I remember back when I was an accounting major, the AICPA was pushing its 150-credit requirement to sit for the CPA exam. It just wasn’t enough, apparently, to get a bachelor’s degree in accounting; another 30 credits were needed. But instead of requiring additional courses like accounting theory, the history of accounting, accounting systems, or case studies in accounting fraud, for example, the additional 30 credits could be in . . . anything!
I’m no statistician, but I do like mathematics, statistics, and quantitative methods in general. That’s why I hate to see lawyers use confusing language when writing or talking about these subjects. Take this recent quote from an article on the US News website about lawyer salaries. Here’s the part that’s troublesome (emphasis added):
Law school graduates “can expect a starting salary in the range of anywhere from a low of $50,000 all the way up to $205,000, and those are median salaries,” says NALP executive director Nikia Gray.
Is that wrong? I’m not talking about merely being misleading. That's another matter entirely, as only the very top students at the most “prestigious” law schools will have a realistic chance of making a $205,000 salary upon graduating and passing the bar. Rather, I'm wondering if that quote is wrong. Here’s what I mean:
The law degree used to be called the LL.B., or bachelor of
laws. Pictured below is the relevant
portion of a re-issued J.D. degree, or Juris Doctor, replacing an LL.B. that had
been awarded earlier, back in 1940, by
The now-deceased J. Gordon Hylton, a former law professor of mine at MU Law, explained in this blog post that the law degree used to be called the LL.B. because it was recognized for what it was: a bachelor’s degree.
No, I’m not talking about their race or gender. Only rich, elite corporate clients care about such things. My clients, on the other hand, don’t care about my skin color or whether I run a BIPOC-compliant operation. Rather, they want to know if I can draft and argue a motion to dismiss, negotiate a favorable plea deal, and, most importantly, effectively try a case to a jury.
Instead, the question I’m asking is this: What will the next generation of criminal defense lawyers look like in the courtroom? Unfortunately, law schools are doing their best to turn out lawyers who are as sensitive and fragile as humanly possible. It almost seems as if it’s their primary goal to do so.
Check out my new article on prosecutorial breaches of plea bargains and the rather curious "right to cure." The article exposes this doctrine as another pro-prosecutor tool of the courts, and provides ways for defense counsel to respond to prosecutorial breaches of the sentence concession component of plea bargains. It will be published next year in the Brooklyn Law Review, but you can find a pre-publication draft of the article here. All of my articles, organized by topic, are available here. Finally, you can find the new article's abstract after the jump.
Check out my new article on preliminary-hearing waivers and how they create the prosecutorial obligations to respond to defense lawyers' plea offers and to use good faith in plea negotiations—something defense lawyers either aren't aware of or typically forget about. It will be published later this year in the Pepperdine Law Review, but you can find a pre-publication draft of the article here. All of my articles, organized by topic, are available here. Finally, you can find the new article's abstract after the jump.
But what law schools are doing seems to go beyond a gradual creep. It’s more like a mission explosion, or a big bang of nonsense, that instantly obliterates the original mission parameters. More specifically, rather than sticking to their original mission of trying to educate and train future lawyers, law schools have become obsessed with a sudden explosion of goofy objectives.
Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC-Berkeley law school, has made some ridiculous statements, including once uttering “the worst analogy in the long and storied history of analogies.” But it’s not just that some of his statements are goofy—most people slip up from time to time, and the more a person talks the more opportunities he will have to make nonsensical gaffs. The problem is that, in the Dean’s case, he often utters nonsense when advancing an agenda. And when there’s an agenda driving the statements, we should be less tolerant of the nonsense.
This is my second law professor-bashing post today. This one will be especially valuable to soon-to-be One-Ls, but hopefully will be useful to lawyers as well.
For those of you starting law school this fall, you’ll soon learn that, if you play the game correctly and educate yourselves before walking into class, the law profs don’t really add anything to your education. Many of them will have no experience practicing that particular area of law (or any area of law), some won’t be admitted to a bar, and some won’t even have a law degree. In other words, after properly preparing for class, you will know nearly as much about the law as they do.
The good news, though, is that while profs don’t add much, they are also largely harmless – some might even be funny, thus making the class time pass more quickly. But there is one area where professors can cause you true harm, and that area is legal writing.
This is the first of two law prof-bashing posts today.
I have previously explained how several law schools copied Yale and “boycotted” the US News law school rankings. I use quotes around that word because the schools weren’t really boycotting – or even withdrawing from – the rankings. Rather, they were just succumbing to the irresistible urge to copy Yale and signal their virtue in the process, often to the point of sheer absurdity. They just can’t help themselves. And US News responded to all of this professorial griping by changing its ranking methodology. The new rankings are available here.
Copying Yale and virtue signaling are two things that the wormy legal academy loves doing, so it was pretty easy to spot these events as they unfolded. However, what I didn’t see happening was that the legal academy was, rather hilariously, screwing itself in the process.
In Daniel Boorstin’s book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, he argues that, given the wealth of news outlets in
If the reporter’s digging and imagination both come up dry, then the news that gets reported may be nothing more than a “think piece” or “speculation about startling things to come”—or, worse yet, a rankings puff piece. In sum, “news” is now “anything that makes a reader say, ‘Gee whiz!’”
In light of his words, I couldn’t help but notice two pieces of pseudo-news recently—Boorstin would call them stories about “pseudo-events.” These two current examples fall under the heading of “career news”—a category that is now a big business in itself—and involve my former career (accounting) and my current career (law).
Countless news stories now litter the web proclaiming that Yale and Harvard, followed by a slew of copycat schools, “withdrew from,” “pulled out of,” or “abandoned” the US News law school rankings. But as I explained in a previous post, these schools are not withdrawing from, pulling out of, or abandoning the US News rankings at all. They are just not submitting data. They are still going to be ranked. In fact, the new top 14—which consists almost entirely of “protester” schools—has already been released and, putting aside the narcissism of small differences, appears virtually unchanged from last year! (As explained below, we’re still waiting on rankings for schools #15 on down.)
Withholding data is nothing new or newsworthy; my alma mater Marquette Law did it back in the 90s (see p. 310) long before Yale and Harvard decided the rankings were, for nonsensical reasons, bad. This entire thing is just a redo, a non-event. It’s no more newsworthy than Kim Kardashian having a bad morning because she got too much foam on her designer coffee. It just doesn’t matter.
Instead, law schools are doing this for virtue-signaling purposes—although it’s hard to see how that ploy could be successful with any thinking person, a category of persons that hopefully includes a decent percentage of law school applicants. For example:
A couple of months ago, I said to someone that banking on your phone just isn’t right. The ease and convenience did not fit the seriousness of the activity. Paying a bill, transferring money between accounts, and other banking transactions are just too important and shouldn’t be done so casually or quickly. Among other risks, the risk of error on that tiny “keyboard” is way too high.
Instead, banking should be done in person or on your computer, using a man-sized keyboard. Banking by phone, I said, was just another symptom of the underlying problems that plague us today, such as laziness and a lack of seriousness. It’s just like sending an important message by “text” instead of letter or email—and then having that "text" filled with errors and a lack of punctuation, to boot.
The above headline could apply to most new law school grads. (Not all new grads, of course; not all new grads can pass the bar.) But I’m using the headline to describe an A.I. named Chat GPT.
A few years ago, I was convinced that A.I. had taken over legal tasks (if not entire legal jobs). Not all tasks; you can’t send A.I. into the courtroom to try a case, for example. But certainly it had taken over things like legal research and writing legal briefs, I thought.
And then I got an email from my state bar touting its seminar on how attorneys can put A.I., in the form of Chat GPT, to work for them. I then researched it and learned that Chat GPT recently passed a bar exam. Based on that, I signed up for Chat GPT and gave it a spin.
Certain decisions during the course of a criminal case are so important, so personal, that only the defendant is allowed to make them. Not even defense counsel may tread on this hallowed ground. These decisions include whether to waive the jury in favor of a bench trial, whether to testify or remain silent, and whether to plead guilty and accept a plea deal.
But while the law jealously guards the defendant's decision-making authority against intrusion by his or her own lawyer -- the trained professional who is advocating for the defendant -- the law allows government agents, i.e., prosecutors and judges, to run roughshod over those decisions. Sometimes the governmental intrusion is blatant and obvious, as in the case of trumping the defendant's attempted jury waiver, other times the prosecutors and judges have to be really sneaky -- for example, when silencing the defendant "by instruction."
Read all about it in my newest law review article, scheduled for publication next year in the 112th volume our nation's tenth oldest, continuously-published law review, the Kentucky Law Journal. You can find a pre-publication draft of the article here, or read the abstract after the jump. (You can find all of my law review articles, organized by topic, here, and you can find my books here.) Enjoy!
In recent years we’ve heard cries of “follow the science” in support of all kinds of agendas and political movements. But science is a methodology and, in many cases, has exposed those agendas as unsupported by, and sometimes even contradicted by, the science.
Claiming a word as your own and attaching that word to your agenda is a neat trick, if you can pull it off. (Prosecutors do it all the time with the word truth.) But despite the recent flurry of creativity surrounding the word science, this tactic is as old as the hills. A brief look at the history of science-misuse is instructive.
In Mathew Stewart’s book The Management Myth, he explains that various groups have historically used the word science to promote their own agendas, regardless of whether there was any actual science involved:
Today, there are many articles about the declining number of CPAs and, especially, of accounting majors in the CPA pipeline. The latest such article is here, in today’s WSJ (subscription required). That article’s title indicates its proposed solution to the problem: How can we make accounting cool? And there are many articles like this one, angsting about how to replenish the numbers within the profession. But I doubt people are now avoiding accounting because it’s un-cool. It has always been un-cool (which, in some circles, can be cool).
In the
By comparison, in Wisconsin, the courts at all levels of the system have managed to super-legislate from the bench; they have somehow turned an evidentiary hearing, which was designed to prevent improvident prosecutions, into a prosecutorial weapon for charging anything and everything without probable cause and, certainly, without the presentation of any evidence.
What do I mean? Well, if
pre-hearing discovery and actual witnesses are the hallmark of
