Savannah Law Prof Marc Roark rages at the announced closing of his bottom-of-the-barrel law school and implores social media to #SaveSavannahLaw

On his twitter feed, Professor Marc Lane Roark of doomed Savannah Law School (which is a branch of equally scammy John Marshall Law School of Atlanta) introduces himself modestly as a "Law Professor, sometimes poet, sometimes fiction writer, academic on homelessness, urban affairs, identity, literature, and the south."

As a poet, albeit just sometimes, Professor Roark may be more naturally perceptive than the norm, and therefore able to perceive meaning and beauty where others see only a dismal and toxic pit of scam. And, of course, he has a poet's ability to communicate meaning and beauty in vivid and compelling language. So I was moved by Roark's simultaneous social media elegy for his soon to be ex-law school, and last-ditch plea for its survival. Even if I must evaluate his eloquent words in the  skeptical and evidence-focused manner of a mere sometimes scamblogger and actual practicing lawyer. 

Roark: "Our bar passage rate was decent."  

Savannah Law's bar passage rate was 54.5% for July, 2017 and 33.3% for February, 2017-- outcomes that were respectively a whopping 23.9% and 20.6% below the Georgia state average. Indeed, Savannah was on track to violate the ABA's Standard 316(a)(2), which requires that a school's annual first-time bar passage rate be is no more than 15 points below the jurisdiction's average first-time bar passage rates for three of the last five years. 

Roark: "Our job numbers were outstanding." 

In so saying, Roark does not cite Savannah Law's overall job placement numbers, but rather its placement results within a very specific subcategory of employment outcomes, namely federal clerkships, of which Savannah grads snagged four in the last three years. This is a very run-of-the-mill performance, even for a fourth tier school. However, Savannah's unusually small class size lifts its federal clerkship rate to to 2.8%, or a smidgen above the median. (See this chart, listing federal clerkship rate for the graduating classes of 2014-2016, by law school). 

Unfortunately, Savannah's overall legal placement rate is more accurately characterized as "outrageous" than as "outstanding." For the Class of 2016, only 15 out of 36 graduates (41.6%) got full-time bar-required non-solo jobs within 10 months of graduation. This places Savannah in the bottom 30 among law schools, i.e. the bottom 15%.  

Roark: "Our scholarship was innovative and bountiful." 

Professor Roark has innovated unto the world a bountiful law review article entitled "Reading Mohammed in Charleston: Assessing the U.S. Courts Approach to the Convergence, of Law, Language, and Norms," 4 Widener L. Rev. 205 (2007). 

In the article, Roark summarized seven appellate court decisions where application of Saudi or Afghan law was requested by a party in a commercial context. Now any lawyer could have summarized these cases and their rulings, but only a law professor could supply the show-offy literary references and pretentious verbiage meant to convey, with as much circumlocution and puffery as possible, the obvious point that interpreting texts from different cultures can lead to distorted or unintended results. See Reading Mohammed at 212 ("As Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir about reading cultural epigraphs in an environment that would seem to challenge the norms and practice of that reading, so this article is an anthology of seven distinct instances in which American courts attempt to read Islamic law through their own cultural interpretive lenses. Instead of Austen, Nabokov, and Fitzgerald, our six memoirists struggle with the cultural norms of the Prophet and his law"). [ed: Roark means seven "memoirists," aka courts, not six. Widener Law Review members, circa 2007 were not paying close enough attention to the article during the editing process, though I can hardly fault them]

An earlier draft of this article (available for download at bepress) was entitled Reading Mohammed in Charleston: Assessing the U.S. Courts Approach to the Convergence of Law, Religion, and Commerce," So Roark replaced two of his three title convergers, swapping "religion" and "commerce" for "language" and "norms"-- though with little substantive alteration in the text of the article. See e.g. Reading Mohammed, bepress draft, p. 11 ("Like Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir about reading cultural epigraphs in an environment that would seem to challenge the norms and practice of that reading; so too, Reading Mohammed in Brooklyn [sic] is an anthology of six distinct instances in which American Court’s [sic] attempt to read Islamic law through its [sic] own cultural interpretive lens. Instead of Austen, Nabokov, and Fitzgerald, our six memoirists struggle with the cultural norms of the Prophet and his law").  

I pose this question: Do serious scholars write whole articles about the convergence of certain forces, then determine that it was actually entirely different forces that were doing the converging, but still find no need for substantive changes to the article, only to the title? Because a more critical person might conclude that such a move might more commonly be expected from a poseur or a dilettante or worse. 

Roark: "Our faculty had the 35th most downloads for law schools in SSRN." 

If Roark is going to brag about the total SSRN downloads of articles published by Savannah Law faculty, he ought to have fairly acknowledged that his championship team has lately been far off its game. In the last 12 months, Savannah Law has ranked 144th among U.S. law schools in new SSRN downloads with a total of 3,133, bested ever so slightly by top performer New York University School of Law, with 167,462 downloads.

But this elides the question: Why does Savannah Law's SSRN download stats deserve any more than negligible weight as to the issue of the school's moral right to exist? We are talking about law review articles, of which there is no shortage, and which rarely have any influence on actual legal practice or even on other academic disciplines. Roark, for instance, has posted 17 scholarly papers on SSSN, the vast majority of which are law review articles. These 17 articles have a cumulative citation total of one.

Roark's article "Reading Mohammed in Charleston: Assessing the U.S. Courts Approach to the Convergence of Law, Language, and Norms, discussed above,  has accumulated 121 SSRN downloads, or about 10 per year.  Its low total may suggest that genuine scholars of both Western and Islamic law are happily convergent in common allergy to pretentious bullshit. 

Roark: "Yet the owners of the law school decided that the real estate was too valuable for something like educating a group of radical, thoughtful, visionaries who would see (sic?) to do good in the world. . . . So today we learned they sold the building out from under the law school." 

I was touched by this heartfelt plaint. Not because I consider it valid, but because I had a strong sense that the aggrieved wording was a stand-in for the complainant's punctured ego. I mean, it has got to hurt when the interests who have been providing your comfortable livelihood make it clear that they believe the chair you are seated upon is objectively more valuable than that chair plus you. 

The LSAT score for the most recent entering class of Savannah Law was 144 at the 25th percentile and 147 at the median. Excluding the Puerto Rican law schools, only seven accredited law schools out of over 200 scored worse at the 25th percentile and only eight scored worse at the median. I hate to be unkind about this, but how likely is it that a group of persons who have earned the description of "radical thoughtful visionaries" have collectively scored close to rock bottom on a test that measures logic and reading comprehension? And if the students at Savannah Law do possess these sterling different drummer qualities, test results notwithstanding, is it not likely that they would contribute more to overall world goodness outside the frustrating constraints of the precedent-bound, procedure-bound, and credential-fixated realm of legal practice?

The capitalists in charge of this for-profit law school, subject now to Roark's public ire but not when he was anticipating uninterrupted salary checks, have asserted that "This hard decision resulted from Savannah Law School’s inability to attract a necessary applicant pool to ever achieve sustainable enrollment levels." Indeed, Savannah Law offered admission to 273 persons in 2017, but found only 38 enrollees among that number.  That is a pretty significant decline, both percentage and raw number -wise from 2015, when the school was able to secure 59 matriculates from 245 admittees. 

Perhaps Savannah Law's owners are not motivated by blind greed so much as by a sober assessment that their business plan had misfired in idealistically overestimating the pool of radical thoughtful visionaries. At least the special kind of visionary, whose imaginative wisdom leads him or her to pay $42,682 resident sticker per year to attend a school with job placement results and bar passage rates that are about as decent-to-outstanding as the cake that Marie Antoinette fed to famished French peasants. 

Roark: "At the end of the day, Savannah's legacy may simply be this: we never had a chance to show what we were capable of." 

These are poignant words indeed, until you actually think about them. 

First, Savannah did have a chance, in fact seven years' worth of chances since its establishment in 2011. Seven years in, and the school was only enrolling three or four dozen students per year, of whom a significant percentage were sub-145 LSAT scorers. I hate to side with the profit-hungry owners of the school but, again, were they not entitled to make some informed judgments about financial viability after seven years? 

Second, let us assume that Roark and his colleagues were hindered in their noble and ambitious goals by administrative incompetence and neglect and other circumstances beyond their control. Doesn't that simply put them in the category of nearly everybody? "I never had a chance to show what I was capable of" is something that could be fairly said by anybody whose talents and abilities were not given unlimited scope, funding, and encouragement. Welcome back to the real world, Savannah law professors, or shall I say soon-to-be-ex-law-professors, an often disappointing and frightening place where you do not typically get six figure salaries for a worklife of maximum autonomy, pampered ease, undue authority and respect, and the opportunity to show what you are capable of.

Roark: "Innovation centers have certain things in common -- one thing is-- they have law schools. Law schools bring smart people in contact with each other to create new synergies. If Savannah wants to be an innovation hub it needs a law school." 

But for the magnetic draw and adhesive quality of law schools, smart people rarely make contact, and certainly never join together to make beautiful synergies that bring enrichment to all. With no law school in the vicinity to draw then out of their shells, local smart people behave like autistic savants, each trapped inside of his or her own idiosyncratic and uncommunicative mentations. 

OK. To be less snide, I would like to note a somewhat boosterish, but still interesting recent article about how Pittsburgh became an "innovation hub." (Roark's exact phrase). The article is about the revival of the city's tech sector, with special focus on local developments in robotics. The article identifies Carnegie Mellon University as hub's hub, the place that drew funding for robotics projects, brought together scientists from various fields, and rapidly produced research that could be commercialized and productivized into the larger economy. 

Now, Carnegie Mellon does not even have a law school, but it still somehow managed to bring very smart people into contact with each other in a way that produced concrete innovation. Pittsburgh does have two middling law schools, the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne, but the article did not deign to mention either, let alone give them a starring role in innovation. (Not quite fairly as to Duquesne, which did innovate to the extent of offering law students quality ukulele lessons to compensate for a less than first-rate legal education). 

Perhaps true innovation involves creations more substantive than "synergies," a word whose primary usage these days is to try to create vaguely upbeat impressions about interactions and convergences. 

Actually, my sense is that the word "synergy" has been so overused by scammers that it tends to unintentionally alert sophisticated readers or listeners that the declarant is an obnoxious flack. So maybe we can recognize the new usage of the word "synergy" by applying it to the collective behavior of most law professors in producing puffed-up scholarshit, in reinforcing one another's unearned sense of accomplishment and entitlement, and in their striking aversion to responsibility. Hey law profs, you have ruined a lot of lives with your contemptible synergies.