On the absurdity of law schools and law reviews

I’ve written several times about the low hours and great pay enjoyed by law professors (many of whom can’t appreciate their situation because they’ve never experienced the intense stress, crazy hours, and low pay enjoyed by most lawyers).  Add on the usual law prof benefits (e.g., health insurance, sabbaticals, summers off, research stipends, etc.) and its no wonder that “law professor” has appeared near the top of several “best-jobs” lists.  And I’ve also written about how some profs launched themselves into the financial stratosphere with creative benefits called “forgivable loans.”  But there’s yet another benefit that, although I had never heard of it, turns out to be relatively common for those in the academy: spousal hiring.

Legal news from around the world wide web

The legal profession is rife with nonsense, and I can't possibly write about all of it.  So here are some great posts from around the www to keep The Dog's readers up to date.

First, prosecutor misconduct.  For me, outside of not-guilty verdicts, some of the sweetest moments in law practice came when prosecutors hid evidence, but then accidentally disclosed it anyway.  (One example is the smoking-gun memo that gets mistakenly placed in my discovery packet.)  But prosecutor misconduct is a serious problem, and we can't always count on their ineptitude to serve as a self-correcting mechanism.  For a great post on prosecutor misconduct (with courtroom video at the bottom), check out The Irreverent Lawyer.

Second, law school shenanigans.  Sure, law profs make a lot of money for a short work year and a 3-4 class per year workload.  That's no longer shocking.  For shocking, visit Outside the Law School Scam to learn how an unkempt dude who went straight from law school to a professorship, and then to a deanship, collected hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and other creative payments like "forgivable loans," and then still kept his professor job (though not the deanship) when it all came unglued.  

And third, law review publishing.  I once wrote a law review article with about 100 footnotes.  Then the editors sent it back and wanted 200 footnotes, including footnotes for sentences so basic they required no citation.  For example, if I write that "sometimes defendants will defend battery cases claiming self-defense," I don't need a footnote because the claim is obvious and undisputed.  After much battling of our own, we ended up settling on about 150 footnotes.  For more on the intricacies of law review publishing, including how the journals select their articles -- finally, an explanation for why the Harvard L. Rev. has thus far refused to publish my work -- visit Class Bias in Higher Education.  

Enjoy! 

Knock-knock game replaces warrant requirement

I don’t know how, logistically, this would work, but someone needs to put the Fourth Amendment out of its misery.  Actually, it’s too late for that.  It is already dead.  We just need to bury it and quit talking about it as if it still exists. 

I’ve been down this road before, but let’s briefly recap.  Assume the police believe that you smoked pot in your home, or possessed a medication that wasn’t prescribed to you, or visited an illegal website from your computer, or owned an adult pornographic video to which a child was exposed, etc.  Further assume the police claim their belief is based on “probable cause” (e.g., an accusation by your neighbor that he smelled pot smoke coming from your apartment, an accusation by your kid’s friend that he saw “naked people” on your TV when he slept over, etc.). 

Another gem from the state bar

The state bar has been serving up a lot of softballs.  Its most recent came in the form of an email, asking me to donate thirty minutes of my time for its latest dues-funded project: a survey on how to improve law schools.  “This survey,” the bar promises me, will “undoubtedly advance the profession.”  That’s a bold claim, and one that I seriously doubt.  But I might have participated were it not for an even bolder claim: the bar tells me to donate my time because “educating tomorrow’s lawyers is a shared responsibility.”

I’m pretty sure that’s not true.  Instead, I’m pretty sure that law professors are responsible for “educating tomorrow’s lawyers.”  Let’s take a look at some numbers to support my novel claim: 

Expunction junction, what’s your function?

There were two Wisconsin cases this past year – Hemp I and Hemp II – on expunction of criminal records for young people convicted of relatively minor crimes.  Aside from the substance of those cases, Hemp II may have put to bed a debate that my colleague Terry Rose and I were having against the director of state courts back in 2010.  In a nutshell, the director put out a pamphlet stating that, even after expunction, “If you are asked if you have ever been convicted of a crime, such as on a job application, you must answer ‘Yes.’ ”  We disagreed.

Wisconsin state bar discourages free speech

I was just thinking that I haven’t written a judge-bashing blog post in quite a while.  And then, out of the blue, I got a call from criminal defense lawyer and free speech advocate Terry W. Rose, telling me about an outrageous opinion piece in the November issue of Wisconsin’s state bar magazine.  This piece, subtitled “never provide information in blog posts . . . that criticizes judges,” is especially alarming because it was written by a lawyer and, worse yet, the vice chair of our state bar professional ethics committee.  Essentially, the opinion piece makes two claims.  Its first claim pertains to lawyers discussing cases in which they are, or have been, involved as counsel.  (I’ve already written about that tandem of bizarre ethics rules in an earlier blog post and in a forthcoming law review article.)  And its second claim — the claim I want to address in this post — is that ethics rules 20:8.2 and 20:8.4(c) “make it very clear that a lawyer may not criticize a judge in most circumstances and doing so could result in significant sanctions.”

Vampires and cops

In my second book I asked: What’s the difference between a vampire and a cop?  Answer: A vampire has to be invited into your home before entering; a cop only has to say he was invited in and the judge will believe him.  And now, it turns out that cops don’t even have to do that much.  In State v. Parisi the cops had “probable cause” to believe that Ms. Parisi was smoking some weed inside her home.  Probable cause is an incredibly low level of proof, but it allows the cops to do a lot of things — except enter her home.  For that, the general rule is that they need an invitation or a judicially-signed search warrant.  (Admittedly, warrants are nearly always rubber-stamped and are nothing more than Fourth Amendment symbolism; worse yet, they sometimes fail to serve even that limited purpose.)

Lawyers, throw away your computers!

I just read an article that annoyed me more than listening to a podcast where the guest starts every sentence with the word “so.”  Apparently there is a group of “young lawyers” who are trying to “shake up [the] legal profession with mobile apps.”  (I hated the expression “apps” when restaurants were using it, and it’s even more annoying when techies use it.  Aren’t the words “appetizers” and “applications” short enough?)  According to the article, this entrepreneurial group may have developed some new software programs that sound potentially useful for certain legal practice areas — kudos if that is, in fact, the case.  But the gist of the article is that the legal profession’s goal should be “to remove computers from the equation and build complex legal documents through mobile devices.”

The problem with continuing legal education (and how to fix it)

I recently attended a day-long continuing legal education (CLE) program as part of my 30 CLE hours that are required every two-year reporting period. It may have been the "longest" eight hours I've experienced since becoming a lawyer — although one speaker’s informative, dynamic, and even inspiring presentation on defending domestic violence cases salvaged the day from complete and utter disaster. Many of the remaining presentations, however, fell into one of the following categories:

The lawyer job market (revisited)

I recently wrote about an advertisement for a Racine County advocate counsel position.  Essentially, the job would require the victim newly hired attorney to handle as many as 80 case appointments, including the defense of serious felonies, for $25,000 per year without benefits or even expense reimbursement.  I suppose that I knew this was outrageous, or I wouldn’t have written about it in the first place.  But as a criminal defense lawyer for the last twelve years, I’ve kind of become immune to governmental and bureaucratic outrageousness, so I didn’t expect that the post would garner such national attention.