Law school puffery and the last minute grab for students

If memory serves, first-year contract law teaches that specific, factual misrepresentations are bad and legally actionable, whereas mere “puffery” (e.g., “We are the world’s best; hurry and come to us before it’s too late!”) is just bad.  I even remember one law school professor wryly telling the class that daytime television ads by personal injury lawyers were “quite unsettling.”  Yet, despite this anti-puffery attitude inside the classroom, law schools are among the biggest puffers when it comes to selling their own services.

California State Bar Serves Up Delicious Irony

"This is delicious!"

Lawyer ethics rules — particularly those regarding confidentiality — are supposed to protect clients.  But sometimes the bureaucrats are so obsessed with giving the impression that they are protecting the public that they actually lose sight of that goal.  For example, when doing research for a new law review article, I came across several articles discussing the California Bar’s “Formal Opinion 1986-87.”  This opinion is now quite old, but it is so absurd that it is still being discussed and debated in legal publications as recently as 2013.  In short, the opinion deals with California’s version of the bizarre ethics rule that prohibits an attorney from revealing any information relating to the representation of a client.  And the word “information” includes not only confidential client communications and other secrets, but all information, including information that is widely and publicly available.  (If you are a Wisconsin lawyer and think this is ridiculous, you might be surprised to learn that we, along with most states, have similarly absurd rules in the form of SCRs 1.6 and 1.9.)

“You’re not killing me properly” and other legal news

I’ve often criticized government officials for completely botching nearly every aspect of the criminal justice system.  (Until my recent spate of legal education-related posts, government-bashing is pretty much what this blog has been about since I took to the keyboard with the inaugural post on judicial incompetence in 2010.)  If fact, the negligence, complete ineptitude, and even intentional wrongdoing of many police, prosecutors, and judges makes for a compelling argument against the death penalty.  But now there is a better argument: government officials aren’t even capable of killing someone properly.

Summer hiatus (and good links)

Knightly and I are on summer break, where we're alternating naps and research for a new law review article.  In the meantime, checkout these blog posts for some interesting goings on.  First, and most significantly, there is good news for practicing lawyers: law school enrollments will be down yet again this fall.  If these declines continue, eventually the huge backlog of unemployed lawyers (and the massive numbers of underemployed lawyers) might be able to find suitable work -- though we are a long way off from that utopia.

This graph nicely illustrates the dipping  plummeting applications over the past decade.  This post at Third Tier Reality (a great blog, but not for the law professor or the overly sensitive) discusses how this fall's entering class of law students will likely be the smallest since 1974, even though we now have dozens more law schools than when Steely Dan was making magic.

Bad Business

TV viewing with Knight

Some marketing campaigns are so bad or so embarrassing that you wonder how they ever got off the ground.  One ad that makes me flat-out angry every time I see it is the Time Warner Cable series, where former football coach Bill Cowher walks into a family’s home and just starts talking to them about TWC’s services.  In one commercial, the marketing geniuses behind the ad actually have the nerve to make Cowher read this line: “You shouldn’t have to buy what you don’t want.”  This from the company that makes me buy an entire package of cable channels just so I can get ESPN and FX.

Big Ten conference to dissolve, Rose Bowl to terminate, sky to fall

"Really, Jim?"

A group of college football players at Northwestern recently won the right to unionize and negotiate for better working conditions, health insurance, scholarship terms, and other forms of pay and benefits.  Essentially, the athletes were deemed to be “employees.” This makes sense, of course, as they are under the university’s control, provide a service to the university, produce millions of dollars in revenue for the university, and receive benefits, including tuition and books, in return.  (The fact that they’re paid in goods and services, instead of cash, shouldn’t turn them into non-employees.)  According to this ESPN report, however, the Big Ten’s Jim Delany says that if the schools actually have to pay their athletes, the conference will dissolve and it will also bring an end to the traditional Rose Bowl matchup between the Big Ten and Pac 12 champions.  Really, Jim?

Work experience: Northwestern Law School’s double standard?

I recently read an interview of Northwestern Law School’s Daniel Rodriguez.  In it, he said that Northwestern Law has taken a page from the business schools and requires—or, more accurately, strongly prefers—that its incoming law students have two years of work experience before reentering academia’s bubble.  A double check on the school’s website confirms this: ninety percent of the incoming students have worked at least one year, and more than seventy percent have worked at least two years.  Fair enough.  But then I wondered: does Northwestern Law School impose a comparable, two-year legal work experience preference on its law professors?

Associate’s degree in law?

Attorney Jeff Winger got caught.  After he graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and launched a successful career at a law firm, the Colorado Bar Association found out about his fake bachelor’s degree.  The punishment: disbarment.  The light at the end of the tunnel: go back to college and earn a post-J.D. bachelor’s degree and be readmitted to the bar.

When Winger arrived on campus, one of the professors—a former drunk-driving client of Winger’s—asked: “I thought you had a bachelor’s from Columbia?”  Winger responded: “And now I have to get one from America.  And it can’t be an email attachment.”

Jeff Winger is just a fictional character on NBC’s amazing but recently canceled television show Community (DVDs available here), but his situation got me thinking: aren’t law degrees really just associate’s degrees? 

The Law: “Jealous Mistress” or Ignored Spouse?

Back in the Paper Chase era, law school deans would tell their incoming classes: “Look to your left, look to your right—one of you won’t be here next year.”  Along with this scare tactic came the now-famous warning that “the law is a jealous mistress,” and will require nearly all of a student’s time and attention if he or she hopes to graduate from law school.  Oh, how times have changed.  And for proof, look no further than the University of Texas Law School.    

Legal education potluck: judges, lawyers, law schools, law profs, and law reviews

I can’t quite explain my morbid fascination with the state of legal education — well, maybe I could, but it would take too long and require way too much introspection.  In any case, I’ve often blamed law schools for judges’ lack of understanding of basic legal principles.  But that’s not to say that practicing lawyers, on average, know the law any better than the judges.  It’s just that lawyers’ ignorance of the law is not as obvious to me.  For example, when a prosecutor misstates the law, there is no way to know if: (1) he/she really doesn’t understand the law; or (2) he/she is intentionally misstating the law to try to trick the judge — something I’ve suspected, and prosecutors have even gleefully confessed to me, on several occasions.  But regardless, the point remains: the judiciary’s utter indifference to the rule of law is still traceable to the law school industrial complex.  And a recent article by law school prof (and law school-basher) Paul Campos may have identified some root causes within the law schools.