Consumer rights advocate and Harvard Law graduate Ralph Nader once addressed a group of law students at his alma mater. Among other criticisms of legal training, he suggested that there are two law schools: a school of the law and a school of the unlawful. He had the right observation but the wrong diagnosis—he focused […]
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“Political parties live in a house of power. They are organizations for social fighting. The contents of a definite moral choice are never selected. The only criterion is the ubiquitous use of a method.” C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America. Training for irregular political operations and lawfare originates from an […]
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In June, more than 100 deans signed a joint letter calling for law schools to support constitutional democracy by teaching students to disagree respectfully and engage across ideological divides. As around 40,000 new law students begin their professional education this fall, it is fair to question whether law schools have demonstrated a commitment to this […]
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In most parts of the world, lawyers are formally trained in an undergraduate degree program. The Bachelor of Law (LL.B), is also an accelerated three-year curriculum. In the United States it takes over twice as long. First you need a 4-year undergraduate degree in any subject—a gratuitous requirement, as there is no such thing as […]
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“Thinking is not a matter of making definitions in one place, classifying things in another, inferring in a third, and making practical judgments in some fourth place. How these activities are organically related to each other and to the use of language, a systematic exposition of the nature of thinking should make clear.” — Arthur […]
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The law school deans at places such as Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Penn rarely turn to me for advice. Ok, never. That’s partly because I am not a lawyer but mostly because I am the head of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), an old organization that is known as one of the conservative voices […]
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As lawyers like Barack Obama have noted, law school is already a year too long, with lots of nonessential classes. As a result, law students often graduate with over $150,000 in student-loan debt. Yet law students may soon be required to take more unnecessary classes. 150 law school deans have asked the American Bar Association […]
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That certain quarters of the academy–humanities departments, most social sciences departments, and many graduate programs (social work, education, and to a lesser extent law)–are ideologically imbalanced is not news. A decision in an Iowa court, however, exposed the difficulty in addressing the problem. The case, which received extensive coverage in the Des Moines Register and […]
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Earlier this month Annette Clark, dean of Saint Louis University’s law school, abruptly resigned from her job via e-mail after only a year. She left after accusing the Jesuit university and its president, Rev. Lawrence Biondi, of looting the law school in order to fund other, non-law-related programs on the Saint Louis campus. This was […]
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Colleges–both on the undergrad and graduate levels–typically admit students and encourage them to take on onerous amounts of debt, without first giving those prospective students the actual data about their chances of finding work in that major field afterwards. This is just as true, by the way, for non-profit as it is for for-profit schools. […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a team of eight law firms have just “sued a dozen more law schools across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates ‘burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.’ The lawyers . . . […]
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Crossposted from OpenMarket.org The New York Times featured an excellent news story Sunday by David Segal on the costly white elephant that is legal education in America. He describes how law school is expensive because of government-enforced accreditation standards that prevent law schools from containing costs even if they wanted to (and in truth, most […]
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This is an excerpt from Schools for Misrule, Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, to be published March 1 by Encounter Books. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is author of The Litigation Explosion and creator of the popular blog Overlawyered.com. *** In his 1918 book The Higher Education in America, the […]
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During my service as a member of the accreditation committee of the American Bar Association, the ABA added a 200th school to their roster of accredited law schools. This growth could be seen as a cause for celebration– the roster of new schools included many with missions that would clearly benefit society. Public service law […]
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Here at Minding the Campus we’ve been elaborating on Charles Murray’s argument that college isn’t for everyone, and that a college degree—which can cost graduates at least four years of forgone earnings and leave them drowning in student-loan debt—isn’t necessarily the ticket to economic prosperity that it’s cracked up to be. So what?, you might […]
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Professor Johnny R. Buckles of the University of Houston Law School has written and posted a hypothetical Supreme Court case on the Solomon Amendment and whether private law schools can restrict military recruiting over the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. Hint as to how the decision comes out: the Chief Justice is named “Orthodoxy” and the dissent is […]
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The Shark provides a list of the top five Law School “Admissions Innovations” of 2008, with analysis. The ludicrous Baylor case is ranked one, but I hadn’t heard of several of the others. Take #3 University of Michigan Law School’s Wolverine Scholars Program admits University of Michigan undergrads who have at least a 3.8 GPA […]
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Walter Olson tipped us off to this, at Point of Law: Paul Caron of TaxProfBlog has run the numbers on this year’s Presidential contributions (at least those coded “law professor”, which may miss some) and they’re even more overwhelmingly lopsided than you might have expected: 95 percent Obama, 5 percent McCain. At Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, […]
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– Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy wonders why some prominent universities don’t have law schools – Princeton, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Rice, and Tufts are law-school-less. As is Brandeis, ironic as he notes, “for a prominent university named after a Supreme Court justice.” He’s surprised they haven’t made the leap. Take a look. – Harvard’s new […]
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Erwin Chemerinsky, a noted constitutional scholar and law professor at Duke for 21 years, has just been hired and then fired as the first dean of the University of California, Irvine, Law School, which opens in 2009. Irvine’s chancellor, Michael Drake, explained the firing by saying “he had not been aware of how Chemerinsky’s political […]
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