Brooklyn Law School Dean Nicholas Allard writes smug and jokey law review article bragging about how he refused to allow a nine-year-old girl to have a pet dog.

Last November, if you recall, Brooklyn Law School [BLS] Dean Nicholas Allard wrote a letter to Erica Moeser, President of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, imperiously demanding that Moeser provide a "sincere apology" for her "not only surprisingly defensive, but offensive" comment that the decline in bar passage rates was attributable to less able law grads, and also demanding that Moeser provide a "complete explanation" of her motives and timing.

 

In his letter to Moeser, which he cc’d to every other law school Dean, Allard instructed Moeser that there had to be a problem with the integrity and fairness of the bar exam when "more than a small number" do not pass since "graduating from an ABA accredited law school requires intelligence and hard work." Allard did not mention, in his pompous rebuke, that the 25^th percentile LSAT score of incoming Brooklyn law students has declined by nine points between 2010 and 2014, prima facie evidence from his own institution that Moeser’s assessment was correct.

 

At the time, Allard’s letter to Moeser struck me in tone and substance as a thuggish attempt to deflect well-deserved blame from himself and fellow law deans by trying to bully and humiliate Moeser for the crime of stating the very, very obvious. However, Allard has a gentler and more personable side, which he exhibits in his recent boosterish law review article "A Dean Grows in Brooklyn," 46 University of Toledo Law Review 273 (2015). This light-hearted article about his first couple of years as Dean is filled with cutesy witticisms and mildly self-deprecating little vignettes meant to depict BLS as an upbeat, diverse, and tight-knit community of "thinkers, doers, leaders, and motivated bright students." Dean Grows, at 275. See e.g. Id. at 277 ("While pizza may seem like the great unifying force at the Law School, there are other common factors: namely their pride in their law school."); Id. at 275 ("Law schools are places of unbridled energy, intellectual curiosity, and unwavering purpose, preparing leaders in law, government, commerce, and education"); Id., n.20 at 288 ("Oprah Winfrey once told me to stop my name-dropping").

Consider the following anecdote from the article in light of Allard’s conflict with Moeser. It seems that Allard and a law student were chatting in an elevator the day before the bar exam. The student said that there was still "so much I still don’t know," but that she would nonetheless "just handle it and wing it if need be." Id., n.9 at 279. Allard supposedly replied, "I could not be prouder of you if you knew all the material. You are ready!" Id. The student later effusively thanked Allard for giving her the confidence she needed. Id.

 

Granted, the day before the bar exam is a little late to say "You are doing it wrong," but did Allard really find her can-do attitude to be as praiseworthy as actually learning the law? I suppose if Allard had had an extra few seconds in that elevator he could have added some additional confidence-building bullshit, such as: "And if you fail the bar, I will personally admonish the chief bar examiner that the test she administers must be terribly flawed in that it did not reward your intrepid winging.

Allard's article drips with accolades for the quality and commitment of the BLS faculty, but I was drawn to the paragraph where Allard gently teases the lawprofs for throwing themselves drinking parties in the middle of the day. He states, "What other group of people will use words like oeuvre a half dozen times in a single faculty meeting, talking about a number of different agenda items? I never even knew that oeuvre was word you said out loud! And of all the different jobs I’ve had, I’ve never worked with anybody who throws an off-site going away party during the week at four in the afternoon!. . . Who has a party at 4 p.m.? You gotta love it!" Id. at 279.

Yes, you gotta. Nothing fills my heart with love like the thought of six-figure-salaried law faculty at a trap school with an appalling job placement record and a declining bar passage rate toasting their oeuvres and slurping down cocktails at off-site parties held during work hours.

Something Fishy at the University of Tulsa School of Law.

"Whether or not any of these "harpoons" find their marks in the students’ minds is a matter of some luck as well as skill (or so I tell myself). . ."-- University of Tulsa Law Prof. Tamara Piety.

Why should someone enroll at 82nd-ranked University of Tulsa School of Law, where students graduate with an average interest-accruing debt load of $100,000, not counting undergraduate debt? Because at Tulsa, as at no other law school, the law student will read a chapter from Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick in Civil Procedure class-- specifically Chapter 89, "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish." This is due to the inspired pedagogy of University of Tulsa law professor Tamara Piety. Through Ishmael's brief discourse on aquatic fair game and imperialism, the Tulsa legal fledglings will learn one of the most profound secrets of our profession, namely that [lock the doors, draw the shades, send the children to their rooms, speak in shocked whispers] the law is often fashioned, interpreted, and applied to favor the powerful.

Naturally, Professor Piety wrote a law review article extolling the merits of her innovative class assignment. See Something Fishy: Or Why I Make My Students Read Fast Fish And Loose Fish, 29 VT. L. REV. 33 (2004). She also scored a trip to New York City to give a presentation on the article at a "Law, Culture & Humanities" conference. (See Piety's CV, Item No. 72 under "Presentations/Conferences). No wonder Professor Piety holds such a lofty opinion of "the utility of [legal] scholarship." (See here and here). Indeed, not only is this particular article useful, but its  fortunate readers, probably consisting mostly of other law professors, will surely take sympathetic enjoyment in the droll little wisecracks of a much put-upon legal scholar trying to drag her chowderheaded students into the light.

In the article, Piety mocks the stupidity of her students, noting that they often fail to realize that Melville meant "fast" in the sense of "fastened," rather than in the sense of "speedy." See e.g. Something Fishy at 37 ("Alas, the students come to us with little refinement in the use of their principal tool—the language. Thus, they greet this reading with the misconception that it has something to do with fish racing or racing fish."); Id. at 37 ("[A]lthough they might well think "racy fish" if they thought of yet another alternative for "fast" and "loose""). 

However, Piety does not mention that part of the problem might be that her institution, the University of Tulsa, accepts students with appallingly mediocre scores on the LSAT-- a test which, for all its faults, provides an assessment of reading comprehension and logic. Tulsa's most recent entering class had a median LSAT of 154 and a 25th percentile score of 151.

As well, Professor Piety uses the article as a platform to engage in some understandable bragging and name-dropping "by way of background" (Id. at 35) as to the intellectual road that led her to such unorthodoxy in the civil procedure classroom. The story can be summarized as follows: Piety went to Harvard for an LLM to help her get a job in legal academia after reluctantly embracing her professors' belief that she was well-suited to teach law.  At Harvard, she read Moby Dick after hearing it praised by her favorite professor, Cornell West, in a seminar that West co-taught with Roberto Unger. Maybe not the most compelling anecdote, but the Piety still managed to milk it for 2½ pages of her 17-page article.

In "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish," Melville finds universal applicability in the whaler's code: "A fast fish belongs to the party fast to it. A loose fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it." Tamara Piety hopes, and so do I, that her students "may dimly begin to grasp the concepts therein and be enriched thereby." Id. at 34.

For instance, what is an idealistic but naive high school or college kid to a scamming law professor or law dean, but a loose fish? And what to that same scamming law professor or law dean is a class, even one filled with students of "little refinement," but fast fish-- or, shall I say, an all-you-can-eat fish fry?

Below are some quotes from the article, which was written in a style that was clearly intended to be jocular, tongue-in-cheeky, and reminiscent of the ornate prose favored by Melville and his contemporaries. I found it smug, affected, and deeply condescending. Alas, Dear Readers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

1. "After I’ve explained myself more fully in these pages, you, dear Reader, may also come to see my way of looking at it. After all, if clarity of purpose and intelligibility of the materials were the touchstones of "present-ability" of the readings we give to students, we should end by giving them nothing at all! Or so it often seems in reading legal materials (particularly late-twentieth-century statutes). So I am not surprised when I’m reading exams and I come across yet another illustration that some central piece of information in the course has slipped by the student almost in its entirety." Something Fishy at 34.

2. "Thus, one answer to the question, "Why do I make them read this chapter?", is "Because it’s good for them!" Besides, there is always the chance that one or two of them, or perhaps a whole crew, may dimly begin to grasp the concepts therein and be enriched thereby. At least that is my hope." Id.

3. "At any rate, I find there are several pedagogical purposes to be served by this reading, purposes which I set before you so you can judge for yourself. Whether or not any of these "harpoons" find their marks in the students’ minds is a matter of some luck as well as skill (or so I tell myself), so I cannot promise that your results will be any better than mine. But it will enliven the process of this Sisyphean task we call law teaching. At least I have found it so." Id. at 34-35.

4.  Still, when I am reading exams and I come across some reference to how such and such agrees with "the rule of fast fish and loose fish" or why Melville would "hold" such and such, I feel no special remorse that I’ve burdened them with some reading that they obviously didn’t understand. Such observations tend to join with many others of a similar ilk, drawn from the more traditional materials, in a veritable "school" of malapropisms and misstatements with which exams are generally filled."  Id. at 34.

5.  "It so happened that some years after graduating from law school I came around to the belief offered by my professors, and promptly ignored by me at the time (in the time-honored tradition of youth), that I might, after all, like teaching law. . . I took the plunge and found myself in amongst a school of young strivers known as Harvard Law School. What exhilaration! What terror! Yet despite the many moments of self-doubt and self-examination (which I discovered I shared with most of my young colleagues), it was thrilling. Just the tonic to blow the cobwebs from the brains and banish morbid thoughts! A bracing intellectual breeze blows there at all times and if you are standing in it you can’t help but be swept up. And I was. Gladly. One particular breeze, hurricane more like, was the venerable Cornell West, from whom I took a class called "American Democracy...In this course, West was wont to refer to Melville as the "greatest American author" and Moby Dick as a "masterpiece." Id. at 35-36.

6. "Alas, the students come to us with little refinement in the use of their principal tool—the language. Thus, they greet this reading with the misconception that it has something to do with fish racing or racing fish, (although they might well think "racy fish" if they thought of yet another alternative for "fast" and "loose"). Id. at 37.

7. "One of the first challenges for my students in grasping the meaning of this reading is a seemingly trivial one at first glance, but upon closer inspection is revealed as a harbinger of a key skill to be learned—the enlargement of one’s vocabulary and the necessity, in this pursuit, of looking things up!" Id. at 37.

8. "However, despite their general belief that the law professor’s job is to mystify not to clarify, I agree that I do want to shed light on the subject for my students. However, I also view it as my responsibility to challenge them, to push them to, and then past, what they previously thought were their intellectual limits."  Id. at 34.

 

A Personal Story

It has been ten years since I graduated from law school and have been working in my "JD-Advantage" job.  I am nothing but grateful that I managed to stay employed during the Great Recession and its on-going aftermath, to be sure, given my seemingly precarious status as an early-40s Gen-Xer with the attendant responsibilities of a mortgage and family.  However, to point to law school as a ringing endorsement for my "success" is premature at best, and largely in spite of law school at the worst.  Of course, by going to a quad-T law school I did myself in to some degree, but those shiny brochures and smiling ScamDeans certainly told another tale about student outcomes even then, as we all know.

If you have followed my posts, you know that I used to be an engineer prior to law school.  I was school-debt-free, and making around $50k back on-or-about 1995, with reasonable yearly raises.  As you will see, my law school education dumped on a lot of debt with no real uptick in my starting salary, and there is nothing to suggest that my progression in my old career would have been worse.  If nothing else, I would still be education-debt-free, at a very reasonable salary, with no missed opportunity costs.

When I was hired into my JD-Advantage job, after extensive networking, researching, and informational interviews, I stared out at (wait for it) $55k.  In 2005.  While $55k is nothing to sneeze at given the deplorable outcomes for many JD graduates, my law degree did not catapult me forward as the ScamDeans and shiny brochures would suggest...in fact, it slammed my butt back ten years to 1995, plus debt.  I thought that shiny JD was supposed to be remunerative and versatile...?  

Anyway, when I graduated in 2005, my law school debt stood approximately as follows (more below the fold):

Federal: $71,000.00 at 2.65%, 30 yr. graduated

Private 1: $16,000.00 at 4.82%, 15 yr.

Private 2: $5,000.00         at 2.33%, 12 yr.

Private 3: $42,500.00 at 3.00% (approx.), 15 yr.

Total $134,500.00

Indiana Tech can't even be given away

Indiana Tech Law School had great expectations. Two years ago, before the fateful opening of its doors, it confidently charged a $50 application fee, which it generously reduced to $25 for those single-minded centurions who signed up for its binding "early admissions" scheme. In the sugar-plum visions of soon-to-be-former founding dean Alexander, that glorious Harvard on the Wabash would open with a hundred students and a median LSAT score placing it third among the Hoosier State's five law schools.


Alas! not even thirty students showed up, and their median LSAT score came in ten calamitous points lower than Alexander's pie-in-the-sky prognostication. Changes were in order. Out went the application fee. In came numbers-based "scholarships" advertised by spam. Out went the dean. In came a series of specialties, among them "global leadership", for the best damn law students in Allen County.


In year 2, under the masterly interim leadership of André Douglas Pond Cummings (who during a Mormon mission reportedly rechristened himself "Dougie Fresh", with or without the capital letters), Indiana Tech drew roughly the same number of incoming students. It nonetheless soldiered on, confident of getting accreditation.


But, woe! this time the ABA withheld its seal (rubber stamp?) of approval. Now those intrepid centurions of Indiana Tech's inaugural class, resplendent in their rented orange-yellow polyester caps and gowns, may not even be allowed to write the bar exams in Indiana, never mind any other jurisdiction. And who is going to pay $30k per year in tuition for a school that couldn't even get provisional accreditation?


Desperate times call for desperate measures. And the raffling off of a "scholarship" to someone who had not even applied was not nearly desperate enough. With a new scam-dean to open year 3, Indiana Tech proved its vaunted innovative spirit by eliminating tuition. Yes, this year anyone enterprising enough to attend Indiana Tech won't spend a sou for the intellectual fellowship of such godlike figures as Dougie Fresh and Lamparello!


Indiana Tech was hoping to draw in twenty first-year students this year. How many people actually enrolled?


Fifteen.


http://www.theindianalawyer.com/indiana-tech-law-school-restarts-accreditation-process-welcomes-zoeller/PARAMS/article/38054


Ladies and gentlemen, you may have the dubious honor of beholding the first stillborn law school of our time. Indiana Tech can't even give itself away. Even if the ABA gives in and accredits Indiana Tech (as it may well do), the toilet's reputation will be indelibly tarnished. Accreditation at this point would be a damp squib. The jilted, passed-over back number of Fort Wayne will never recover.


And, yes, Indiana Tech, we told you so.

More Accurate Infomation, Indeed

In my time monitoring the news reports regarding law schools, I occasionally feel like the entire discourse is an enormous ruse when I see an advocate make a claim that strikes me as strangely absurd. It's almost like Poe's Law for law school discussions - I come to have an honest confusion about whether the speaker is spilling eyebrow-raising earnestness or truly sophisticated parody.

For example, observe this purported quote from Seton Hall's Michael Simkovic:

Providing more accurate information to the public could benefit law schools, but the greatest beneficiaries would be the students whose lives law school can change for the better. For many college graduates, the $30,000 to $60,000 extra per year that they can typically earn with a law degree will mean the difference between living in a safe and clean neighborhood or one that is dangerous and polluted.

For the sake of brevity, I must resist the urge to focus on the premium numbers and the prompted imagery of all those BS/BA holders who are scrounging in the ghetto making what sounds like $20k a year while living out fantasies from The Wire.

It's curious that Simkovic would claim that law schools are somehow victims of public misinformation without an obvious indicator of sarcasm. Up until a few short years ago, law schools regularly profited mightily off media acquiescence and massive information asymmetries. Even now, in the "debate" over law school's general value, the institutional actors have far more media cachet than their struggling graduates, and hardly have clean hands when it comes to accurate public perceptions. Many of those same institutional actors have held postures somewhere between haughty ignorance and defensive criticism when it comes to legal education's most obvious problems. A few of them have aggressively gone after those who dare use their super-lawyer-premium justice-seeker skills against the legal academy.

The loudest voices about having "more accurate information" in legal education have invariably come from outside the academy. And accordingly, the "more accurate information" that has come out has decidedly not benefited the law schools, excepting, perhaps, Simkovic's own unimpeachable, relevant work. It's incredibly difficult to believe that "more accurate information" would, in any possible way, lead to more/higher-quality law school enrollees or else one would think the law schools would open the books with haste whether AALS was splurging on a Ministry of Propaganda or not.

Of course, the AALS could do far more than expend monies on "highly qualified communications professionals" to do "public outreach efforts" in a Fox News-style venture to bring "accurate, informed, and balanced news coverage" to the law school industry.

Instead, AALS could provide a blanket donation to Law School Transparency and pass a resolution that member schools must make their NALP reports pubic. Perhaps, even, the AALS could establish a standard for longitudinal reporting so that researchers like Simkovic would have superior data from which to conclude - for example - that law school is an outstanding investment regardless of any possible variables. Going further, the AALS could have member schools submit their numbers to a third-party audit to give the reporting an official sheen of authenticity for the likely future big firm partners, judges, and premium-savoring others who enroll at Seton Hall.

Or would that be too much publicly available accurate information?

More LSAC Hi-jinks

First off, thank you to our contributors and our commentators for standing tall on the law school scam.  I normally try to pitch my hat in the ring two or three times a month here on OTLSS, and unfortunately work has prevented me from doing my part as much as I would like as of late.  It's a group volunteer effort, and I for one appreciate everyone's participation here during the summer, which can be a time of slow news days to begin with.

LSAC's latest numbers have come out, and they are showing a modest 1.9% drop in applicants for 2014-2015.  This has been heralded in some corners (mostly academic) as the end of the recession, the renewal of the legal profession, and other platitudes from those desperate to believe that needed changes have come.   Perhaps the rate of decline has indeed slowed or even stopped, but that didn't prevent LSAC from playing games with their reported data then and now.

Early this year, I lambasted LSAC for their questionable accounting and charting standards.  As we all know there have been declines in applicants for several years now, and the cartel was looking for any sign, anywhere, that the bleeding was staunched.  Below is my own view of the data, plotting applicants against applications for the last five years.  Amazingly, not only are the r-squared regression values damn near 1.0 each year, apparently you can count on about 6.75 applications per applicant without fail.

Which leads to the disturbing "bump" in the latest applicant chart from LSAC.  Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine, you can see the same chart from the June 2015 timeframe without the bump.  Now, in August 2015, there is a strange bump in the applicant count for BOTH 2014 and 2015 where there was none before for 2014.  Furthermore, as we know the relationship between applicants and applications is linear, where is the consummate "bump" in applications?  Hmmm...nowhere to be seen, and the applications curves are as smooth as a baby's bum.

Or maybe there is a bump in the applications after all...?  I back-calculate approximately 4,500 students in the applicant "bump" that appeared between June and August, and if I use my 6.75x correlation on what appears to be a very small change in applications, I get around 2,200 students, or half of the recently-proclaimed bump.  Close enough?  No real change at all in applications, given the 0.99 correlation value between applicants and applications, so the disconnect between the two LSAC charts remains?  It's hard to tell just looking at the chart with its severely compressed scaling.

August 2015

June 2015

August 2015

In any event, LSAC has already demonstrated a propensity to game the numbers and their charts to suit their own view of the world, and this modest 1.9% decline is overall applicants is not to be trusted, bump or no bump.  LSATs taken continues to decline across the board, and to think that happy days are here again for the Cartel is dubious at best.

Athornia Steele, head of LSAC, described the scambloggers as "wicked witches of the west."  The truth can cut both ways, however.  I submit that anyone who values brains, heart, and courage will find common-cause with the (green-skinned) scambloggers long before joining LSAC's merry traipsing down the yellow-brick road that is no doubt paved with "good intentions"...and hefty, non-dischargable student loans.

Law firm hires exclusively from toilet schools

I have said before that only a dozen or so law schools in the whole US deserve consideration by those who are not independently wealthy (http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.ca/2014/12/guest-post-by-old-guy-which-law-schools.html). I have warned that a degree from a bottom-end law school will effectively exclude its bearer from a decent career in law.

Well, I am wrong. At least one law firm not only hires but even prefers graduates of toilet schools—to the point of refusing to consider their counterparts from Harvard and Yale:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-leitman-bailey/why-we-do-not-hire-law-sc_1_b_7789022.html

Adam Leitman Bailey proclaims, urbi et orbi, that his small New York law firm specializing in real estate will not hire "from the Ivy League [s]chools". (Apparently he uses the term "Ivy League" loosely.) Instead, it recruits "from the top of the classes of the second, third or fourth tier [sic] law schools". These worthies work half time during the semester (those coming from, say, Thomas Jefferson face a rather long commute) or full time during the summer. After graduation, some of them may return to full-time jobs, eventually even partnerships.

An exciting development! At least one employer covets the top-performing students at every Cooley from Maine to California. First "JD advantage", now "toilet advantage"!

Mr. Bailey "admire[s] the top ranking [sic] law schools". So why won't he hire their graduates? "First, the top students from these law schools have no interest in applying for a job at our firm." Ay, there's the rub. Do I taste the characteristic flavor of sour grapes?

Second, from the premise that "many of these law schools either fail to rank their students or do not even grade them at all", Mr. Bailey concludes that "[t]heir students typically have no incentive to get the best grades in their classes" or "to squeeze as much learning as possible out of the law school [sic] experience". It is true that some of the good (NB: not "the best") law schools, including my own, adopt that policy. But so do some toilets. And it does not follow that the students have no incentive to get high grades or to learn as much as they can. Nor does a high class rank from a Cooley, which may well use multiple-choice exams, attest to great learning.

Third, according to Mr. Bailey, "the statistics show that almost every large law firm offers all of the summer associates full time [sic] jobs. In order for the top law firms to attract the brightest students they must also show that in past years all of the candidates received job offers." Sorry, Rip Van Winkle, but none of that is true in 2015. Even at élite academies, many bright students struggle to find work anywhere. They would not idly reject an offer from a top firm just because it had declined to hire a few people back. And white-shoe law firms in recent years have rejected many a summer associate. Some have postponed their entire cohort, deferred or rescinded offers, and even reduced or eliminated their summer-associate program. Of course, former summer associates are also free to decline a job offer in order to work for Mr. Bailey's firm. So Mr. Bailey's argument does not support his refusal to consider students from the good law schools.

Fourth, those students focus their academic attentions on "political theory and international law and classes on capital punishment", whereas Mr. Bailey's firm needs "trial practice, corporations, tax, civil procedure and any real estate and litigation course offered". Really? Civil procedure is part of the curriculum everywhere. And most of the students at the good schools do take some of those other courses. Besides, the presence of a course on the transcript does not prove significant knowledge of the subject, nor does the absence of a course prove ignorance.

And do students at the toilet schools really opt for the meat and potatoes of Mr. Bailey's practice? Unconvinced, I had a look at Indiana Tech's offerings (http://law.indianatech.edu/academics/curriculum/courses/). Real estate is limited to the single course Landlord Tenant Law. Taxation is represented by a single course, Federal Income Tax EPT, that pertains to the taxation of individuals only. On the other hand, Indiana Tech's students enjoy a sprawling smorgasbord of fluffy offerings, including Sports Law, Sexuality and the Law Seminar, numerous courses ostensibly pertaining to global leadership, and, most ridiculously (Dougie Fresh's fingerprints are all over this), Hip Hop and the American Constitution. Indiana Tech also requires six semesters of Foundations of Legal Analysis, at least the last four semesters of which are bar review. Similar candy-ass offerings typify toilets other than Fort Wayne's pride and joy.

To hire those "who have competed for three years for the top grades and at the same time who have learned topics relevant to our real estate [sic—learn to use the hyphen, for Christ's sake] practice", Mr. Bailey pursues the top graduates of toilet schools. Even on his own terms, however, that approach does not work. Top graduates of toilets have not necessarily had to compete: someone in a class full of underperformers will get first place, and outranking those who could not get into a good law school does not attest to a competitive spirit. Nor have those graduates necessarily learned anything relevant to real-estate practice or, for that matter, to legal practice of whatsoever kind. The best shit, after all, is still shit.

Concluding what is obviously a faux-contrarian bid for publicity rather than an appraisal of law schools and their graduates, Mr. Bailey vaunts his firm's "ability to hire the best candidates based purely on merit, not aristocracy". He is right about the largely aristocratic character of the Harvards and the Yales—something that I, one of the relatively few non-aristocrats to graduate from one of those universities, can corroborate. But selecting "purely on merit", however defined, is inconsistent with blanket exclusions—particularly of those graduates whose law schools, despite their faults, at least manage to people their classes with top performers by the measures of GPA and LSAT score. In any event, I would not look for "the best candidates" by scouring the top ranks of Charleston, Appalachian, and Arizona Summit.