That law professors will find it difficult if not impossible to find employment at law professor salaries. A large pay cut is inevitable. To say nothing of evaporating benefits.
Cooley has reportedly slashed professorial staff. Several other schools have frozen or lowered tuition-that is perhaps the last step before slashing professorial staff.
The other shoe has yet to drop and it will be deafening.
The chair will be yanked out from under many a six-hour-a-week ass. And scholarshit, currently the sine qua non of hackademic hiring, will turn out to be a dreadful liability. Pretentious, illegible treatises on open roads and neo-Rawlsian hip-hop will vanish from résumés in a trice.
DeleteI don't expect many law professors to go hungry, though: most of them are upper-class fucks with parents or spouses or trust funds to support their dead weight.
Old Guy
Old Guy -- of course law professors won't go hungry. McDonald's gives its employees free food. Unless, of course, the manager is a law school graduate with $150K in dept ... LOL
DeleteRegarding point number 4 at 9:06...San Diego will probably be the first city to have law professors searching for jobs alongside their unemployed grads. I find it deliciously ironic that their fraudulent act of pretending to teach unqualified students will result in even more competition when they have to seek real jobs.
DeleteAnd those job-seeking professors will explain to the recruiters that they should be hired in preference to their students because they are great lawyers and lousy professors and thereby "what could those students possibly know?"
DeleteJust exquisite.
Congratulations, guys! You and your colleagues have really accomplished something good. (Which is a lot more than can be said for the ABA, the feds, the judges, ....)
ReplyDeleteseton hall law is,better than harvard it is better than anythinf in the world
ReplyDeleteAnd Newark is the most beautiful city in America.
DeleteI have to disagree...Trenton takes the title as the most beautiful city in America. Newark and Camden are tied for second. Or is it Detroit?
DeleteAnyway, 1,000,000 page views means visibility; the shedding of light on a profession that was destined to decline. Just think in those one million perusals, how many minds were changed and lives saved...and how many more in the next million. The impact is noticeable and for that I say, Bravo!
But Trenton has no law school, so it's hardly a city. Camden has one, and Newark and Detroit each have two. You want to be a young, hip urban professional, you hold your nose and go where the law schools are.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83tboDnpE7Y
ReplyDeleteThe scamdeans and lawprof pigs shall not be allowed to rest. We must get the word out till we close 150 law schools.
ReplyDeleteThat's about the right number. Not even twenty law schools in the US are worth attending.
DeleteOld Guy
Yeah 55-60 sounds about right to me. One state school for each state (and no, Fla and NY and CA do not need more than one state school in spite of their size--they are the most saturated legal markets) plus the top 5-10 private schools.
DeleteI seem to recall that Brian Leiter, a professor of law (but oddly enough, not of philosophy) at Chicago, once conducted a thoroughly unscientific online poll on how many law schools would close. I think the consensus was fewer than ten.
DeleteActually, BamBam, some smaller states should split the costs of running a shared law school with another small state or with a larger neighbor.
DeleteI think 30 or so law schools will close within the next 10 years.
DeleteIf bar exam passage rates are purposely lowered in all states to no more than 50% of test takers, I think you'll see a much more dramatic drop in the number of schools.
In fact, the next big push should be for par passage rates to go down.
NH and Vermont could probably share grads from Massachusetts. Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming could snake grads from Colorado and Washington. The Dakotas could share one or swipe from Minnesota.
DeleteI don't see why there should be one school for each state. Already Alaska doesn't have one, and soon enough Delaware and Vermont will join it. With the notable exception of Louisiana, the variations in law from state to state do not justify state-specific schools.
DeleteOld Guy
Everyone knows this is just dybbuk clicking refresh over and over again on government-owned computers.
ReplyDeleteI am sure that whatever unnamed person keeps sending me weirdo messages through this blog is acting out of the most elevated master morality.
DeleteI know of several seriously unbalanced law professors. Sometimes people who think they understand the criminal justice system feel free to commit the basest of crimes.
DeleteI was glad to find out that I was not alone in my legal career being nasty, brutish and short.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Hobbes, that is. I wonder what Nietzsche had to say about legal careers?
DeleteI think he said, "Laws are made to be broken."
DeleteAfter the syphilis hit his brain he just mumbled and drooled.
DeleteYou're right, that is nasty. I hesitate even to think of what would motivate a sadistic online troll like Brian Leiter. I think that Maurice, for all his faults, has done us a great service with his philosophical explorations of the depths of professorial depravity. He has gone where even angels fear to tread.
DeleteI'm thinking that Nietzsche must have said that every man is his own lawyer. How else could Leiter have gotten it in his head that he's a lawyer? And clearly stating that in his threatening email to Carrie was the boner of the century. Not only premature, but utterly foolish under any circumstances.
DeleteI glad you all have gotten to this point.
ReplyDeleteMy law school scam hope is that one day every lemming reads Nando's entries on every school they wish to apply to and then goes to Law School Transparency and looks at the Employment and Underemployment scores and costs tab for those schools.