Oppressed People of Color named Nancy Leong

I hope I don't get this site in trouble, but I got this leaked (hacked?) email from our quandam friend and law review article champion, Nancy Leong, Professor of Law and specialist in POCNNL studies (People of Color named Nancy Leong). Earlier, she went on record stating that it was a miracle that the "mostly white, male" establishment allowed a "person of color" to publish her devastatingly powerful law review article, Racial Capitalism, which aims to protect POCNNL against the "legal establishment" (which she is, as a POCNNL, not part of). 

Also, she specializing in the most important issue facing us today as law students, attorneys (employed or not), professors, administrators, and the public: the need for more law review articles.

______________________________________________________________________

From: Leong, Nancy (NLeong@law.du.edu)

To: L*****, B**** [censored for privacy reasons]

Subject: Re: Scumbloggers dispute

Greetings & salutations again B****,

I just wanted to know if you are following up on that recent comment (Aug 11, 2012 8:14:41 PM) I wrote defending the need for more law review articles and their importance in modern legal jurisprudence. I gave the scumbloggers hell on that, and I know you agree with me, by default, since you above all know which side our bread is buttered most. I ignored their puerile comments entirely, as we should do whenever it is possible to ignore oppression—I'm not sure what else we can do about it at the moment. Some oppression of POCNNL is to be expected from time to time. 

LSATs administered continues to drop

The number of LSATs administered continues to drop - a good thing for all parties except the law schools.  According to TaxProf, who calls the news "grim," 2013 June LSATs administered is down almost 5% from last year, and Octobers numbers are nearly 11%.

This shows that the least informed law school cohort, the 0L's, are becoming increasingly aware of the bad value that law school has become.  One might've thought that "law school scam" fatigue would have hit major newspapers such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but they have continued to report on it, and law school blogs have continued to thrive.  This, along with word-of-mouth, has led to the increased drop of LSATs administered, which in turns leads to smaller incoming classes at the majority of law schools, which finally leads to law schools taking desperate measures in order to stay afloat.

Despite the drops, most law schools seem to be, at least on the surface, remarkably intact.  There are cracks in the foundation, such as Vermont's law school woes and University of Iowa's tiny first year class, and most recently the New England law school faculty buyouts, but you don't see the mass law professor layoffs or the law school closures that some of us have been expecting.

Stay tuned.

The Brass Ring Is Hollow: An Overview of the Biglaw Mess

Biglaw is in trouble. When law students are wooed by law schools with promises of $160,000, Biglaw is the promised land that provides this bounty. But, the  Biglaw of yesteryear is quickly receding into history. Partners are trying to keep their AmLaw profit per partner numbers up. Many corporate clients are now unwilling to underwrite Biglaw training for new associates at exorbitant prices. As a result, the industry is in a panic. Once venerated firms are folding or desperately pursuing mergers. "Stealth" layoffs are becoming a regular occurrence as partners try to protect their bottom line. Firms are embracing the move of "back office" operations to lower cost cities in flyover country. All of this frenzy is akin to a rhino staggering and struggling after having been shot by a hunter.

The dynamic within law firms is changing, and not for the better. Partnerships are now split between equity and non-equity partners, with the non-equity partners receiving those titles mostly to mollify them into continuing to work under oppressive conditions. For some lawyers, partnership is not even an option. "Staff attorneys" are now a permanent underclass in most firms, doing the scut work that associates and partners feel is beneath them. But Biglaw is no stranger to technological innovation. Document review software is growing increasingly sophisticated and starting to replace contract attorneys at a fraction of the cost. The document review projects that do remain are a race to the bottom, with lower and lower hourly rates as the newly minted attorneys compete with attorneys who have been out of law school anywhere from one to twenty years long. It is a sad state of affairs.

If law school is a scam, Biglaw is its older brother. Equity partners are operating the biggest Ponzi scam in existence today. They make millions of dollars while farming out the actual legal work to lowly associates. Witness the stories of Mayer Brown and Dewey LeBoeuf. In this excellent article, the venality of the partners is on full display. The genteel image of a group of partners sipping scotch and talking eruditely about the law is a far cry from what was going on at Dewey. Just like with the law schools chasing prestige through an improved US News ranking, Dewey wooed partners with multimillion dollar contracts. When the economy began to turn, they put the blinders on and doubled down. More superstar partners were brought in to burnish the firm's image. In the end, the firm went crashing and burning. All of the superstar partners simply packed up and moved on to their next firm, staying one step of the legal industry's destruction.

Law schools need to look at Dewey and make substantive changes to prevent a similar outcome. The student loan well is quickly drying up for some schools, as undergrads are beginning to see through the fog of law school marketing and the profession's self aggrandizing image. It is very likely that some law schools will begin failing in the next few years. People like Brian Leiter are lashing out at anyone willing to tell the truth, hoping against hope that they can impede the bleak future that awaits them in the new world order. The legal education complex is no longer the impenetrable fortress it once was. We have an opportunity to slay the dragon once and for all.

Ghosts

Happy Halloween y'all!

I wanted to ponder the ghostliness of the scamblogger movement because it is a frequent point of contention for boomers and a point of attack for deans and professors.  As we all know, a few professors have tried to "out" scambloggers in an effort to silence them.

The boomer/professor argument generally seems to go something like this: "If you can't sign your name to something, your argument is not legitimate."  They stand by this no matter how excellent the writing and analysis posted by a scamblogger.  It is the classic ad hominem attack of "you're too yellow for me to bother listening to."  It also allows the scammers to avoid direct discussion of the overwhelming facts that have now exposed the law school scam.

Furthermore, stories of "outing" a scamblogger always surface online, and it serves as a warning shot to anyone else who may dare to cast a stone at the ivory tower.  The parallels to other protest movements and battles between the classes throughout history cannot be clearer.  The rich professors desperately try to cling to their wealth and power and to snuff out any prole who gets out of line.

Of course, it also turns those professors into some of the most know and most hated people on the law school scam circuit (see Prof. Leiter).  For some, it becomes the most defining characteristic of their online presence.

Needless to say, when a professor values knowing the identity of a critic over the content of his criticism, this obsession exposes the shallowness of her understanding of the problems facing law schools and the legal profession.  The idea that the identity of a writer is more important than what he writes has long plagued academia.  Whether it be a liberal arts paper or a work of literary fiction -- or a law review article -- most professors judge quality based on the CV of the author and not based on what she says.  So, it makes sense that this logic translates to the online discussions about the major problems associated with law schools and the legal profession.

Interestingly, these professors seem to have total ignorance (or feigned ignorance) toward the role that anonymous dissent has played in the development of democracies around the world, including here in America.  They also discount the reasons behind the anonymity of the majority of scambloggers, again feigning ignorance toward the risks that many of us take by perpetuating the message that law school is a scam.

Those scambloggers who are not lucky enough to be self-employed or protected by tenure face other retribution by old-school boomers and plain old nasty bosses who have financial ties to the law school industrial complex.  Also, scambloggers may face retribution by judges, bar association members, and a number of other people who just want to maintain the status quo.  While I often think that many people over-estimate the fear of retribution -- it is a legitimate fear.  (Then again, I say, "fear not!"  There isn't much more that the powers-that-be can do to screw us further.)

So, on this Halloween, I wish to acknowledge all of the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins of the scamblog movement by saying, well, "trick-or-treat!"  The free-falling applications and the zombie-schools -- those that should be dead already but still lumber along -- are attributable in large part to scambloggers and the plaintiffs and lawyers associated with the highly-publicized scam-suits.

Confucius say: Odds long, debt high

Did you hear the Story of the Greedy PigLaw partners who cannibalized their own firm until it was yesterday's dinner?

It may seem of academic interest only to inquire about one particular firm's demise, but it reflects what the legal profession is, at both its best (as in money) and worst (as in behavior). At one point, while facing disaster and bankruptcy, the firm signed a golden parachute contract with one rainmaking partner to give him 8 million (USD) in salary a year and 60 million dollars in case of default (i.e. the firm removes him or falls to pay his salary). 60 as in sixty, you IBR-debt slave suckers who are happy if you get a 0.25% discount on your student loan interest rates if you sign up for auto-debit.

What strikes me is not just a problem with the "bifurcated distribution", where successful law grads make millions but others cannot get a job selling apples for a nickle in Times Square, but that even those successful dudes face failure (although the 60 mill guy will be fine: he landed another big firm gig). Dewey brutalized its non-rainmaking partners and associates--they were the last to get paid (or not paid). Many lost their jobs and not all managed to stay employed in PigLaw.

Have it "Your Way" at Chicago-Kent

OK, here's your order!  Would you like to Super-size your JD with a Specialization in Entertainment Law or Space Law?

Sigh.  What to say, what to say.  Let's just launch right in, shall we?

Chicago-Kent's new 1L Your Way program, debuting next fall, permits new students to defer selected first-year course work to a subsequent year in favor of taking an upper-division elective, such as patent law or business organizations. This option is designed for first-year students with defined practice goals. For example, students who plan to practice intellectual property law or corporate law often begin law school with that goal in mind.

"We're providing new opportunities for students who want to hit the ground running," said Dean Harold J. Krent. "Those of our students who know that they want to concentrate in a particular practice area are eager to start specializing in the first year, and the summer job market often rewards them for doing so."

http://www.kentlaw.iit.edu/news/2013/announcing-1l-your-way-specialization-program

"Your Way?"  Ah, the fast-food drive-thru analogies abound.  This has been touched on before:

We all knew it would come to this eventually. The legal profession — once reserved for studious minds who diligently ponder the most complex moral, ethical, and legal issues of the day — has been reduced to a collection of short-order cooks, who whip up documents instead of eggs and toast. Actually, that change probably happened many years ago. Generations ago, even. But there is something visual striking about the new Connecticut offices of the Kocian Law Firm. The firm is operating out of an old Kenny Rogers Roasters building. The Kocian lawyers are keeping the drive-thru window — and they’re using it as an easy and efficient way to exchange documents and quick advice with their clients. 

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/10/the-inevitable-future-of-the-legal-profession-connecticut-firms-open-drive-thru-law-firm/

Our own Law School Truth Center has a thing or two to say about this as well:

Ah, metro east St. Louis: drive by shootings AND drive by criminal defending. If there's one thing the thugs of East St. Louis need, it's to shout about their sexual assault case into a static-heavy mic. If only someone would come up with some sort of portable communication device that could allow people to set appointments more conveniently; until then, he's got the market for convenience covered. Clients will no doubt take you seriously running a law practice out of an abandoned bank. 

http://lawschoolscam.com/blog/index.php?/archives/84-Oh,-The-Places-Lemmings-Can-Go-Drive-Thru-Law-Practice.html

Anyway, back to having it "Your Way."  Sounds great in principle, but the proposed pay-off (specialization translates to 1L summer opportunity and eventual jobs) remains to be seen.

To begin with, law schools have offered "specializations" for quite some time now, and I think most graduates would say that they fall flat. Many, many JDs have "IP Specialization" or "Business Law Specialization" or "ADR Specialization" or "Environmental Law Specialization" gold stars on their diplomas, and, well, the flood gates of opportunity did not exactly throw themselves open. Look at the dismal employment stats and skewed, bi-modal income distributions, for example. 

Additionally, law schools have had 2L/3L clinics for years, which are touted as the experiential "workhorse" compared to the typical 1L core class or 2L upper-level class.  While some practical experience is certainly a good idea, many JDs have complained about how little time they actually get to do substantive work through the clinics. The fact that 90 credit hours get in the way of practical experience is certainly a part of this difficulty, but also the sheer volume of students seeking these opportunities (*cough* *cough* JD overproduction *cough* *cough* open enrollment *cough* *cough*) naturally limits what any one student gets to do. Here's hoping the law schools have spent some time reviewing and seriously updating this angle. 

Finally, the proposal stands to create some "odd duck" 1Ls compared to the rest of the herd. Firms already know students don't know anything - they don't hire you based on your "knowledge" anyway. They hire your for (1) pedigree, (2) connections, and (3) grades, among other things. Shifting classes around, like rearranging chairs on the Titanic, does not do much to affect an outcome that really has nothing to do with straight-up academics or practice-readiness in the first place. Plus, the hiring lawyers already went through the "classical" legal education process themselves, and now you as the Your-Way student come to the table with a different set of credentials. I can hear it now - "Wait, you've taken a class on Business Organizations, but not on Contracts or Property? How does that work?" As a 2L, when "real" summer associate opportunities "open up," (or so I was told but never saw, personally), the classes and experiences that students have obtained have equalized out, anyway.

Plus, who got legal jobs their 1L summer, anyway?  I mean, connected people, yes, but your average Joe rising 2L?  The 1Ls I knew took summer classes, studied abroad, or did something else to fill their time.  No one I contacted, be they paying gigs or even externships, even wanted to look at you unless your were a 2L, and this was the going advice at the time. 

As a side note, it will be interesting to see what classic 1L classes get pushed back to later years in favor of more "practical" classes under Your-Way-type programs (my personal prediction is Con Law - sorry, all you civil-rights and free-speech lovin' LawProfs, but those are the breaks when it comes to what the majority of firms deal with and bill for). 

Overall, while "Having it Your Way" may be a nice idea, it comes (1) too, too late, and (2) can't do enough on its own. The issue is JOBS, folks, and no amount of "practice readiness" changes the legal market or undos decades of JD overproduction. A related issue is PRICE, folks, as these JDs need to service huge amounts of debt thanks to this so-called practice-readiness that has been bestowed upon them. If half as many practice-ready JDs were produced at half the cost, for example, then graduates could afford to pursue less-remunerative but more available opportunities early on in their careers. It's a balance. 

Oh, but wait, IBR, say the ScamDeans. Right. I'm sure the American Taxpayer just loves the idea of bailing out billions of dollars worth of student loans that are going essentially unpaid, to produce more practice-ready JDs than the market needs. I see what you did there with your "ethics" and "professionalism." 

This practice-ready canard is perhaps well-meant, but it is certainly well-played, make no mistake. False hope will draw many students (and their sweet, sweet federal student loan dollars) into the fold. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Law School Scam is Like a Highway to Dreamland: An annotated fictional tribute to Law Prof. Nancy Leong's scholarshit article: "The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream," 64 Fla L.Rev. 305 (2012).

Nancy Leong, JD 2006, is a Professor of Law at the University of Denver School of Law, where she teaches Criminal Procedure, in spite of having zero background as a criminal law practitioner and near-zero experience in legal practice of any sort. Last year, Leong stunned the criminal bar with her watershed law review article: "The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream," 64 Fla L.Rev. 305 (2012), asserting, in 48 closely reasoned pages, that caselaw analyzing the constitutionality of traffic stops is boring compared to movies and songs that reflect the "American dream" via an open road motif.

http://www.floridalawreview.com/2012/nancy-leong-the-open-road-and-the-traffic-stop-narratives-and-counter-narratives-of-the-american-dream/

________________________________________________________

Scene: A dorm room or an off-campus apartment. Snowflake and Lemming, two procrastinating and stoned-out-of-their-minds 1Ls of a particularly stupid and egotistical variety are pondering the boringness of the law and what it all means.

Snowflake: Dude, reading this caselaw is, like, sooooooo boring. [1]

Lemming: Yeah, I would much rather, you know, watch movies. [2]

Snowflake: What kind of movies?

Lemming: I don’t know. Maybe Zombieland. [3]

Snowflake: That is exactly what I am saying. Caselaw is boring. [4] Compared to movies like Zombieland or The Good Girl. [5] You watch those movies, you groove on the transcendent motif of the open road. But you read caselaw and all you get is a bunch of old judges writing mundane stuff about some traffic stop. [6] Road movies are enjoyable, but Fourth Amendment caselaw is dull. Just like how the open road is cool, but traffic stops are a drag. [7]

Lemming: The Good Girl? Dude, that was a chick flick.

Snowflake: I found it very touching. Not just movies. I’d rather listen to songs by musicians such as Jon Bon Jovi, [8] Springsteen, LL Cool J, and Ice Cube. Music makes me dream extravagant dreams. [9] Dreams about the American dream. [10]

Lemming: What we just said, I think it is very insightful.

Snowflake: Yeah. They should pay us to teach law, not charge us to study it. We could, you know, write down what we just said and they could publish it in a law review or something. Our insights. They are scholarly. Doing scholarship is why law professors make all that money. [11] Also, it is what makes them such great teachers. [12] Of course, we would have to make our article sound, you know, professorial or something.

Lemming (giggling): Pompously professorial.

Snowflake: Yeah, we would have to use words like "narrative" and "counternarrative."

Lemming: How many times would we say "narrative"?

Snowflake (thinking grandly, the psychoactive effects of the drug really kicking in): I bet we could use the word "narrative" 164 times in a single 48 page article! [13] And, of course, we couldn’t just say that caselaw is boring, we would have to refer to it as "sterile texts,"" "that dry medium," "banal," "narrow," "mundane," "focused on minutiae," "a rude awakening from the sweet American dream" "no poetry in these narratives," "notable for [its] depressing sameness," "stark," "a dystopian counter-narrative to the joyous parable of the open road," "a sober counter-narrative to the alluring saga of the open road," and "read[s] like the documentation of an audit." [14]

And let’s refer to movies and songs featuring the open road as "iconic cultural texts" and "our most exalted cultural texts" and "fables of freedom" and "joyful liberated narrative[s] and "alluring saga[s]" at the "heart of the American dream," occupying "a revered place in our collective imagination," and conveying "cultural meaning. . .etched into our deepest consciousness"--a "soundtrack for our obsession with the road," "standing for the "possibility of possibility itself." [15] Also our readers will appreciate it if we use Jack Kerouac to ask some ironically rhetorical question-- you know, like, would he have written On the Road if some cop had pulled him over for an obstructed windshield? [16]

Lemming (sadly): You have to use footnotes in academic writing. Footnotes are a drag.

Snowflake: But we could cite ourselves in the footnotes. You know, cite to what we think of the movie Crash or something.

Lemming: I found it didactic and full of itself.

Snowflake: Then we could say that in a footnote! [17]

Lemming: It will be great to be a law professor. All that money. Plenty of free time to get high.

Snowflake: And they would pay us to present our findings to scholarly conferences. Scholarly conferences in posh seaside resorts in Hawaii, Amelia Island, and Hampton Head. [18]

Lemming: That will be sweet. All that talk about a crisis in legal education is baloney. A JD is surely the open road to the American dream. [19]

_________________________________________________________
footnotes:

[1] Nancy Leong, "The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream," 64 Fla L.Rev. 305, 328 (2012) ("These dry judicial narratives contrast starkly with the joyful, liberated narrative of the open road that we find in our most exalted cultural texts.")

[2] Open Road at 324-325 ("In addition to the sort of cultural texts in which we find the narrative of the open road, another highly influential chronicle of the traffic stop is the judicial opinion—a cultural text antithetical to our literary and cinematic staples. That dry medium has nothing of the poetry or magic of our best novels and our favorite movies. Rather, the sterile chronology of a typical judicial opinion examining a traffic stop represents a rude awakening from the sweet American dream of the open road.")

[3] Open Road at 314-315 ("Zombieland likewise pays a dark homage to the road’s power to forge human relationships. Set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies, the four remaining humans band together and gradually shed their disagreements, united by their road journey as much as by their determination to survive in the face of a common foe.")

[4] Open Road at 328 ("Judicial narratives that begin with a traffic stop are notable for their depressing sameness. There is no poetry in these narratives. They read like the documentation of an audit.")

[5] Open Road at 313 ("Dreams of escape inevitably involve the road—in a literal sense, almost necessarily so. But the road also becomes an inextricable component of the dream itself. In The Good Girl, Jennifer Aniston’s character Justine. . . agonizes over whether to leave her husband. . . Her decision—already weighing on her emotionally—becomes vividly physical as she waits at a traffic light.")

[6] Open Road at 330 ("This clinical evaluation of the content of the traffic stop effectively punctures the uplifting fantasy of the open road. The symbolism of the road as a route to a better life—one free and unencumbered—dissipates in the face of bickering over whether a host of minutiae means that a police officer saw enough or heard enough or knew enough to establish "reasonable suspicion." The American dream has no time for such details; put another way, someone whose fate hangs on those details has no time to chase the American dream.")

[7] Open Road at 334-335 ("The traffic stop, then, disrupts or simply precludes the close interpersonal bonds that the open road facilitates. By interposing the force of the law, the traffic stop tears at the fragile fabric of human relationships and precludes the deep connection so often found in long road journeys.")

[8] Open Road at 317 ("The road leads to the American dream, and it is the American dream. We may choose to reject the mythology, of course, but the cultural meaning remains etched in our deepest consciousness. The most jaded among us still understands exactly what Jon Bon Jovi means when he proclaims, "My heart is like an open highway.")

[9] Open Road at 346 ("Hip-hop texts communicate the imaginative costs imposed by the traffic stop narrative. One such cost is the lowering of standards for what constitutes a good life: those trapped in the traffic stop narrative lose the ability to dream extravagant dreams that transcend the mundane worries of daily existence.")

[10] Open Road at 349 ("Of course, no one—black, white, or otherwise—can ever truly and fully claim the American dream. The infinite potential represented by the open road is truly both infinite and potential. Indeed, part of its appeal is its intractable status as fantasy.")

[11] See Society of Law Teachers 2012-2013 survey of law faculty salaries, http://www.saltlaw.org/userfiles/SALT%20salary%20survey%202013.pdf Note that the salaries listed exclude health care benefits, retirement benefits, dependents’ tuition benefits, domestic partner benefits, travel funding, book allowance, research assistant funding, and summer research and teaching stipends.

[12] See Nancy Leong's comment on this Workplace Prof Blog thread, at Aug 11, 2012 8:14:41 PM: "It seems obvious to me that scholarship contributes in important ways to the quality of teaching. Scholarship requires us to stay current on cutting edge legal issues. It requires us to remain curious, excited about the material that we teach, and intellectually nimble -- and if we ourselves lack these qualities, we stand very little change of inculcating them in our students. . . .Without that broader frame, our students become narrow-minded legal technicians who never pause to think about the normative implications of what they're doing."

[13] Open Road, passim.

[14] Open Road at 307, 324, 325, 328, 329, 341.

[15] Open Road at 307, 312, 317, 328, 341

[16] See Open Road at 331 ("Did Jack Kerouac pause to count how many air fresheners he had? Was he concerned whether his travel plans might appear "consistent" to the reasonable, objective observer? These questions answer themselves.")

[17] Open Road at 133, n123 ("I feel compelled to mention here that I really did not like Crash. I thought it was didactic and full of itself, and obviously Brokeback Mountain (Alberta Film Entertainment et al. 2005) should have won the Academy Award instead...")

[18] Nancy's CV.

[19] Nancy Leong's slop-- or to use her precious language, her "medley" or mélange" (Open Road at 309)-- uses the phrase "American dream" no less than 50 times. George Carlin used it only once, to better effect, in the following quote: "The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."