Writing tip from the Legal Watchdog (or, don’t write like a law professor)

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. 

Law profs just virtue-signaled their way toward irrelevance

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.

Pseudo-Events

In Daniel Boorstin’s book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, he argues that, given the wealth of news outlets in America, there are an awful lot of pages that reporters have to fill.  Therefore, “[t]he successful reporter is one who can find a story . . . If he cannot find a story, then he must make one . . .”

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).

Law school sheep and the US News rankings

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:

Text messages and phone banking – what’s next?

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. 

Ready to pass the bar, not to practice law

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. 

Follow the Science?

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:

Accounting: How to Wreck (and Rescue) a Profession

In my earlier life, becoming a CPA was, in a sense, easy.  To be sure, the two-day exam itself was very tough.  Unlike state bar exams which sometimes have an 80% first-time pass rate, the November 1996 CPA exam, for example, had a 17% pass rate for first-time test takers.  But the process of becoming a CPA was very simple.  Just get a B.S. or B.B.A. in accounting, sign up for and pass the CPA exam, and then wait for your certificate to arrive in the U.S. mail.  Granted, it wasn’t that way in every state, but that’s the way it was in my neighboring state of Illinois where I got my CPA certificate.  The certification allowed you to use “CPA” after your name, and, as the accompanying letter from the Illinois Board of Examiners informed me: “The certificate is good for life and does not need to be renewed.”  Congratulations and welcome to the profession!

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). 

Idaho and Wisconsin: A Tale of Two Preliminary Hearings

In the Idaho quadruple homicide case, defendant Bryan Kohberger is accused of murdering University of Idaho students Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves, and Madison Mogen.  The defense waived the right to a timely preliminary hearing (14 days in Idaho) and set the hearing in June so it has enough time to go through all of the evidence.  The judge cleared five days on the calendar for the hearing itself.  This indicates that the defense gets the discovery materials (e.g., police reports, witness statements, etc.) before the prelim and the state has to call actual witnesses at the evidentiary hearing in order to establish probable cause.

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 Idaho’s preliminary hearing, then these are the hallmarks of Wisconsin’s preliminary hearing:

Yellow pages advertising: a blast from the past

2010 was a simpler time, as there was only ONE place worth advertising: the phone book! This might have been my last year advertising in "the yellow pages." And I no longer advertise anywhere -- I've always found it distasteful, hence the simple, straightforward approach to my old yellow pages ad. But I liked this old ad; it always reminded me of Van Halen's Diver Down album cover.

Enjoy "Secrets" from Diver Down, and re-live the 80s:

"You know how sometimes, you got to run?

You're runnin' blind, but you jumped the gun."