Congress gets a spine and nobody notices because it’s about Yemen.
Read this very interesting piece of Congressional vertebrate paleontology and thought, “Dan would like this; it’s the sort of thing he’d want for his rebooted White House Watch.”
But of course, it turns out that he wrote it.
UM did fine; the news is the crash over at neighboring law schools, notably Nova Southeastern, Stetson, and Barry. What happened? (In reading this list I would not read much into small differences in pass rates; but big differences (over 10%, maybe; certainly over 20%, and likely less) do mean something.)
This year’s bar was tough, with the lowest pass rate on the multistate in 34 years. In that environment, UM’s 83.2% is credible, given that we have a lot more bar-takers than our close competitors, even if it is still lower than I would like.
The shockers on this list are Nova and Stetson and Barry. Nova had an 86% pass rate in 2009, and almost 81% in 2010; last year was 70.2. Where are they now? At 42.9%. What happened?
Stetson, once the #1 or #2 in the State, and at least in the high 70s or low 80s less than 10 years ago, was 76.8% last year, and suffered less this year, but it was down to only 67.2%. These are schools that are (were?) known for solid teaching of doctrinal law, for producing reliable local practitioners year after year, if perhaps not for being national or especially academic in their ambitions. Barry, which not long ago was comfortably in the mid-70% range, and got 58.9% last year, cratered too, to 45.5%. Indeed both Barry and Nova were below Florida A&M, and FAMU’s 58.5 score wasn’t much to cheer about.
There won’t be much happiness at the University of Florida. They have a fine program, and students with excellent credentials, and yet only 70.9% passed? A blip, I trust.
I’ve long said that Bar pass rates are over-rated as a measure of law school quality. But, as I also said back then,
[T]here certainly comes a point where a substantially lower bar pass rate than other schools in the state is a sign of a problem that a law school should work to fix. Most people come to law school in order to become lawyers. If they can’t pass the bar, at least on second try, in most cases they have wasted large amounts of time and money. If this is happening to a substantial fraction of the class, and it isn’t happening nearly as much in other law schools in the same state, then something is wrong either with the teaching, the work ethic, or with the admission policy. Note that the latter may not be the school’s direct fault: as there are more and more law schools it becomes increasingly likely that some schools simply are unable to attract enough students with enough discipline or talent, which puts pressure on the school to either teach to the bar, or to flunk a greater fraction of the entering students.
I’m not sure where that point is exactly, but surely a 42.9% pass rate is below it, and probably 62% also, unless the school is self-consciously taking risks on admissions in order to further a social goal (which arguably describes FAMU) — and the students understand this going in.
I’m glad we as a school did well; I feel sorry for everyone at every school who tried hard and failed. Anyone can fail the bar once; many of you will pass on second try, if you work hard again.
My brother is reviving White House Watch. It was his best journalism, back before he got sucked into management, and I’m really happy to see it again.
He even has a sort of manifesto, of which this is a part:
I see two ways it can add value above the din:
1. By relentlessly putting Trump’s incremental actions in their proper, alarming context as an ongoing, corrupt assault on pluralism, shared truths, and core liberal democratic values; and
2. By convening an ongoing online dialogue about what we need to do once Trump is gone, with an emphasis on strengthening our democracy and curbing executive branch powers that have grown unchecked.We can’t allow this to become the new normal. So how do we restore pre-Trump expectations? And having learned some very painful lessons, how do we apply them to rebalance and reenergize our democracy?
I don’t have the answers, but I’m excited about asking the questions and reporting what I hear.
In addition to multiple postings using the latest news as a point of departure, I’ll do my own reporting and interviews. I’ll talk to experts about the weakening of the checks and balances intended to protect us from tyranny, and how to strengthen them. I’ll review literature on key topics, especially related to the violation and restoration of norms. I’ll experiment with online annotation of articles, essays and white papers. Depending on the site’s budget, there could be podcasts and even teach-ins.
I’m also intent on offering a megaphone to the growing community of groups and individuals already focused on the work of restoring and protecting democratic principles. The endless scandals, outrages and distractions of the Trump era have robbed them of the national attention they deserve. White House Watch will work with them on internet time to inject their important perspective into the daily political discourse.
(My only question is why I had to hear about this from Mom?)
Maryland has no statute of limitations for attempted rape, according to a web page at RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network):
I mention this à propos de rien.
Dwayne Wade, Miami’s (ever so slightly faded) star basketball player, has been wrestling with whether to retire, or to play one more season. The team wanted Wade, both because he’s still valuable and because he’ll give the fans some excitement in what otherwise might not be a very exciting season.
So this afternoon, Wade announced his decision, and did it in a manner that couldn’t be more different from the way that his former teammate LeBron James announced his Decision to ‘take his talents to South Beach’.
Here’s how Dwayne Wade did it:
Hard to believe that I started blogging on this day in 2003, fifteen years ago.
I had imagined when I started discourse.net that I’d be writing mostly about the ideas that animate my scholarly work. On the whole, that didn’t work out for me; the level of detail and precision I strive for in academic writing either didn’t translate well to blogging, or just took too darn long and got in the way of ‘real’ work. Instead, the blog became an outlet for legal musings — academic outtakes, if you will — and personal political screeds that ramped up as the nature of the Bush administration torture scandal came into view. Eventually it also became a form of political action for various causes, and an info portal on local elections, especially judicial ones. (Next up: the proposed Florida Constitutional Amendments.)
At one point I was getting thousands of visitors, sometimes in a single day.
But then, one day I decided I wanted to spend more time writing, so I dialed back. I decided I was first an academic, and only very much second or third a blogger, and I wanted to stay that way. I no longer wasted any time on publicity, and stopped making an effort to have at least one post a day. Traffic slumped. As projects like Jotwell and We Robot took more time, blogging languished further. And two rather serious health crises, one in 2010 and one that only resolved itself recently in this past year, brought blogging to temporary, but lengthy, near-halts.
Anyone still reading here is a die-hard, and I thank you. Drop a note in the comments below, or in Who Reads Discourse.net.
There have been 20,316 genuine comments here in 15 years, and I am grateful for all but the trolliest. On the other hand, Askimet reports it has blocked 3,243,190 spam comments, and that doesn’t count the enormous number I deleted manually before installing Askimet. Even ignoring those, that means only 0.6% of comments here have been real? Fortunately, nowadays very little of the spam gets through the filters, so neither I nor anyone else ever sees it. It’s just a work tax on the server.
My first post introducing the blog wasn’t much.
My second post discussed the origins of a paper I co-authored with my wife, Caroline Bradley, on ‘Virtual Worlds and Real Rules’; I think the paper is still timely and relevant.
My third post could also have gone up last week: I wondered why the dollar was so strong, and bemoaned how hard it is for the individual investor to do currency hedges in an economically sensible way. (It also had what I think was my first comment spam.) Still true, although right now I don’t have a strong desire to hedge the dollar since I would not know what currency to buy instead; the US has problems, but so do most other major industrial nations.
But my fourth post, Rose Burawoy, Political Scientist, the one about my grandmother, well that one both has — and has not — withstood the test of time, and the ways it has not are dispiriting. The torture issue has not gone away: our current Supreme Court nominee could not bring himself to say waterboarding (or worse) is torture. Nor has the federal government been cured of its use of Gestapo tactics: refugee families ripped apart, children in cages, border Hispanics systematically having their citizenship questioned. Local governments are in on it too: the doctrine of qualfied immunity protecting police for a wide range of violent or indefensible actions, Blacks gunned down by police for what far too frequently seems no reason, consent decrees on local policing abandoned by the feds leaving bad departments free to continue to act wrongly, civil forfeitures even in the absence of criminal convictions back in fashion after it looked as if they might be on the way out.
I still don’t think the Nazis will take over America. But they are much more in evidence than I thought possible 15 years ago. We’ve seen them on the streets of Charlottesville, and the President thought that was just fine and dandy, which is hardly surprising since he employs Nazi sympathizers if not outright Nazis. ICE’s Border Patrol employs more than 40,000 officers and agents; their political and social views sound bad, so far they do not show many signs of becoming tomorrow’s Brown Shirts. Then again, who would have thought we would see the Nation’s chief official sympathizing with Nazis in the streets?
Democracy responds slowly to evil, but it often responds. Or, as Dr. King put it, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
It’s not too late. Yet. That is my story, and so far I’m sticking to it.
Jotwell Blenderlaw
