Saturday, January 25, 2014

Review of the ABA Task Force Report: But What About the Lies?

The ABA Task Force on Legal Education has issued what I interpret to be a final report on the state of legal education.  As a good citizen of the legal community (see page 35), I stopped what I was doing immediately to read.

To be fair to the drafters, this report is much better than the earlier one.  For example, it seems more polished on the areas of tuition pricing and student debt, and it seems to better acknowledge the role of criticism.  Moreover, the recommendations are broader, and they have expanded some of the recommendations.  There are still some minor annoyances, like their continued red-herring approach of public goods (which they still muck up) versus private goods, and their claim that a consumer outlook is new (without any sort of reference or citation).  Also of note is that they claim the project was rushed and was limited to only one year (one year for a large group of academics to write 35 pages...can you imagine the pressure?!) due to the urgency of the problem and they didn't have time to test hypotheses (bottom of page 3).  I don't know where to start with that one.

My biggest problem, though, is still the "moralizing and blame" section, which I will reproduce here for reference (from p. 9):
Moralizing and Blame. Some of the criticism takes the form of moralizing and blaming current problems on various actors in the legal education community. Deans are blamed for raising law school tuition or failing to stand up to certain constituencies. Faculty are blamed for supposedly self-seeking behavior and the pursuit of questionable goals for the law school. Universities are blamed for supposedly pressuring law schools to become profit centers. The legal profession is blamed for insufficiently supporting law schools and recent graduates, and steadily shifting educational responsibilities and costs to law schools. 
Moralizing and blaming are not particularly 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.
Actually, this is a situation where moralizing is absolutely productive.  There has been massive damage to the credibility of law schools and any trust that existed between law schools and students/alumni.  The drafters would seemingly admit this, given that they note public confidence has been eroded (page 1).  They also note that many graduates are falling far short of the career ideals they believed it.  But they never address why these graduates had such lofty ideas despite market reality or why public confidence has been eroded.

I don't blame individual deans for raising tuition per se, and I don't know what "certain constituencies" the writers are referencing.  I've never blamed faculty for holding jobs (their posh working conditions and the fact that we severely overpay them are not their fault), and I don't know what "questionable goals" the writers are referencing (as an aside, is it wrong to question law schools for questionable goals?).  And I sure as hell do not blame the "legal profession" for "insufficiently supporting law schools" (!).

The problem with that paragraph - aside from its incomprehensible vagueness and its express mischaracterizations - is that it omits the single greatest reason law schools are morally-blameworthy:  the lies.

If you really want to know how the trust between law schools and law students/alumni/the public became broken and heal the wounds and rebuild trust towards a better legal education system, it's because the schools have engaged in a lengthy propaganda campaign that essentially misled a generation and a half of lawyers and continues to do so.

All sorts of educational ventures have a public value and a private value.  Most have had substantial tuition increases in the last twenty years.  Many of them dump into private markets that are oversaturated to high heaven with little alternative value.  And yet in law it goes beyond that because law school administrators - almost all of them holding the ethical training of lawyers - have waged an egregious, decades-long war against market truth, and continue to do so.

For example, law school marketeers were claiming that you could go to a third-tier school like St. Johns or Stetson or Baylor (to name three of about 175) and make bank - six figure private practice medians - coming out of law school.  And these seemed believable because a minority of graduates got those jobs and the fifth-tier trash pits were making similarly bogus claims.  It was a culture of systemic bullshit.  Now many of them have stopped this nonsense, but they can't even admit that what they did previously was morally wrong; on the contrary, they actually have actually blamed students for being stupid enough to believe what they were saying.

They created misleading statistics charts that showed 90+% "employed" with the implication that "business" meant consulting and in-house counsel positions instead of Starbucks associate.

They used different denominators between the salary charts and the employed charts to give the impression that the exorbitant salaries listed applied to all the "90+% employed" instead of a very small fraction thereof.

You had a dean of admissions call prospective applicants "little bastards" he could "trap" in order to evade good faith evaluations of their incoming classes, while administrators applauded his performance.  Why can we not moralize, again?

They consistently made (and have made) claims that a law degree is a lifetime investment and that you have to look at an investment return over 40 years when they know full well that a very large percentage of alumni wind up out of the law within a few years and much of the remainder had higher earnings potential at 35 than they do at 55.  They avoided inconvenient truths like the fact that most BigLaw associates are gone by year 5 to lower-bracket employment options.

They have consistently claimed that - regardless of the market troubles in lawyerland - you can do anything with a law degree because it's more versatile than other professional degrees or PhD programs.  That they can claim this with a straight face is admirable, in a sense, but it's still a damnable lie.

They continue to push "specialization" in areas where there is an infinitesimal amount of work:   space law, environmental law, international law, and the like.  They have started new LLM programs at an alarming rate, and are now selling these to lawyers as a way of making yourself stand out as a truly special snowflake in an employment market that never asked for these things.  In a dog eat dog world, your animal law LLM is not going to help.

They continue to spout nonsense about the shockwave of baby boomers who are going to retire in the next few years to create vacancies for new lawyers.  In support of this contention, they're using the objectively-false premise that lawyers leave the workforce at 65, and the equally-absurd premise that those lawyers leave a set of clients for a new lawyer to enter from scratch like a hermit crab.

They're now claiming that slashes in class size or tuition is "strategically planned" and that they knew the law school market was going to crumble and they anticipated accordingly with large cash reserves.

They're now claiming - with charts and such - that we'll be running a shortfall of attorneys by 2016!

They have and continue to claim that IBR/PAYE and PSLF are actually good reasons to join the indebted ranks of law school alumni

And yet, the ABA Task Force concludes that it's best to presume good faith and not "moralize" even though it knows that marketing honesty is an issue, as it expressly calls for increased transparency.  How can you reconcile this?  If we can presume "good faith," why is transparency necessary?  Why was there a breach of trust in the first place?

What the ABA Task Force proposes is essentially what dictator sympathizers say after the revolution.  "Hey, you all got fucked.  Whatever, let's move on together."

That's not productive.  Because what happens is that the same people often wind right back running the government and doing the same damn things they did before because their behavior went completely uncorrected.

That's a viable fear of what's going to happen in law schools.  The Task Force can't even take the simple step of explaining the bad conduct, much less calling it bad or censuring those who engage in it.  It's not difficult to see that the same attitudes that have run law schools for the last few decades are going to continue unabated because you're letting them go on without correction or reprimand.  This situation - where there's been a breakdown of trust and credibility - is the exact situation that calls for moralizing, blame, and contrition, or at least an observation that it happened and stricter rules prohibiting such conduct in the future.  In fact, for many of us to have any faith that the present law school environment can actually change and be productive, that process of moralization and contrition must take place.

This Task Force Report has a whole section on "faculty culture."  Yet none of the items addresses the psychological biases or similar phenomena that allowed large groups of lawyers to sit idly as their institutions sold Glen Ross Farms to people with high hopes and access to easy money.

It's disappointing to me that this is one behavioral issue over which law schools have complete and unfettered control, an issue that is frankly beyond serious argument at this point that it occurred, and the ABA Task Force missed a great opportunity to address it head-on.  It's a shame that the Task Force chose to protect and shield the most dishonest among them instead of standing by firm principles of candor and transparency...you know, that thing lawyers are supposed to do.

This thing has fifteen pages of recommendations, and as best I can tell, there isn't one that says "stop lying."  The five recommendations made directly to law schools are all developing plans, statements, or programs (page 34).  One should wonder why "use some scholarship to seriously study your own long-term efficacy with rigor" isn't recommended, but the bigger omission, to me, is "stop lying."  The recommendations to the ABA's section on legal education are all addressed to standards, one of which is, in fact, increased consumer transparency.  But I would have rather had one say "be more aggressive in punishing misleading advertising."

But, of course, there were better reforms to mention, like increasing access to justice by adding more options for non-lawyer practice (page 33) and - who could forget - establishing another task force (page 30, very first recommendation).

Overall, the Task Force paper has some good ideas and sound recommendations.  Yet, I find asking readers to presume good faith without even addressing the repeated and continuous acts of bad faith disingenuous, borderline insulting, and completely against the spirit of true, good faith reform.

67 comments:

  1. Lawprof grade post. Good job!

    ReplyDelete
  2. When teenagers get caught cheating on the S.A.T. they get arrested. Meanwhile law schools cook the books for decades to get billions in federal student loan money and nothing happens.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great Post Truth Center. Your writing is always much appreciated.

    Keep it up!

    ReplyDelete
  4. You can't assume good faith when there is so much evidence of bad faith. For example, there is no way that an intelligent person cannot see that the reverse robin hooding merit scholarships hurt the poor and minorities. In other words the reverse robin hooding exploited the poor and minorities in order to raise law school ranks in U.S. News. Looks like bad faith to me.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yes, great post and so incredibly true. As someone wrote on another blog a couple of years ago, used car salesmen and beauty schools have not been able to get by with the lies that law schools have gotten away with for at least the 25 years that I know of. In the 1970's the federal government stepped in and closed a rash of beauty schools that were selling useless training programs for a profit using federally sponsored student loans. Unbelievably, nothing is being done to close down these law schools who are acting far more egregiously and producing greater life destroying effects.

    It is the lies that lured me into this business. I would never have left what I was doing and gone to law school had I known the truth more than two decades ago. It is the lies about the initial percentage employed, the lies about the starting salaries, and the complete lack of candor in revealing that the vast majority of those who start out in big law do not remain there and go on to make far less afterwards that are soul and life destroying. They lure the young with their lies, grab the loot, and leave people with destroyed or at minimum marginalized lives.

    We can have no respect for institutions that lie, particularly not institutions that hold themselves out as being about the dissemination of truth and justice. However, the law schools are not the only liars in this devilish game. The ABA refuses to call the lies and instead writes these niceties. The big law firms refuse to acknowledge the truth about long term job prospects because leverage is required to generate huge profits for those at the top. In short, a large part of the lawyering business seems to be corrupt and based upon lies in my view.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But law schools have a lot more prestige than beauty schools. Here is probably the main reason why the government hasn't stepped in to limit loans for law schools. In the eyes of the general public law is still one of the most lucrative and secure professions (although this belief is eroding fast though, thanks to the law school's own greed).

      If funding for legal education was restricted, then this would send a clear message that law is no longer a ticket to the upper middle class (if it ever was). Then people might start thinking that if legal education doesn't ensure personal prosperity, then maybe no education can ensure prosperity. And the reason why so many people are un or underemployment isn't because they don't have enough education (a cherished lie the government seems to be pushing), but because the economy is in permanent stagnation and the jobs simply aren't there.

      Delete
    2. The trick here is that the feds cracked down on for profit schools but not non-profit schools. And they didn't shut down any schools per se. Rather, when the number of a school's graduates who defaulted on their loans exceeded a certain percentage the feds would no longer make loans to students at that school which, of course, immediately put the school out of business. This would rein in the law schools just as effectively but there is that weird deference to academia. "Knowledge is good." - Emil Faber

      Delete
    3. "Non-profit" simply means that they spend every nickel on bloated salaries and other expenses. In any event, some law schools (such as those of the notorious InfiLaw group) are profit-seeking institutions.

      Delete
  6. How can law schools turn out ethical attorneys when they are not ethical themselves? One of law schools major purposes is to produce ethical lawyers. Yet they are teaching us how to be dishonest.

    Need to trick students to come to law school, just give incomplete job placement info. Need to trick students to come to law school, just offer a scholarship that will be taken back after the first year.

    Law schools are teaching law students to be dishonest. No wonder there are so many crooked lawyers out there.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is an excellent comment.

      I fully agree with every bit of it.

      Delete
    2. Absolutely. How these fraudsters can claim that Law School is not a "public good," nor is it deserving of "consumer protections", is beyond cynical.

      Yes, folks, step right up. "Defend liberty," "pursue justice," and all that jazz.

      Oh, we meant you, the graduates. Not us. ScamDeans, LawProfs and Universities are not subject to those same directives. No sir. "Ethics" and "professionalism" are for little people.

      Delete
    3. Say duped, I can claim that law school is not a public good. I think the fraudsters claim that it is.

      Delete
    4. Ah....looks like I had a "not" in my earlier response. Anyway, I think we're on the same page.

      Delete
    5. Yes, we're on the same page. Law school overadmission is not a public good; it actually harms the legal profession and the overall economy.

      Even if law school were a public good, it's completely immoral to let ignorant, deluded, marginally qualified students incur enormous debts to pay for it. If nothing else, the law professors could accept lower pay and higher teaching loads to pay for it.

      Delete
  7. Presumption of good faith? That's a rebuttable presumption, and it was rebutted many years ago.

    We cannot move forward until the ABA and its law-skule hacks come clean. Maybe naming names isn't necessary, but there has to be a frank admission that the faculties and administrations of law schools have been behaving in ways that are obscenely inimical to the interests of students, the legal "profession", and the public.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "Proponents of a substantial role for scholarship often argue that faculty scholarship promotes public value, directly and indirectly, by developing more intellectually competent lawyers and by improving law as a system of legal ordering" (at 7).

    Come on. How much scholarshit is read by more than 2½ people? Most of it (Ms Leong, enter and sign in, please) is garbage that contributes absolutely nothing to the intellectual competence of lawyers or to the quality of the law.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Lies, lies, lies from law school deans. Why should I be an ethical lawyer?

    ReplyDelete
  10. A partner at a big firm in New York has declared bankruptcy:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/business/partner-in-a-prestigious-law-firm-and-bankrupt.html

    ReplyDelete
  11. Great post. Nothing else left to say....

    ReplyDelete
  12. A. You betrayed my trust and robbed me blind.

    B. Moralizing and blaming are not particularly productive.

    A. What should I do? I am unemployable and have no credit.

    B. What is needed instead is a dispassionate and pragmatic examination of the current situation.

    A. Do you have to giggle while you fondle a big pile of the money that you extracted from me?

    B. I recommend that you begin with a presumption of good faith on the part of all participants.

    ReplyDelete
  13. From the Legal Skills Prof Blog

    My predictions (for 2014):

    1. Law schools will start rethinking the system of charging high tuition and then discounting it for students that they want.

    2. Parents paying full tuition for their kids will realize that they are subsidizing other students who get the discounts. They will be angry.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Things are pretty bad when even a law professor admits the scam. Plus the scam didn't help law schools, it only made things worse.

      For example at my old law school Hofstra, during nora demleitner's deanship, it practiced reverse robinhooding scholarships combined with bait and switch scholarships, deceptive and incomplete job placement statistics, deceptive and incomplete scholarship renewal statistics, and I suspect section stacking. Despite all this Hofstra fell from 89th to 113th in the U.S. News law school rankings this year.

      Delete
    2. Given their latest admission numbers, Hofstra looks to be going off a cliff. They could actually be the second law school to close, after Indiana Tech. It looks like the Honorable Scamdean Demleitner jumped off just in time. I'm sure she even got a huge raise to go to Washington and Lee, which she is now in the process of destroying.

      That ridiculous "simulation" project should have been scrapped long ago. It's only the "sunk cost" fallacy that keeps it going.

      Delete
    3. Lane seems to be a more honest and capable dean than Demleitner. However it is probably too late for Hofstra. Word of mouth can destroy a law school especially in the age of the internet. There are a lot of angry former Hofstra students out there.

      Delete
  14. The New York Times just dropped another atomic bomb on the scam.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/business/partner-in-a-prestigious-law-firm-and-bankrupt.html?_r=1

    If even Biglaw starts to look unstable, they have nothing left to sell...especially at the current prices.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wouldnt make too much of his situation. All BR means is there is more money going out than coming in. This guy makes 375K per year and has about a million in retirement savings. Only reason he is having trouble is 10k per month to his ex wife and mandatory 5900 per month to retirement plan. If I was a BR judge I would deny the petition and offer to help him come up with a sustainable budget.

      Delete
    2. The sobering part of the article wasn't the bankruptcy issue. It was the state of this guy's career as a non-equity partner. 30 years in big law, and all he has to show for it is an expertise in a very narrow area that, unfortunately for him, is not very useful (or profitable) anymore. The only reason this guy is still collecting a paycheck is because a rainmaker at the firm has protected him (out of pity?). And how much longer will that last?

      Delete
    3. As a partner - I'm not quite in this mess - but even partnership is not the merry sunlit upland that so many law students, summer associates and junior associates think. Except for a select few it is like standing on badly stacked pile of heavy blocks - while your colleagues grab some of the blocks to make their part of the pile more stable - and if it falls over, you are going to be crushed to bloody mush. And meanwhile everyone thinks you have lots of money - but as this poor schmuck's budget shows ... meh! not really.

      Delete
    4. ...and the state of this guy's career is not uncommon. Remember, he is one of the 10-15% who ever made it to big law, one of the 15% or so who made it past 5 years in big law, and one of the less than 10% who went on to be called partner. Yet, you see that his job is insecure, and he doesn't make anywhere near what is purported to be the per partner profits at his firm. There is only a small percentage of partners who actually do make such large sums. In fact, often junior income partners make less than senior associates when you factor in the cost of insurance, taxes, and equity contributions. This story is simply another example of how the emperor really has no clothes. Further, it is an example of how lies permeate the lawyering business from law school to reported profits per partner. I just saw a report a few weeks ago that highlighted that per partner profits in the big law firms (and again, this is only for the small percentage who are equity partners) were in fact exaggerated from the single digit percentages all the way to 20 percent or so. I think many will find all the way along, that lawyering is not what it was represented to be.

      Delete
    5. Also, his rise occurred thirty years ago, not today. Conditions have changed dramatically.

      Maybe I can move to Maycomb County, Alabama, and accept payment in hickory nuts.

      Delete
    6. Anonymous at 6:06 ("As a partner....") -- Absolutely true! Every large firm has a very small number of equity partners who are the big swinging dicks -- and everyone knows who they are -- while the other equity partners are more or less riding their coattails, unless they're lucky enough to have small, portable practices. The only protection is to live beneath your means and save whatever you can. And don't get divorced unless your spouse has consistently made more than you do.

      Delete
    7. My AmLaw 50 and AmLaw 200 firms wildly exaggerated the profits per partner in published reports. The first paid well, but most partners hovered nicely over a half a million, not in the several millions as the AmLaw figures suggested. The second paid most partners little more than senior associates made in the big firms.

      There were exceptions of course. Rainmakers - the very select few - could earn a couple of million dollars a year or more in the bigger firm and a million and a half in the smaller one. Still the profits per partner were wildly exaggerated.

      That is not to say it was a bad life or anything Working at these places was actually a good life, especially for anyone without a backbreaking commute.

      If only these jobs were stable and lasted a career, life as a lawyer would be sweet. Unfortunately, law is unstable and these rose covered partnerships are unstable for many people too.

      Some survive, but you need extreme good fortune to retire from one of these jobs on your own schedule. Only the select few have such extreme good fortune.

      Delete
    8. White & Case is an excellent firm. Great people. Great M&A expertise. Wonderful offices in London and throughout the world. Very exciting place to work. This gentleman should count himself very fortunate to land at such a good and congenial firm.

      It was really, really dumb for him to declare bankruptcy. A big embarrassment to White & Case. He should have just negotiated with his ex-wife and signed on to the plan that limited him to a couple of hundred grand in liability.

      I am guessing he also disposed of assets before making the filing. Even with the landlord, which I understand was not released as part of the plan other partners signed on to, there is a duty of the landlord to mitigate, and there are bigger and richer fish in the Dewey partner pond to take on the lions share of that liability.

      Dumb, dumb move. If I were the managing partner at White & Case, I would can this guy for the adverse publicity he has brought the firm.

      Delete
  15. No one ever hears the word 'honesty' in law school. Nor are they told "First do no harm".

    Why? Because the words literally cannot come out of the scammers' mouths.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Senator Kirstin Gillibrand urges Obama to mention Student Loan debt relief in his SOTU address Tuesday night:

    http://www.ny1.com/content/news/202527/gillibrand-wants-obama-to-mention-student-loan-debt-relief-in-state-of-the-union

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'd like to offer a STFU address in response to Obama's predictable lies.

      Anyhow, debt relief won't work without debt limits.

      Delete
  17. Why you will be paying off your student loans forever:

    http://www.buzzfeed.com/doree/heres-why-youll-be-paying-your-student-loans-forever

    ReplyDelete
  18. Student loan repayment options for dummies:

    http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/Intuit-Teams-Feds-Publicizing-Student-Loan-Repayment-Options-

    ReplyDelete
  19. This report is a goddamned outrage.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Student loan repayment options for dummies:

    http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/Intuit-Teams-Feds-Publicizing-Student-Loan-Repayment-Options-

    ReplyDelete
  21. Law school issues. Do the math:

    http://www.lawfuel.com/law-school-issues-math/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Look at the median starting private sector income for the supposed top 5 best value law schools.

      U of Texas $155,000
      U of North Carolina $117,500
      Brigham Young $84,500
      Stanford $160,000
      Yale $160,000

      Stanford and Yale are maybe semi-accurate. The others seem a little optimistic.

      Delete
    2. Those figures conveniently exclude unemployed people and those whose private-sector job involves dispensing coffee or delivering pizzas.

      Delete
  22. Priced out of a college education:

    http://www.richmondregister.com/viewpoints/x1768002829/Priced-out-of-a-college-education

    ReplyDelete
  23. the scam deans will hopefully wind up in jail, and hopefully they will be raped there. I personally would rather see them hang for their crimes. But that really is not going to happen. But I can hope that someday some of the scam deans will see the inside of a prison. And bad things happen in prison, scam deans....

    ReplyDelete
  24. Personally, I don't think prison rape is an adequate or appropriate punishment for anything. I'd settle for incapacitation of the scam deans, in which they wouldn't be able to operate scam institutions from behind bars. I'm sure some of them would try it, though...

    ReplyDelete
  25. Maybe the reason the task force wants people to presume good faith is because members of the task force have been guilty of some of the condemned practices. The task force condemns using merit scholarships that raise tuition for poorer students. David Yellen was dean at two of the law schools that had merit scholarships. In fact at Hofstra Yellen started a night program so that there would be more suckers that could help provide funding for merit scholarships. At that time part time students didn't count against the us news gpa and lsat so it didn't matter how bad the night students were. Great plan!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. At least the report refers to them as discounts and spurns the term "scholarships". For that matter, it seems to avoid linking them to "merit" as well: they're almost always about nothing but LSAT scores and, secondarily, undergraduate GPAs, precisely because these are the factors that the admissions offices can use to manipulate their schools' place on the You Ass News rankings.

      Delete
    2. There were 5 deans/faculty members on the "force."

      The problem is that the rest of the "force" is a bunch of push-overs, tokens, and figureheads.

      Delete
    3. That's the problem with the Task Force Report. The task force contains members who were part of the scam. The Task Force Report is useless. It would be like A-Rod and Clemens being on a committee to investigate peds in baseball.

      Delete
    4. Peds in baseball? Who woulda thunk it?

      Delete
    5. I'll serve on the task force. How much is the honorarium?

      Delete
    6. Hmmm...a task force...sounds like lots of money for travel, hotels and restaurants.
      No wonder they want to start another one.

      Delete
  26. What other law deans were on the task force? Any law professors? Is there a list of task force members?

    ReplyDelete
  27. Just want to say thanks for your work. You summarize the issue nicely. Some people simply have no moral or ethical compass.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Truth and reconciliation sounds great... but it is rooted in the one-time oppressors telling the whole truth, acknowledging the hurt they've caused, and then ceasing their harmful behavior. Cessation of the harmful behavior is by far the most important part.

    At the end of the day --after all the transparency, the baby steps towards reform and all the earnest discussions-- ALL law schools continue to flood a hopelessly overflooded market with new lawyers. Not ONE has closed its doors. The harmful behavior continues and thus there can be no real forgiveness.... and hence no progress.

    Immediate across-the-board class-size reductions of 50% and tuition cuts of 33% are the first steps to Truth and Reconciliation. Show us your good faith.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a good proposal. Another step in reconciliation would be for law schools to refuse to hire any more unqualified professors, i.e. those with less than 5 years of practice experience. Any untenured professors with less than 5 years of practice experience should be laid off. That's no big deal, because the tenured professors could easily double their own teaching loads.

      Delete
    2. But 11.38 you'd be going against 130 years of tradition there! Here's a famous 1886 quote from Christopher Columbus Langdall:

      "[w]hat qualifies a person, therefore, to teach law is not experience in the work of a lawyer’s office, not experience in dealing with men, not experience in the trial or argument of causes—not experience, in short, in using law, but experience in learning law . . . ."

      More I read about this guy, more I am convinced he was a crank.

      Delete
  29. I'm really getting tired hearing from David Yellen. He was part of the scam.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I remember on LawProf's blog comments, Kyle from LST was defending Yellen as someone who is concerned but feels his hands are tied, or something like that.

      I'm not sure that being better than the Valvoline Dean is much of an accomplishment in this circumstance.

      Delete
    2. Yellen was dean at law schools that used reverse robinhood scholarships. His committee condemned these scholarships. What does this make Yellen? Certainly not a hero.

      Delete
  30. His hands are tied???? When he was dean at Hofstra David Yellen started a night school program so that he could use the tuition to attract day students with high GPAS and LSATs to improve in us news. He was one of the original deans to use reverse robin hooding. In those days us news didn't count the GPAS and LSATs of part time students.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Nando needs to do a post on Yellen.

    ReplyDelete
  32. I have to stop reading this blog. Every time I read this blog I get so pissed and all worked up.

    Ignorance IS bliss.

    ReplyDelete
  33. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2014/01/there-isnt-enough-money-to-keep-educating-adults-the-way-were-doing-it/ Article about the higher ed scam by Clay Shirky, a tenured prof criticising the role of tenured profs in this trainwreck.

    ReplyDelete