Pay Us $185,000 and You Too Can Work For A Small Firm

John Marshall To Look For New Dean
Money Quote: “Our graduates have a history of going to small firms, DAs and public defenders’ offices. We don’t have the employment swings that big law schools have because their graduates are focused on more elite firms,” Lynn said.

Law Professor Defends Law Schools; Blames Media, Students, Advisors, Everybody But Himself 

Money Quote: "He starts off by arguing that law schools are not producing more graduates than ever before, even as he concedes that law schools are in fact producing more graduates than ever before in absolute numbers. But, because there are more “people” in the United States and a higher percentage of those people are going to college, he concludes that law schools are producing a lower percentage of graduates, relative to the number of people involved in higher education."

CounterPoint #3: You Could be a Reforming Do-Gooder Regulating Communicator

From the NALP, part of the law school complex, I bring good news for you under-and-un-employed law grads! J.D. advantage jobs are out there for you. They exist. Let's not complain, let's explain.

Apparently, there are countless jobs that let you have an advantage when you possess a solid J.D. The NALP defines J.D. Advantage as 

jobs that do not require bar passage, an active law license, or involve practicing law in the traditional sense. However, in these positions, a JD provides an advantage in obtaining or performing the job. In fact, many graduates view entry-level opportunities with the federal government or in business/industry as a primary goal. There are many law-related positions for which a JD is a significant competitive advantage.

Simkovic and Leiter Are Firing Shots From Their Ivory Tower

Since the execrable paper "The Economic Value of a Law Degree" was publicized, Michael Simkovic and noted anti-reform advocate Brian Leiter have been firing potshots at anyone who dares to post anything negative about the paper.

The list is long, but worth reading through.

The Economic Value of a Law Degree

Money Quote: “A peculiarity of the cyber-ranting about "don't go to law school" is that it never explains, or even seems to care, what happens or would happen to those who forego the JD.”

Brian Tamanaha Says We Should Look at the Below Average Outcomes (And We Did)
Money Quote: “These numbers are pre-tax and pre-tuition.”

Above the Law Needs to Read More
Money Quote: “How profitable varies from person to person.  There are surely a few individuals who do not benefit at all or even do worse.  If we had a way to identify these unlucky people before law school we would encourage them to avoid law school.    Judging from student loan default rates, this is a relatively rare outcome.  Further, income based repayment of loans should substantially mitigate this downside, even as it makes it difficult for us to nail down exactly how much a given person pays for law school. “

Brian Tamanaha’s Straw Men (Part 1): Why we used SIPP data from 1996 to 2011
Money Quote: “Had we used earlier data, it could be difficult to know to what extent changes to our earnings premiums estimates were caused by changes in the real world, and to what extent they were artifacts caused by changes to the SIPP methodology.”

Brian Tamanaha’s Straw Men (Part 2): Who's Cherry Picking?
Money Quote:   To measure the value of a law degree, we must measure earnings premiums, not absolute earnings levels.

Brian Tamanaha’s Straw Men (Part 3): We use better (and more) data than studies Tamanaha praised in his book
Money Quote: “We certainly are not claiming to have uncovered hundreds of years of data on law school earnings premia.  But, ultimately, we are not sure how valuable such a retrospective would be for today's graduate.”

Repetitive (and avoidable) mistakes

Money Chart: As you can see, they only show default rates up to 2010. The default crisis hasn’t even begun yet.

Brian Tamanaha’s Straw Men (Part 4): We would have to be off by 85 percent for our basic conclusion to be incorrect
Money Quote: “We estimate the present value of a law degree at the median as $610,000 as of the start of law school.  This figure is pre-tax and pre-tuition, but includes opportunity costs and financing costs.
In other words, some combination of the student and the federal government could pay up to $610,000 for the law degree and break even.  The government might contribute to the cost through debt forgiveness through Income Based Repayment, or through some other method.”

Reflections on "The Economic Value of a Law Degree" and the Response to It
Money Quote #1: It all reminds me why, as I said long ago, blogs are bad for legal scholarship, since they provide a voice, sometimes--as with the ATL cesspool--a loud voice for people who literally have nothing to say because they have no relevant competence or skill.

Money Quote #2: “We have had a massive downturn in applications to law schools the last three years, primarily as a result of ABA-induced better reporting of employment outcomes and New York Times coverage of the bad job market for new JDs.  That's fine, some of these individuals may have made the correct decision by foregoing law school.  But we've also had an hysterical cyber-reaction by miscreants and charlatans (like Campos), as well as by unemployed law school graduates desperate for someone to blame for the latest crisis of capitalism.  Journalists have generally done a poor job sorting the wheat from the chaff, though there have been honorable exceptions (I think especially of Debra Weiss at the ABA journal).”

I see fear and nervousness through the veil of arrogance and pomposity that Leiter puts up. He knows he will soon be out on the street and is holding on to Simkovic's conclusions like a person holding on to a tree branch to avoid going down a waterfall. Mr. Leiter, the tree branch will eventually break and you will be swept away by change. Trying to resist it will only make you look more foolish than you already do.

Comment on the ABA Task Force Working Paper

Here's the paper:  ABA Task Force Working Paper

Here's my comment:  Dogpoop.

Let's start with a theme that legitimately perturbed me:

The Task Force has resolved these challenges [you "resolved" them?] by structuring the Working Paper as a field manual for people of good faith who wish to improve legal education as a public and private good... 

Moralizing and blaming are no productive.  What is needed instead is a dispassionate and pragmatic examination of the current situation that begins with a presumption of good faith on the part of all participants.... 

For the past five years, participants in the system of legal education have responded to the environmental and structural stresses and challenges with good faith and increasing commitment.

There absolutely is a place for pragmatism and dispassionate evaluation.  But there's also a place for anger and moral outrage, and such is necessary to a proper evaluation.  This situation has caused a lot of real financial pain for thousands of graduates over the last decade (at a minimum - likely more like three decades).  People attended law school wanting to invest three years to have a thirty or forty year career and they wound up carrying the albatross of student loan debt and structural unemployability.  If you REALLY want to "solve" the problem, you have to address the problem, and the problem is that real life people have wound up real life broke and real life miserable because this system failed them.  If there wasn't passion involved, this wouldn't be a credited topic of discussion among the landed gentry.

And on what basis should I presume good faith?  Why isn't there a place for moralizing?  Systemic problems don't arise in a vacuum.  There are good people in this system, but there's clearly exploiters.

We know for a fact that this system has liars in it.  We know that Villanova, Illinois, and Rutgers have committed blameworthy acts.  We know that a claim for fraud against Thomas Jefferson has made it to discovery.  We know that Don Leduc, Larry Mitchell, Stephen Sheppard, Claudio Grossman, Jay Conison, Patrick Hobbs, and others have made ridiculous statements, some on a regular basis.  We know that Indiana Tech sold and built a law school on totally bogus premises.  Where was the good faith in publishing bogus employment and salary statistics, which probably 3/4 of law schools did?  Where is the good faith in dressing down unemployed alumni?

There's no good faith in propaganda, Task Forcers.

ABA Task Force releases Working Paper on the Future of Legal Education

Cross-Posted from TaxProf:

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/08/aba-task-force.html

A quick summary: An ABA Task Force focused on the future of legal education has been studying the crisis featuring legal education and have released a "working paper" that so far serve to introduce their preliminary findings, with the finished product and recommendations to be made a few months from now.

As AboveTheLaw noted, "Essentially, the document says, 'Wow, the scam blogs were totally right.'" http://abovethelaw.com/2013/08/aba-finally-states-the-problem-now-will-they-do-anything-about-it/

For instance, the working paper describes the perverse "Reverse Robin Hood" policy surrounding "merit" scholarships perfectly on page one (I'd copy and paste it but the format isn't conducive to that).

Here is the link to the working paper.  Have a good weekend everybody!

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/professional_responsibility/taskforcecomments/aba_task_force_working_paper_august_2013.authcheckdam.pdf

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."    

Scamsuit Updates

Yesterday, a panel of the Sixth Circuit affirmed Judge Quist's decision to dismiss the lawsuit against Cooley.

You can read the ridiculous opinion:

http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/13a0198p-06.pdf

The panel of judges spend pages on a weird technicality related to Michigan's consumer laws.  Basically, they reason that the students might have a claim if the complaint mentioned that law school affected their personal lives and not just their business interests.  This distinction made at the dismissal stage is a stretch and makes little sense.  Of course, the judges spend the rest of the opinion discussing how unreasonable it was for law students to ever give any credence to anything that the law schools ever said or wrote.  It is written in an eye-rolling tone, like the judges are saying, "Of course the law schools lie about the benefits of a J.D. -- Duh!"

Apparently, thousands of law students across the country are objectively "unreasonable" for relying on the information provided by their federally funded law schools about the benefits of earning a J.D.  The one question that the judges never seem to answer: if the employment and salary data is not important or not a reasonable source of information, why do the schools go to such lengths to manipulate the data and to hide information even in this current era of Law School Transparency and new ABA rules (which some schools still do not comply with because no real consequences exist).  If the employment and salary data are truly irrelevant and unbelievable, why would the schools not just tell the truth about 50% or more of graduates who never work as lawyers?  Obviously, the law schools gain some benefit by misleading their students, otherwise they would not do it.

Even though a few of the other lawsuits have survived, so far, it makes me a little queasy to think that a lawsuit against Cooley cannot survive.  If you read the opinion, the judges recognize that Cooley has an open admission policy, huge class sizes, a one third dropout rate, and all sorts of other factoids that I did not know before but that reinforce the sad joke that is Cooley.