The so-called University of Southern California joins other institutions in offering a bachelor's degree in "legal studies".
In many countries, the professional degree in law is a bachelor's degree: students can go straight into preparation for the legal profession after finishing high school, without first obtaining a bachelor's degree in another field. This new bachelor's degree in "legal studies", however, will not give access to the bar. Its purpose is anything but clear. Scam-professor Bob Rasmussen denies that it is "law-school lite": he says that the program will impart "general knowledge for what you would want a smart, educated person to know about the law". Smart, educated people have presumably been learning about the law for centuries without the help of four-year degree programs, so I don't see the urgent need for this new degree.
The curriculum includes the following courses: "Law and the U.S. Constitution in Global History, Law and Society, Introduction to Criminal Law, Fundamentals of the U.S. Legal System and Current Court Cases". That sounds pretty thin to me. "Current Court Cases" is obviously ephemeral, and a few of those other courses sound like candy-ass crapola of the dreaded "law and" variety. Conspicuously absent is rudimentary training (outside the criminal field): what exactly is a contract, and why should one care?
Vague notions gleaned from "Law and Society" will not prove useful for employment. At first I speculated that the purpose of the degree was to curry favor with admissions offices at not-quite-toilety law schools. But the piece cited above ends with the following:
Undergraduate degrees in law could help graduates obtain JD-advantage jobs without the cost of a law degree, said Kyle McEntee, founder of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, in an interview with Reuters.
Kyle McEntee was indeed the founder of Law School Transparency, but this year he apparently sold it and the anti-scam movement for thirty pieces of silver and a cushy job at the LSAC. The law-school scam is unlikely to thank him for suggesting that jobs in its mythological "JD-advantage" category can be filled without the supposed advantage of a JD, just a cotton-candy bullshit bachelor's degree in "legal studies". Nor will scamsters be flattered by the unfavourable comparison of "the cost of a law degree" to that of majoring in "legal studies" in the course of an undergraduate program.
If you are stupid enough to sign up for law school, expect to be undermined by a bunch of undergraduates who opt for "legal studies" instead of some other major with similarly bad prospects for employment.
Universities are very greedy these days.
ReplyDeleteSo, instead of taking Torts, Contracts, Constitutional Law; you can take Law and Society. While you're at it, you can take Science and Society instead of Physics or Chemistry. Take Gender Identity in Film instead of American Government. Take Introduction to Marxism instead of American History. And, you can produce a completely unemployable lunatic fit for nothing but blocking highways and throwing molotov cocktails at police cars. But, at least all those loans will help them build a credit history.....
ReplyDeleteIn Old Guy's youth, candy-ass courses were mocked as "Physics for Poets", "Clapping for Credit" (music), and the like.
DeleteAbout thirty years ago, the multiplication table was disparaged as "rote learning" and was removed from the elementary-school curriculum. Someone quipped that math had been reduced to "math appreciation" (along the lines of music appreciation).
Cursive handwriting was dropped around the same time. A few days ago, a client said that he could not read a word that Old Guy had written, because Old Guy had used cursive script. Next to go will be reading itself. And even the prestigious law schools have plenty of so-called students who cannot compose a decent paragraph.
This sounds like a thinly disguised CJ program. Maybe the sound of criminal justice scares away a lot of woke employers and this is a way to repackage the product.
ReplyDeleteI went to college long before the concept of "woke" came along. Back then, as now, it wasn't that employers were woke it was that the major was a joke. A classic case of turning a blue collar job into a college major favored by those who couldn't handle serious material. I knew a now-deceased NYPD murder detective - the department's elite - who had zero college training and whose time in the service was spent as a navy hard hat diver, not a cop. He got plenty of convictions without the benefit of one hour in college.
DeleteOn my campus we called CJ "Criminal Just-Gettin'-By." My junior year there was a contoversy because two guys were neck and neck for valedictorian and they were parsing minute criteria to decide who should get it. One was a biology major and the other a CJ major. In the end the CJ guy got it. EVERYONE thought the bio guy should have gotten it because he took far, far harder classes and everyone considered the CJ guy to be a total douchebag for not conceding the point regardless of the minutia. But what did he care? He was graduating in a few days and wouldn't have to listen to what people were saying about him any more.
In Old Guy's day, majors were usually in academic subjects: history, mathematics, English, and the like. Business, where it existed (it was not available at Old Guy's élite university), was considered to be a joke of a major. So was "education" (training for primary- and secondary-school teachers, also not offered by my university), which to this day has the lowest average SAT score of all common majors.
DeleteNowadays non-academic majors abound. Beyond "criminal justice" and "criminology", there are now majors in leisure studies, golf-course maintenance, interior decorating, astrobiology (the study of life outside this planet—not that any has been proven to exist, but why should that stand in the way of a bullshit major?), pop culture, puppetry. If they are needed at all, those should be offered as associate's, not bachelor's, degrees.
Hey OG-don't forget the "Masters in Legal Studies" degrees the hucksters are also peddling. Mixed in with the usual-eg TJ-you've got pretentious law schools such as Wash U and Cornell offering a degree the utility of which is speculative at best. What isn't speculative is the enormous debt for a master's which does not allow the student to qualify for the bar exam.
ReplyDeleteThese people have no shame.
https://www.princetonreview.com/law-school-rankings?rankings=best-online-master-studies-in-law-programs
What exactly do the holders of that bogus degree "master"? They may not acquire the knowledge of "legal studies" that is imparted by one of these new bullshit bachelor's degrees.
DeleteThe "Master's in Legal Studies" seems like an attempt to garner whatever prestige a JD may still have without putting in the effort to earn a JD. I don't know why any empolyer would be interested in this Mickey Mouse degree.
Some schools are offering it to people who drop out after 1L to increase bar passage rates, others are basically just letting people take the 1L year in lieu of the LSAT and admitting them if they rank high enough in the class.
DeleteSo it's either an entry-ramp to a JD, or an off-ramp from one that at least looks somewhat better than stigmatizing yourself as a dropout or leaving the dreaded "resume gap." I don't think anyone expects it to have much intrinsic value to employers but at least in the off-ramp context it can reduce the amount of actual damage having attended does. Employers may hate hiring JDs for nonlegal roles, but they often hate hiring "failures" and "dropouts" even more.
The odious toilet Vermont Law School recently restyled itself Vermont Law & Graduate School. It is going to offer "new degrees, a Master of Climate and Environmental Policy (residential and online), an Executive Master of Environmental Policy (online only), and a Master of Animal Protection Policy (residential and online)". These Mickey Mouse degrees are billed as pertaining to "public policy", not to law. Of course, the little whistle stop of South Royalton, Vermont—a half-hour's drive from the nearest grocery store—is a veritable Mecca of expertise on public policy.
ReplyDeleteIt gets worse. I found this site: "What Can You Do With a Master's in Legal Studies?" https://onlinemasteroflegalstudies.com/career-guides/mls/
ReplyDeleteThey give a list of "career options" such as Law Librarian; Court Reporter; Real Estate Broker; Parole officer just to name a few. Law Librarian? Sorry, you need a JD AND a Master's in Library Information Science. Master's in Legal Studies won't get you this job. The link for this 'career option' quotes salary and employment statistics from the BLS for librarians and media specialists(known as school librarians- and has its own state certification requirements). I can't believe they are quoting stats for jobs that you can't get with a master's in legal studies. Court Reporter? You have to go to a special school to learn to operate the stenotype machine and get to a speed of 240 words per minute. The master's of legal studies won't train you for that nor will it help you if are a court reporter. Real Estate Broker? Just a 75-hour course and pass a state exam. Parole Officer? Nope, just a bachelor's degree. These purveyors have no shame. I can't believe anyone would be stupid enough to get this degree. The site above mentions that graduates will serve as a 'legal resource", but wouldn't that be practicing law without a license? Unbelievable. SO glad I dropped out of law school years ago and became a teacher.
They just pulled that list out of their asses. Court reporter and real-estate broker, as you said, don't require any degree at all; and a "Master's in Legal Studies" is neither necessary nor sufficient, nor even desirable, for those other positions—or for that matter any other position that comes to mind.
DeleteYes, you can get all sorts of jobs with this bullshit degree. But you can get them just as easily, if not more easily, without the bullshit degree.
Some goddamn scam-professor published a list of hundreds of things that one can (allegedly) do with a law degree. Among them: royalty. All because some damn fool Dutch queen or English prince has a law degree (like as not honorary rather than earned). Well, the last time Old Guy checked, royalty comes with certain qualifications that are almost impossible to achieve after birth, and a JD is of no use for fulfilling those qualifications. Anyone counting on waltzing to the Norwegian throne on the strength of a JD (probably from an über-toilet) should kindly refrain from reproducing.
Well, take the probation officer example. A bachelors may be the minimum, but if you've got two otherwise equal candidates and one has a BA in criminal justice and the other has the same AND an MLS, the nod may indeed go to the one with the MLS. Is it worth what it'll cost which is essentially the same as 1L year? Probably not. But there probably are a few scenarios where it'll give someone an advantage, even if only as a tie-breaker.
DeleteSounds like a remote possibility. And what is an "MLS" going to do for a probation officer? Have you considered the possibility that the "MLS" might prove disadvantageous for someone seeking that job? We've had many accounts here of people who left a JD off their résumé so as not to seem overqualified or otherwise unattractive.
DeleteAbsolutely on a JD functioning like a scarlet letter, but that's because it pigeonholes you as a lawyer and those employers assume that all lawyers are rich, so if you have a JD and aren't using it to practice then you must be some kind of loser and no one wants to hire losers. I doubt they'd have the same reaction to an MLS precisely because it does not and cannot qualify you to practice.
DeleteI find it hard to predict how the "MLS" would be perceived. Probably it would impress a lot people, just as a PhD bought from a diploma mill does. To others, it might mark the bearer as a rube and a loser. If I received a résumé with "MLS" on it, I would have a quick laugh before dispatching the résumé to the wastebasket.
DeleteThen there would be that intermediate group of those who would ask why the bearer hadn't become a lawyer. The truth about the Mickey Mouse nature of the "MLS" might then come out.
I find it fascinating that you dropped out of law school and became a teacher. What shocks me, beyond words, are the number of teachers, making great money, doing a job with upward potential. . .who quit their job to attend law school. In fact, in general a lot of people with very good, well-paying jobs decide "I want to be a lawyer" and walk away from it all. When they realize that there are no jobs for most JD's these days, many end up going back to their former profession, having wasted three years of their lives and probably $300,000 when you consider 3 years they 1) earned little or nothing and 2) borrowed big to pay for law school. The whole thing is profoundly stupid and scandalous.
DeleteThe baby boomers, for whom university was cheap and well-paying jobs were plentiful (at least for able-bodied males) even without a high-school diploma, keep passing "higher education" off as an "investment". Oh, it's a great investment for the scamsters, who collect their undeserved fees up front and benefit from a huge demand made possible by the federal underwriting of student loans. But it's no investment, just an enormous liability, for the many dolts who sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of non-dischargeable debt bearing high interest, all for the sake of a toilet-paper degree of little use for finding a job.
DeleteI agree with you 100 percent. I also share your disdain for colleges and universities that care more about their football and basketball programs, and other nonsense, than about actual education. Remember, though, the students are also culpable for all of this. Too many go to college for a 4 to 6 year long party, all funded by student loans that they have neither the intention nor the ability of ever re-paying. My local pizza deliveryman has a college degree, and plans to attend a low-ranked law school, because he says that "law has always been my dream." I focused exclusively on academics when I was in college, and went to the best law school in my state starting in the early 90's, when tuition was much lower, and there were actually plenty of jobs for JD's the year I graduated. The dolts attending college and law school today are often just there to live a lavish lifestyle funded by so called "student loans" that the lender, borrower, and beneficiary all know will never, ever, be repaid. Kind of like our own government and its ever growing "National Debt", aka "the deficit" that our leaders have neither the ability nor the intention of ever repaying.
Deletedilbert, I've met two other people who dropped out of law school to become teachers. I only heard of teachers leaving to go to law school(don't know any personally). I dropped out 30 years ago because I clearly saw the bimodal salary distribution back then and where I fell with my grades. After 1L, I refused to borrow tons more money for not-great to crappy pay upon graduation. I know many people who landed biglaw after graduation. Some are doing better than I am; some are not.
DeleteI have a young friend who just took the LSAT and I'm trying very hard to talk him out of going. He's smart; but thinks if he gets into a good-enough school he'll be fine. The debt does scare him though. I referred him here; but all he saw was talk of 3rd-tier toilets and he'll be able to attend much higher ranked.
The path to the legal profession is marred with pitfalls far bigger than an extra-large with pepperoni and mushrooms. As I have said countless times in my Cassandra-like fashion, law school is a perfectly good option for the filthy rich; for everyone else, it may be worth considering if the law school in question is Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, and also if it is one of perhaps ten others (Michigan, Virginia, Chicago, and the like) AND one gets a big discount on tuition (usually styled a "scholarship" by law-school scamsters); it is a bad idea in almost all other circumstances. Since the dreamer from the pizzeria is obviously not filthy rich and is heading for a toilet institution, he falls comfortably within that vast category of those who should stay the hell away from law school.
DeleteAnd you're quite right to point out that much of the responsibility for the ejookayshun scam falls on the so-called students. It's true that young people nowadays have fewer options than those of 45 years ago, but that's no excuse for pursuing a degree that is unlikely to turn out well. There are better options than university for most people.
And, yes, many "students" are there mainly for the lavish lifestyle afforded by free-flowing "student loans". That too is inexcusable, but it is a natural consequence of handing large amounts of money to immature people. Despite the name, "student loans" are really a form of corporate welfare for the military–ejookayshunal complex.
To 7:34, I suggest that the friend read "The Seven Tiers of Law Schools":
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-seven-tiers-of-law-schools.html
Your friend probably thinks of "much higher ranked" as being Cardozo or the U of Colorado. Not in Old Guy's book, it isn't. In the five-year-old article cited above, exactly 13 law schools are listed as being worth considering even in principle, and all of them are risky to anyone who cannot afford to pay for the experience in cash.
Your friend didn't read very far if he saw talk only of toilet schools. There are plenty of references here to bad outcomes for graduates of Harvard or Yale.
1) Law schools lure in gullible young people all the time, with wild tales of careers in "Sports Law, Entertainment Law and even Space Law". I have been practicing law for over a quarter century, and I haven't men a "space lawyer" or an "international lawyer" yet. As to the idea that if he gets into a "good enough" law school he will be fine, no, he won't. Top 10 law school UVA was caught employing 15 percent of its own new graduates in short term low paid bogus "school funded jobs" so they could lie the next set of suckers (I meant to say "applicants") about how they had nearly 100 percent employment of their own recent grads. Yeah, it's easy to say everyone's employed if you employ them yourself to game the numbers. I hope your young friend is not gullible, and does not suffer from Confirmation Bias aka Wishful Thinking that leads people to literally go to law school because they liked the movie Legally Blonde. I don't have much sympathy for folks like that. In closing, remind your friend that IRL (In Real Life) licensed attorneys work for as little as $19 per hour doing "temporary document review projects". If he thinks it is worth spending 4Y college 3Y law school 2 day Bar Exam for the opportunity to earn the princely sum of 19 bucks an hour. . ..well, if he is that foolish, he certainly doesn't have what it takes to be a good lawyer.
DeleteThanks Old Guy. 7:34 here. I'll send the link to my friend. (He's thinking Fordham.) I'll also send a link to a NY Times article about how all the Legal Aid attorneys in NYC work second jobs doing food delivery; bartending; Uber driving, as my friend was interested in Legal Aid. Btw, you are hysterical in your sarcastic descriptions; I love the brutal honesty!
DeleteYes, Dilbert, the law-school scamsters have passed off the sexiest, most exotic aspects of law as realistic options for new graduates. It's as if food service as an occupation were sold on the basis of the work of the top chef at a restaurant that gets three stars in the Michelin guide, when such rarities are vastly outnumbered by those people who sling hash at a fast-food joint or clear dishes at a greasy spoon. Naturally, thousands of law students take the bait and fancy themselves working in "space law" or "sports law" or some other fictional domain while some little person somewhere writes wills or defends criminal charges. Years ago the scamsters put out a poster showing a dolphin ensnared in a fishing net and implying to the gullible that saving dolphins was a viable area of practice. One would have to be quite naïve to fall for that, especially when the cost of law school is often $300k or more. Fortunately for the scamsters, naïveté abounds.
DeleteI've said for years that even Harvard and Yale are questionable nowadays. Harvard some years ago circulated a letter that urged its students to expand their professional horizons (think "JD advantage") because they weren't all finding jobs. It's true that the rate of employment (or graduate study or "MRS" degrees or whatever) is very high at a Harvard, but still there are those who do not find anything, or who get stuck with something unappealing. Consider that Harvard and Yale are very aristocratic places, and ask yourself whether you as a non-aristocrat really belong there.
Building one's career on Legal Aid is unrealistic. I don't go near Legal Aid, which pays poorly and entails a great deal of red tape. Yes, you're quite right about the many lawyers moonlighting at unskilled or otherwise low-paying jobs because they cannot get enough work or enough money through Legal Aid or otherwise.
Just last night I spoke with a recently retired judge, called to the bar in the 1970s, who said that he is glad to be out of the legal profession because law is not what it used to be. He's right. I'm fed up with it myself.
And let's make one thing perfectly clear: Fordham is not a high-end school. It falls in Old Guy's Tier 4, described as follows: "Expect a disastrous outcome at these unless you get tuition waived, have local connections, and intend to build your career in the vicinity of the school (no farther away than, say, an adjacent state). As always, rich people can go here if they really want to." If Fordham were not in New York City, it might well be in Tier 5.
DeleteI always thought of Fordham as a "trap school." The trap is that you typically need a high GPA and an LSAT in the 160s to get in; those kids are smart enough to pass the bar no question. And it's selective enough that somewhere between 25% and a third of the class gets biglaw, Much better odds than a tier 4, but still nowhere near good enough to call it a safe investment. You'd still be better off walking up to the roulette wheel and putting 200k on black.
DeleteThe trap is sprung because the rest of the class (which is the supermajority, 66-75% of them roughly) is pretty much just as screwed as they would be if they went to Cooley, because once you emerge from 2L OCI with no offers that's pretty much the end of the line for having a good outcome. And the tragedy is compounded by the fact that these are pretty smart kids who could've done well in something else.
Yes, Fordham is a trap school. Part of the trap is its location in New York City, which also contributes to the relatively high rate of Big Law. And Fordham is full of rich kids who, despite immense privilege, weren't able to get into a Harvard. You can bet your ass that they get a large share of the positions at Big Law. Thus if you think that you have a 25% chance at Big Law just because a quarter of the class gets it, think again.
DeleteNew York has Columbia, NYU, and Yale (if you consider New Haven to be a distant suburb), not to mention Cornell upstate. All of those handily kick Fordham's ass. Yet Fordham costs just as much.
Fordham should be lumped in with Cardozo, not with NYU.
I'm sure there are people who get the jobs via connections, but I don't think it's that big a share. Biglaw doesn't seem to generally care that you know VIPs unless those VIPs happen to be in a specific position to bring millions in business to the firm. Not to mention the fact that rich kids may have an aversion to billing 3,000 hrs/yr. I mean, it's kinda a sweatshop. Why would you do that if you had a trust fund?
DeleteIn any case though, the point is a bit academic. Even if a 33% biglaw placement rate DID mean a 1/3rd shot, that's still worse odds than putting 200k on black, and that analogy is especially apt because of the "only get one shot" nature of OCI.
In my experience, Big Law cares very much about connections and assesses them through pedigree. The rich kids at the bottom of the class readily got jobs. Old Guy, at the top of the class, couldn't get an interview—and plenty of people were not shy about telling him why: he was marked, through age and otherwise, as not having the right cla$$ background.
DeleteThose big firms are all about money. They want people with connections at the yacht club—potential customers.
Law should be a required subject in high school and undergrad anyway. Law school has little point to its existence, an undergrad major makes more sense and then an apprenticeship or other style training system, similar to CPA where you have to work in the field and then take exams. For law it's as simple as paralegals/law clerks then becoming attorneys.
ReplyDeleteThe law schools don't benefit from that but they're the problem to begin with. Nothing you learn in law school prepares you at all for legal practice, so that's irrelevant. If law schools want to continue to exist they should be forced to actually teach the practice of law, taught by actual skilled practitioners, rather than clueless academics. The current system is akin to the blind leading the blind. Law schools refuse to teach because they consider it beneath them, but maybe if there was an undergrad avenue to practice law they'd feel more pressure to actually be worthwhile, as well as of course losing access to student loans which should have happened a long time ago.
I actually think the 1L curriculum is very good. The 2L and 3L years are pretty much an irrelevant waste of time, but 1L really does teach you how to "think like a lawyer" and the bar mostly tests 1L subjects, too.
DeleteThe rest should indeed be practical experience, but I think the optimum situation would be for law school to be a one-year masters that looks pretty much exactly like the 1L year does now, which ironically is exactly what the MLS is. If we could abolish the JD in favor of just that, I'd be in favor. Even if tuition were the same as now, it'd be a third the cost.
Legal training in the US is a farce. Those who say that one year of law school should be enough don't usually mean that people should be licensed as lawyers right after Contracts and Torts; most of them mean that there should be basic training in legal fundamentals followed by a period of practical training by people who know what they're doing, which category excludes the vast majority of law professors.
DeleteOld Guy is of the view that at least two-thirds of lawyers are shitty. Even at appellate courts, the quality of the legal work is often atrocious. Old Guy recently had to argue against an idiot of a so-called lawyer who seriously maintained that only her side should be allowed to adduce evidence at trial. Laypeople know better than that. (The judge, incidentally, decided in Old Guy's favor.) Another dolt of a "lawyer" wrote "his and I's" in an affidavit. Old Guy thought that even two-year-olds tended to know the word my. And the affidavit was full of invective, conclusions, speculation, opinion—just about everything but evidence.
Those are only a couple of examples from the past few days. Old Guy could regale you with hundreds of stories of the utter lousiness of lawyers and judges. It has come to the point that Old Guy is pleasantly surprised to encounter a lawyer who is capable, intelligent, honest, and congenial. These do exist, and they're not exactly rare, but they certainly are in the minority. Maybe 20% of the bar should be kept; the rest should be sent to clean toilets at Cooley. And that figure of 20% is probably generous.
So Old Guy is sympathetic to the notion that legal training should include a practical element, as it does in many countries (Germany, for instance; even Canada, practically the fifty-first state, requires a sort of apprenticeship known as articling). He doesn't agree that a single year of academic work is enough, but he does agree that the predominance of elective courses in the second and third years reveals the shabbiness of the legal curriculum: we can hardly imagine giving medical students the option of passing up Histology in favor of Medicine & Popular Culture. One gets the impression that there is really only one year of general-purpose material, everything else being left to the student's whims. Old Guy would raise standards and raise demands. Perhaps law school can be shortened, with a period of practical training to follow (after the medical model); but Old Guy would let far fewer people in and would also impose far more exigent requirements for admission to the profession.
https://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=312885
ReplyDeleteCan you believe this crap TLS is now allowing to be published?
Yes. Despite calling itself "Top Law Schools", it seems to feature toilets and über-toilets.
DeleteIn this person's day (a dozen or so years ago), the three über-toilets that made up the InfiLaw chain had more than a thousand students each in their entering classes. What if it's true that one person, or even more, eventually managed to make a financial success out of an InfiLaw degree? This person (I'll say "he" for simplicity's sake) admits that many students didn't find a job in law. In addition, he got discounts that made law school almost free, which means that he was near the top of the entering class. Let's just say that his experience was far from typical.
Note the loser's mentality that was commonplace at his school: hanging out at the beach, using drugs, and otherwise neglecting one's studies. (Apparently this person went to Florida Coastal, for he refers to the beach, and neither Arizona Summit nor Charlotte was near a beach.) That's typical of the worst students.
All three InfiLaw über-toilets, and InfiLaw itself, have gone tits up. They're extinct. As I recall, all three of them ran into big trouble with the regulatory authorities, notably because they were preying on lousy students and were yielding truly awful outcomes. There are loads of schools of the same piss-poor calibre, all of them very much to be avoided.
The hapless public doesn't understand the problems caused by unqualified or underqualified attorneys. Alas, some of them are clever enough to get elected as judges. When there are no appreciable standards--academic or behavioral--for entry into the legal profession, we end up with shit like this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scjc.texas.gov/media/46406/BakerResignation.pdf
And he was even on the judicial committee. Foxes guarding the henhouse…
DeleteSo my secretary (a walking mess) tells me her daughter wants to go to law school to become a “commercial real estate” lawyer. Is that a large practice area or difficult to get into? My speciality is IP law.
ReplyDeleteThe kid is probably going to struggle to hit 150 on the LSAT, but will still get into my local uber-toilet. Her daddy has the (illicit!) means to pay her tuition.
There’s nothing I can do. I already tried to very gently talk her out of it and to focus on a substantive career, but people think they’re special. They think the path to riches goes through law school. There is an endless supply of suckers.
Is father Tony Soprano lol!?
DeleteNot many areas of legal practice nowadays are short of lawyers. I'm tempted to say that no area is, but that would be a bit too bold: maybe there's a little town somewhere in which a lad or lass o' pairts with start-up funds can still make a go of it. Don't ask me where.
DeleteThe fact remains that there is roughly one entry-level job for every two new graduates. Why the hell should your secretary's glassy-eyed über-toileteer make it into that top half when she's slated for the bottom half on the LSAT? Are her parents—an incompetent secretary and a criminal—going to have connections in the legal realm?
Commercial real estate actually does exist as a practice area, unlike Talmudic dolphin-saving law and critical-pluralist aerospace law and international hip-hop law and any other bullshit fantasy that the scamsters are purveying. But it's hardly specialized. Old Guy, who has done just about everything, has advised on commercial leases and other transactions in commercial land. Anyone with a solid understanding of law—granted, that rules out most lawyers—should be able to do it.
A few decades ago, people tended to be more realistic about their vocational options. Inferior students were unlikely to consider becoming lawyers, and they would be discouraged if they did: "Sorry, but you just don't have the grades for a bachelor's degree, let alone law school." It was understood that not everyone was suited for every type of work. Nowadays, however, just about everyone is urged to go to university, and anyone who manages to buy a degree will be set upon by law-school scamsters.
I'm Anon at 5:22.
DeleteHahaha. Yes, I suppose he is Tony Soprano. (The dad deals drugs as a side hustle.)
I don't think this snowflake is being realistic, She is very young and naïve. Her parents do rent properties and could maybe give her a leg up, but it's not like they have a vast set of connections. There are many, many competent and experienced lawyers here who can do real estate law. And as Old Guy points out, it's not that specialized.
Screw it, She'll just have to learn. I did my best.
"Commercial real estate". . .she didn't come up with that on her own. That means that the scam law school is pretending it has an amazing program in commercial real estate, and there are great job opportunities, probably starting at over $150K per year for its graduates in that field! And, sadly, she fell for that due to "confirmation bias" aka wishful thinking, she is believing what she wants to believe. For the most part, smart people stopped going to law school a long time ago. It's just peddling a useless degree to gullible rubes at this point, like a sleazy carnival barker.
DeleteWhich brings up a question: with so many TTTTs, does anyone get rejected after applying to law school, as in total failure to get accepted at every terrible law school? It seems the answer is "no" as there is a place for everyone in some law school somewhere. Cooley, as an example, had an acceptance rate of over 86% in 2020; would love to see the applications of the hapless 14% rejected(who no doubt got into another TTTT somewhere).
DeleteA lot of the people who are "rejected" from über-toilets like Cooley have submitted incomplete applications.
DeleteYears ago we reported that the faux-prestigious Univershitty of Texas had admitted people with LSAT scores as low as 128. There must be people who don't get in anywhere, either because they set their sights too high (I knew someone with a score deep in the 130s who insisted that she would settle for nothing but Yale) or because they really are so appallingly bad that even the stinkiest über-toilets won't take them. Still, an acceptance rate in excess of 86% is close to open enrollment.
Yep, rejections at really crappy schools are often applications that were so appallingly bad it's laughable. I've seen people literally apply to law schools not even knowing you're supposed to go to college first and I'm sure they count that as a rejection.
DeleteAnother thing that happens is known as a "yield protect" rejection. This is when someone with scores way too GOOD for your school applies and you reject them because you know there's no way they'd accept your offer of admission and they don't want to drive down yield rates.
Still another nefarious technique used by schools a little better than Cooley is to give fee waivers to and invite apps from people they know they'd never actually admit in a million years. More people they reject = lower acceptance rate = higher USNWR rank.
OG, you mentioned applicants with LSAT's as low as 128 getting admitted to the Univers(h)it(t)y of Texas law school. You could confidently bet your last dollar that those persons fit into one of the following two categories: 1. Applicants who fit special demographics that helped gratify the school's fetish for inclusivity/diversity, or, 2. Well-connected individuals i.e. relatives of prominent politicians, bit donors, or the like.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago before the big national college admissions scandal came out, we had our own brouhaha in Texas about undergraduate admissions to UT Austin. It came out that applicants with SAT and ACT scores below the 20th percentile were being admitted via a "special" admissions process reserved for those with the right connections. UT Austin automatically accepts any applicants who have a GPA in the top 10 percent of their high school class. So, after the jocks, that leaves no spots for others, including kids who went to private schools with rigorous academic programs, but did not get into to the top 10 percent. That means that these dumb-as-dirt but well-heeled kids who went around the process bumped qualified applicants from being considered for admission.
It's just another example of how depraved and corrupt higher education in our country has become. The whole system and most of the institutions that participate need to be dismantled.
Yes, the ones with LSAT scores of 128 and the like who got into the Univershitty of Texas were the scions of prominent people.
DeleteThe so-called élite undergraduate programs—Harvard, Yale, and the like—are notorious for their "legacy" admissions of the children or other relatives of alumni. But even state-run universities have long since jumped on the "legacy" bandwagon. A couple of years ago, when a bunch of people were prosecuted for getting their little darlings into university through bribery, the prosecutor drew a distinction between that tactic and the supposedly commendable one of donating huge sums to the university. Strikes me that a "donation" with strings attached is itself a bribe.
You're quite right about the need to dismantle the whole damn ejookayshunal monstrosity.
The distinction is who you bribe. If you bribe the university itself, no problem. But if you bribe an INDIVIDUAL at the university, such as a coach of an obscure sport who then falsely tells his employer that you're a recruit when you're not, that is where the fraud occurs.
DeleteMorally it seems like a bribe either way but legally, this makes sense. The individual person being bribed is selling something he does not own. He has the authority to get students admitted, but only if they're sports recruits. So abusing that authority is no different than stealing cash from the till. But the university itself has every right to change its admission standards for a price, it's just that obviously that price is much higher than what some sports coach might be willing to take so the resort to fraud: The illegal bribe is cheaper than the legal one.
What's weirder to me is why this kind of thing is worth limited prosecution resources. They could've easily said OK fine fire your employee or sue him or whatever this is not worth spending prosecutorial resources on. But it is worth it, because they know it'll get newspaper interest. Newsworthiness as criteria for prosecutorial discretion. The media truly is the fourth branch of government.