Monday, January 22, 2018

University of Kentucky Law Professor and filmmaker extraordinaire Brian L. Frye asserts that legal scholarship does not contribute to the cost of legal education

It is a relief to know that the cinematic arts are flourishing at law schools, along with the finest doctrinal instruction this side of a Gilbert’s outline and highly useful and enlightening scholarship that bears no causal relationship whatsoever to rising levels of student indebtedness.

One of the legal academy’s great auteur-scholars is University of Kentucky Law Professor Brian L. Frye. According to an endnote to one of his recent articles: "Brian L. Frye is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. His scholarship focuses on intellectual property, charity law, and art law. He is also an essayist and artist of no particular distinction." And the self-effacing professor does not even mention his two one-year post-law school judicial clerkships or the 27 months he spent as a junior associate with Sullivan & Cromwell before becoming a law professor.

Frye may modestly downplay the quality of his work, as per his so-charming humblebrag, but not his fans at OTLSS. True, we can only anticipate the delights of his forthcoming article: The Athlete’s Two Bodies: Reflections on the Ontology of Celebrity. But cinephiles everywhere can celebrate the completed films that he has conceived, directed, and starred in. These include such works as Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate and Striptease. In an article in the Chicago Reader, a film nerd provides the following description of these paradigm-subverting avant garde masterpieces.
"The two-minute Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate shows the filmmaker fully clothed, sitting in a chair fidgeting, seemingly unsure what to do with his hands. Inspired by the joke that student performance artists just get up in front of the audience and masturbate, this film in one sense merely illustrates the stereotype: Frye makes his body the subject. But because he appears not to know how to sit and where to look, and because the film is not obviously artful (it's a single take not particularly well framed), his body becomes the locus of instability rather than a fetishized object. . .
Striptease might have been titled "Brian Frye Fails to Strip." We see Frye disrobe, but when he gets to his white undershorts, the roll ends in white flare-outs. There's also something strange about his movements, especially when he drops his shirt — because in fact he ran the camera in reverse while putting his clothes on."     
It is galling that the hoi polloi persist in trooping to the multiplex to watch Star Wars, Episode Whatever, when gems like Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate remain comparatively obscure. At the very least, a minimally decent society will not fail to lubricate a genius like Brian Frye with an undemanding academic job and a $123,628 annual public sector salary, the better to facilitate his scholarly, as well as his artistic, ejaculations. Which is precisely what a young public defender failed to understand, in a January 15, 2018 exchange on Twitter, when she rudely interrupted Frye's effusion of self-love with the less-than-enticing imagery of her $250,000 law school debt load.

Professor Frye explains to the insolent tweeter that legal scholarship bears no relationship whatsoever to law student debt, making the knock down point that he gets paid whether he writes or doesn't write. (A few quibbles about that below). Anyway, here is the Twitter exchange in all its naked glory: [N. I want to add that I do not know the identity of "Essential Employee." I stumbled on the exchange while researching another post]




































But wait, Professor Frye, or shall I call you Mr. Pro Boner?: Isn’t "engaging in scholarship" a major reason why the ABA mandates that the majority of law school coursework be taught by full-time law professors instead of far more affordable part-time adjuncts who, you know, actually practice law? (See ABA Standards 403(a) and 404(a)(3)). Isn’t this requirement fiercely defended against proposed modifications by law professor lobbying organizations? Don’t lawprofs routinely receive five-figure "summer research stipends" to top off their six-figure salaries, money expressly provided to encourage scholarship? Isn’t tenure in the legal academy strongly linked to scholarly production, as opposed to service and teaching? And don’t all these things add significantly to the cost of a legal education?

These would be my questions– pardon me, my non sequiturs– though I would never presume to match wits with somebody clever enough to deceive the world into thinking he is doing a striptease when he is really just running the camera in reverse while getting dressed.

Actually, the thing that most troubles me is that Professor Frye has become so absorbed in legal scholarship this past year that he may be neglecting his filmmaking. While I doubt that he or anyone can rise to the level of Brian Frye Fails to Masturbate, I would like to suggest some exciting film concepts inspired by his Twitter exchange with the public defender and the title of his greatest masterpiece: Brian Frye Fails to Take Moral Responsibility; Brian Frye Fails to Argue Persuasively; Brian Frye Fails to Treat a Public Defender with Respect; and Brian Frye Fails to Pretend that he is not a Smug and Pretentious Entitled Narcissist.

See, for these films, he would not even have to run the camera in reverse.

17 comments:

  1. A ridiculous article-it ignores, completely, the fact that he could return this very minute to Sullivan and Cromwell and make over a million dollars a year-but instead is sacrificing that hefty payday to teach law. And with his obvious skills as an auteur, he may well have moved past seven figures to eight figures in private practice, as America's first cinematic genius/law professor.

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  2. Check his photo out at the U K Law website: Brian Frye Fails To Conceal That He's a Smarmy Little Dweeb.

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    1. He looks like Pee-Wee Herman's evil twin.

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  3. His understanding of his own industry's regulatory and economic forces is a bit... lacking.

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  4. We've just been treated to a special screening of Brian Frye Indulges in Intellectual Masturbation.

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  5. Only a narcissist would gloat so smugly about a job that allows him to write shit "of no particular consequence" about one sentence from a dissenting opinion, and justify it on the grounds that he "learned a lot along the way", even while a graduate who borrowed $250k at high interest in order to pay for Frye's decadent sinecure tries to disabuse him of his delusions.

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  6. Über-toilet North Carolina Central University is out of compliance with the ABA's "standards" for admissions:

    http://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/coastal/news/2018/01/22/aba-says-nccu-law-school-is-out-of-compliance

    Watch several ninnies defend their toilet school's "holistic" approach to admissions. For the benefit of those who don't know, I should explain what "holistic" means:

    1) At an élite undergraduate institution, it refers to the preference of underperforming rich kids to overperforming real people. The kid with the perfect SAT scores and the newly published proof of Goldbach's conjecture is "holistically" rejected for not being "one of us", while Maximilian Q. Kennedy-Rockefeller VIII skates in despite his D– average at Choate and his criminal record. (I barely exaggerate. See Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.)

    2) At a toilet school, it furnishes a veneer of respectability for the admission of idiots. "Yes, you got a horrible LSAT score of 145 or lower, like most of the students at this toilet. But our holistic review of your application has identified you as a global leader."

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    1. It’s true that there are some connected kids whose last name is their admission ticket to the Ivy League. However, the main reason highly competitive undergrad schools have adopted a “holistic” approach to admissions comes down to the Holy Grail of diversity. If you don’t believe me, consider the case of Stuyvesant High School in NYC, which is one of the top public high schools in the country. Stuyvesant is 72.5% Asian, 17.8% White, 2.7% Hispanic, and .72% Black. As you might have guessed, Stuyvesant has not adopted a holistic approach to admissions.

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    2. Good point, 6:36. The Dartmouth Review used to get accused of racism for opposing minority preferences in admissions but in truth they also opposed, vocally, any non-merit based preferences including alumni children. They supported some preference for people who were reasonably within range of being qualified who possessed a truly high level of talent in a particular area (e.g. art, music, drama or athletics) but those were merit-based preferences.

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    3. Actually, the "holistic" approach, which has been with us since the 1920s, started out as a way to reduce diversity—by excluding Jews in favor of rich WASPs. Karabel presents the history of the "holistic" approach in The Chosen.

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    4. Whatever its origins, there is no question that in this day and age, the main purpose of holistic admissions is to prop up enrollment numbers for UR minorities. Ironically, in areas with high Asian populations, it may serve to prop up white enrollment numbers too. The Stuyvesant numbers show you that, when forced to compete against Asians based upon non-holistic criteria (i.e., an entrance exam), whites don’t fare so well. I wonder what would happen to white enrollment at a place like Cal Berkeley if it based admissions solely on concrete factors like SAT/ACT scores, high school GPA, and the number of AP/IB classes taken.

      Also Old Guy, I think you exaggerate the benefits of connections when it comes to getting into Ivy League level schools. No one with a D average gets into Harvard. Connected kids generally have qualifications that put them in the ballpark, but are not good enough to get them in under normal circumstances. Then daddy or grandpa makes a call and presto, Chase Worthington IV with his 31 ACT score and 3.5 GPA gets into Princeton over Frank Smith with his 35 ACT score and 3.8 GPA and the folks at admissions justify this based upon Chase’s superior “leadership characteristics.”

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    5. The "holistic" approach to admissions serves to prop up a certain overrepresented minority—the super-rich.

      You're right that the connected kids tend to have decent, though not necessarily stellar, qualifications. On the other hand, Golden mentioned some people with decidedly poor records (bad grades, even criminal activity) who nonetheless got into the Harvards and the Yales. Karabel gives an example from a training manual for admissions officers: I don't remember the details exactly, but roughly it pitted a rich kid from New York City with mediocre grades at his expensive boarding school against a smart kid from rural Nebraska who belonged to Future Farmers of America. Conclusion: while the Cornhusker may have done admirably well, he lacked the natural suavity of the rich kid, who would therefore be more likely to excel in life and consequently should be favored for admission.

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  7. The idea that law professors work "full-time" is laughable. Professor Frye doesn't even know what that means. Analyzing a single sentence for one year is not working full-time. Crazy.

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  8. The really sad thing about all this is that the lawyer who went after the Law Professor is actually lucky. He got a public-service job as a lawyer, representing clients, for $40,000 per year pre-tax. That is a much better outcome than most current and recent law school grads will get. Most of them will never get full-time jobs as lawyer anywhere. They tend to end up working for insurance companies, in claims adjustment and sales, for some reason.

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  9. think of it this way. if i own a business that produces products that are in extremely high demand, then it makes sense that i should get paid quite a bit. after all, it's primarily my labor that produces the above mentioned can't do without product.

    if that thinking was to be taken to law schools, then it would make sense that law professors would receive massive salaries due to the fact that their graduates were in extremely high demand. not to hard to grasp the concept. but take california, for instance. with the closure of whittier law school, the state has 20 aba approved law schools. let's say that, if we take an aggregate, the average graduating class is 50. that x 20 = 1000 shiny new lawyers ready to spring into action. from all that i can see, no way can the market absorb 1000/year california law school grads. and they certainly can't absorb 10,000/decade law grads into positions that can pay the massive debt they've rung up.

    if all that's true, then it's pretty stupid to pay anyone big money to create something very few people need or want. justifying law professor's salaries on anything other than the quality or demand sating ability of their graduates is pointless....

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