j u s t c r i m

Legal Scholarship Costs [National Law Journal]

What is the total cost of a law review article written by a tenured professor at a top-flight law school? It's in the neighborhood of $100,000, according to Hofstra University School of Law professor Richard Neumann. His estimate factors in the salary and benefits for a tenured professor at a high-paying school who spends between 30% and 50% of his or her time on scholarship and publishes one article per year....

Neumann delivered that staggering estimate during a panel discussion on leveraging tenured faculty during the Future Ed conference in New York on April 16; the meeting drew more than 100 academics to discuss innovation in legal education.

Neumann made the case that extensive and expensive research does not necessarily benefit the students footing the bill through hefty tuition.  Even articles written by assistant professors at lower-paying law schools come with a price tag between $25,000 and $42,000, he estimated. 

Neumann also pointed to research suggesting that 43% of law review articles are never cited by anyone."   [emphasis added] At least a third of these things have no value," he said. "Who is paying for that? Students who will graduate with six figures of debt." 

 

 

via www.law.com

THIRD TIER REALITY: Law Review Article Explores Why the Vulgar Scam-Blogs Are So Effective

The technologically-challenged Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology finally published its most current edition. “Executive administrator” Monica Wittstock said that this volume would be online in mid-January. When I talked to her, I was told that this would be available by mid-February. Oh well. What can one expect from a tertiary, fifth-rate legal journal? Thanks for eventually getting off your ass, Monica.

ARTICLE

The lone gem is a piece written by associate professor Lucille Jewel, which is entitled, “You’re Doing It Wrong: How the Anti-Law School Scam Blogging Movement Can Shape the Legal Profession.” Check out this excerpt from page 243:

via thirdtierreality.blogspot.com

Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America | Cato Institute Store

This new book reveals how our nation’s law schools have become a hatchery of bad ideas, many of which confer power and status on the schools' graduates and faculty, as law comes to pervade more areas of life.

From Barack Obama (Harvard and Chicago) to Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale), many of our current national leaders emerged from the rarefied air of the nation's top law schools. The ideas taught there in one generation often shape national policy in the next. The trouble is our elite law schools keep churning out ideas that are catastrophically bad for America. From class action lawsuits that promote the right to sue anyone over anything, to court orders mandating the mass release of prison inmates; from the movement for slavery reparations, to court takeovers of school funding - all of these appalling ideas were hatched in legal academia. And the worst is yet to come. A fast-rising movement in law schools demands that sovereignty over U.S. legal disputes be handed over to international law and transnational courts. It is not by coincidence, Olson argues, that these bad ideas all tend to confer more power on the law schools' own graduates. In the overlawyered society that results, they are the ones who become the real rulers.Listen to the author discuss his book

via www.cato.org

SSRN-Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2010

GREEN BAG ALMANAC AND READER 2011, pp. 339-366, Ross E. Davies, ed., Green Bag Press, 2011
Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 11-01

Abstract:     
This ranking report attempts to identify the best law school home pages based exclusively on objective criteria. The goal is to assess elements that make websites easier to use for sighted as well as visually-impaired users. Most elements require no special design skills, sophisticated technology or significant expenses.

Ranking results in this report represent reasonably relevant elements. In this report, 200 ABA-accredited law school home pages are analyzed and ranked for twenty elements in three broad categories: Design Patterns & Metadata; Accessibility & Validation; and Marketing & Communications. As was the case in 2009, there is still no objective way to account for good taste. For interpreting these results, we don't try to decide if any whole is greater or less than the sum of its parts.

Eiseman, Jason and Skalbeck, Roger V., Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2010 (January 7, 2011). GREEN BAG ALMANAC AND READER 2011, pp. 339-366, Ross E. Davies, ed., Green Bag Press, 2011; Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 11-01. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1736662

via papers.ssrn.com

Is Law School a Losing Game? - NYTimes.com

Law schools’ rosy statistics say most graduates are working. The problem is, many aren’t working as lawyers, or making enough to pay back their student loans.

IF there is ever a class in how to remain calm while trapped beneath $250,000 in loans, Michael Wallerstein ought to teach it.

Here he is, sitting one afternoon at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a tall, sandy-haired, 27-year-old radiating a kind of surfer-dude serenity. His secret, if that’s the right word, is to pretty much ignore all the calls and letters that he receives every day from the dozen or so creditors now hounding him for cash.

“And I don’t open the e-mail alerts with my credit score,” he adds. “I can’t look at my credit score any more.”

via www.nytimes.com

SCOCAL | Stanford Law School Robert Crown Law Library

SCOCAL is a joint project between Justia and Stanford Law School Library. With annotations written by the Advanced Legal Research class at Stanford Law School, SCOCAL is where readers can locate free opinions from 1934 to the present, annotations, briefs, documents and news relating to California Supreme Court opinions.

via scocal.stanford.edu

colbert on law school grades

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experiential experience

FLAC, The Free Legal Aid Clinic of Detroit, an experiential opportunity available to WSU Law students, was easily the most rewarding element of law school in Detroit  ... for me ... I wager a significant percentage of WSU Law Students to this day feel the same ... 

The problem with traditional experiential learning in law schools is that historically it's treated as an afterthought, at best, in the eyes and budgets and curricular mania of most law school administrations ... 

Contrast the [sh]MED school student experience ... Their experiential learning goes on and on,  Graduating from MD school meant going off to work in a residency or internship or fellowship ... More practical opportunities to learn how to effectively play doctor ... "Becoming" ... as it were.  It was something that was part of the deal for the med profession whereas graduating law students have always simply been jettisoned into the reality maelstrom .... take a bar ... start paying loans.

Here's an article that extols the many virtues of experiential learning in law school.  It's part of the CLINICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE (sponsored by New York Law School - Vol. 7, No. 3: Apr 20, 2010):

Maranville, Deborah A., Infusing Passion and Context into the Traditional Curriculum Through Experiential Learning (September 1, 2008). Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 51, No. 1, March 2001; NYLS Clinical Research Institute Paper No. 09/10 #17. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1269072

This article argues that infusing experiential education into the traditional law school curriculum can improve law students' learning. Experiential learning can help feed students' souls by nourishing the passions and values that directed them toward law school, provide context for doctrinal learning that will both engage students and help them learn more effectively and assist in providing two-way feedback and assessment for what students are actually learning in the classroom. These effects can help avoid the decline in engagement so typical of the second and third year law student experience. The article provides concrete examples and suggestions for how and when to incorporate experiential learning.