Category Archives: Law School

Bar Pass Rates Redux

The February bar pass rate scores are out, and UM's are lower than they were in the summer. But I still hold to what I said last time: Bar Pass Rates are Over-Rated As A Measure of Law School Quality.

(And, I might add, they are meaningless at schools which discourage graduates from taking the bar unless the school is confident they will pass. You know who you are.)

Posted in Law School | 17 Comments

IRAC and Ruin

Concurring Opinions: IRAC in Iraq. Great and wrenching post.

Posted in Iraq, Law School | Comments Off on IRAC and Ruin

Does Posing Naked for Playboy TV Have Anything to Do With Your Fitness to Practice Law?

There's heavy breathing going on at the WSJ Law blog as they report that Brooklyn Law School Student Bares All. It seems that Ms. Adriana Dominguez, a 3L who has “worked in the domestic violence unit in the Brooklyn DA’s office and served as treasurer of her law school’s Legal Association of Activist Women” also, as the NY Daily News put it, “shed her briefs”.

The WSJ blogger asks if this additional extracurricular activity might cause difficulties with the NY character and fitness committee when Ms. Dominguez applies to join the bar.

Let the jokes about visible fitness of the candidate, and the lack of character of the bar begin.

Kidding aside — assuming the conduct in the video was legal, it's First Amendment protected speech, and I can't imagine how a bar committee would dare block someone on the basis of their legally protected speech. They better not dare, anyway.

A more interesting question is to what extent a stunt like this might impact one's legal career. I imagine some straitlaced firms might think twice about hiring this kind of amateur videographer. (Maybe Sullivan & Cromwell is not a good bet?) And I could see it being an issue that might get in the way of a judicial career — would a governor or President nominate someone knowing this would be an issue at the confirmation hearing?

Some people are going to say that this sort of dumb stunt shows poor judgment, and might raise legitimate questions in a client's mind. And I'm sure that there comes a — gradually receding? — point where it's all just too much. But if the romp in question is no more than the Daily News article makes it sound (“happily strips naked, gets spanked and holds gavels up to her bare breasts”) well, really, who in the end cares?

Posted in Law School, Law: Ethics | 6 Comments

SwapNotes — Boon or Bane?

Not sure how I feel about this. I (and it appears tons of other lawprofs) got a note today announcing this:

SwapNotes (www.swapnotes.com) is a new free online service that allows students and professors to share notes, outlines, and old exams (which we take down if asked by the professor).

By linking the courses you teach with the casebooks you use, we hope to make it easier for you to see what other professors who use your casebook have to say. By downloading student notes, you can see how colleagues differ in teaching the same material or what common misconceptions your students may have. Additionally, students won't need to wait on long lines, or consult booklists, to quickly find their casebook. They can just check on SwapNotes.

SwapNotes has been around for less than a semester. Despite its short history, thousands of students have uploaded over 3,000 outlines from dozens of law schools across the United States and Canada, transforming it into a useful resource for professors and students.

On balance, it seems like yet another attempt to provide students with shortcuts which will impair their necessary engagement with the material. And thus not a good thing.

Not to mention that I prefer to control my intellectual property myself.

But I'm not quite ready yet to go as far as the colleague who responded as follows:

I do not wish to have material from any of my courses on your site. Further, I would like you to acknowledge that you are not posting material by any student in my courses on your site, as I am asserting my intellectual property in the lectures that students might quote or transcribe prior to such an attempt to post, and I do not grant you a license to disseminate it.

Although, I confess, I feel the temptation….

Posted in Law School | 11 Comments

U. Miami Makes Top 20 in New Law School Ranking

I've yet to see a ranking system for law school that I trust. Leiter's was the least bad, and it had problems. US News is so badly constructed that it's a joke, and the fact that it now is morphing into a self-referential feedback loop just makes it worse (studies show that USN rankings increasingly define reputations, and a lot of the USN ranking is based on … reputation).

But if we're going to have biased ranking systems, I prefer those that are biased in our direction. So may I introduce you to the Lawdragon 25 Leading Law Schools, based on where members of the Lawdragon 500s graduated from law school. They put the University of Miami School of Law at #18 in their rankings.

Which sounds great, but shouldn't be taken too seriously. Even if we trusted Lawdragon to tell us who the best lawyers in the US are, the survey is strongly biased to large schools, since it compares total number of law school alumni among the 'elite' without discounting for school size.

But that bias works for us, so I guess now we can claim to be a “top 20 law school”.

Realistically, however, I would not put UM among the top 20 US law schools if only because we don't have the resources that come with the sort of massive endowment the top 20 schools tend to have, and because first year classes here are very big.

For what it's worth, I do think that we ought to be somewhere low in the second 20. US News, which is as biased against size (and location in provincial legal markets) as Law Dragon is biased for bigness, ranked UM at 65 — a massive problem for the school. Average the two scores [ (18+65)/2 = 41.5] and you get something more plausible although not methodologically defensible.

Posted in Law School, Miami | Comments Off on U. Miami Makes Top 20 in New Law School Ranking

Professional Deformation

You know you're a law professor when you look at a story like this and think, “I bet that would make a great Torts final exam question.”

And I don't even teach Torts. (Actually, there's probably some way to make it a Property final exam question too, if you do easements…)

Posted in Law School | 2 Comments