Paul Campos: “Damn it feels good to be a gansta”

Paul Campos is a law professor who started and, sadly, recently ended a blog titled “Inside the Law School Scam.”  The title of the blog speaks for itself, and there is little I can write about Campos that hasn’t already been written.  But a little is better than nothing, so here goes:

Lies, damned lies, and the statistics that expose them

Sometimes, numbers have an uncanny way of exposing lies.  Consider this tale of two groups: police officers and law school bureaucrats.  With regard to the police, one famous study on police-officer behavior revealed that, before the Fourth Amendment was imposed on the states, the police would simply write in their reports what really happened: they stopped people on the street for no reason, searched them, found drugs, and arrested them.  In fact, the police admitted to this in 33 percent of their police reports.  Only in 14 percent of their reports did they write that the drugs magically fell out of the defendants’ pockets.

The wrong kind of theory

Legal education has come under a great deal of fire lately.  One criticism that has been around long before the recent legal education crisis, however, is that law schools teach only theory, and not practical skills.  The debate, in a nutshell, boils down to two competing camps.  The practicing-lawyer camp mocks theory, while praising the value of a practical education.  After all, we lawyers are licensed to practice law, and clients deserve some basic level of competence, even from new graduates.  The law-professor camp, on the other hand, elevates theory to heavenly heights, singing its praises along with the importance of teaching students “how to think like a lawyer”—whatever that phrase may mean.  Unfortunately, the two sides are only preaching to their respective choirs.  In fact, the debate never gets off the ground because the word theory means something different to each camp.

Law review publishing: In search of a useful ranking system

To date, I’ve published ten articles in law reviews, with an eleventh on the way.  Basically, the system works like this: I write an article, submit it to 50–100 different law journals, and wait for offers of publication. Then, after a series of emails with the editors of some of the journals, I have to decide which offer I should accept.  (After that, the article goes through a lengthy, and sometimes painful, editing process before it’s eventually published.)  My initial decision on where to publish has typically been guided by the US News rankings of law schools, which, in legal publication circles, is used as a proxy for the quality of a law school’s journal.  For example, the UCLA Law Review is published by the UCLA School of Law, which US News says is the fifteenth best law school in the land.  This means that authors would love to publish in the UCLA Law Review and, as a result, that journal may receive well over 2,000 annual submissions for about 12-15 available publication slots.  As we slide down the US News rankings—say, to the bottom fifty-or-so of our nation’s 200-plus law schools—the journals may receive only a couple hundred submissions for their 12-15 publication slots.

Judicial do over

Criminal procedure can be incredibly harsh and unforgiving for defendants and their lawyers.  If a defense lawyer makes the smallest misstep, or fails to do or say just the right thing at just the right time, he can inadvertently “waive” his client’s rights and protections, often with disastrous outcomes.  But, when it comes to judges, the law is much more forgiving.  In State v. Robinson the judge sentenced the defendant to a multi-year term of confinement.  The defendant was hauled out of the courtroom and straight to jail to begin serving her time.  But the judge slept on it, had second thoughts, and decided that he wanted a “do over.”  So the next day he had the deputies haul the defendant out of jail and back into court, where he re-sentenced her and gave her an additional nine months. 

Lawyer salaries: going, going . . . gone

A couple of years ago, some members of the Wisconsin Bar were putting up a stink about the low hourly wage paid to appointed attorneys who represent indigent citizens accused of crimes.  I wrote about it on the MU Faculty Blog, and made the prediction that the state government would not raise this pay rate, which has been unchanged for decades.  And not only was that prediction correct—I’m not taking credit for reading the future; the prediction was easy and obvious—but since that time, lawyer wages have fallen even further.  Many employers, including the government, are now advertising lawyer jobs where the salary is—you guessed it—zero.

Double Standards in Legal Ethics

When reading my $500 per year Wisconsin Lawyer Magazine—which appears to be free to everyone who does not pay bar dues—I saw an article about an out-of-state lawyer discipline case.  The lawyer was publicly censured, fined, and got stuck with “the cost of the proceeding” for some advertising claims that were confusing, probably misleading, and, in some cases, false.  Here’s an example: “the lawyer stated that attorneys in the firm focused their practice in one area of law, but the firm’s web page listed 27 distinct practice areas.”  Obviously, the word “focused” could have different meanings to different people.  For example, some attorneys in the firm may spend half of their time in a single area, thus qualifying as a “focus,” while still practicing in multiple other areas of law for the other half of their work.  Alternatively, maybe some of the firm’s lawyers do “focus” exclusively on one area, while other members don’t focus and instead practice multiple areas of law.  So why was the lawyer disciplined? 

MU leaves the Big East!

Congratulations to Marquette, Seton Hall, Georgetown, Villanova, St. John's, Providence, and DePaul -- the Big East's basketball only schools -- for finally leaving the conference! (Knightly, left, is thrilled with the news.)  For these basketball schools, it puts an end to the ship-jumping and conference realignment forced on them by football schools chasing an extra buck of television revenue while destroying their historical, regional rivalries in the process.  I've been hoping for this break-away for years, and wrote about it more than a year ago.  Hopefully this group of seven will pick up three more schools from the region to form a nice, ten-team league with each team playing every other team twice -- once at home and once on the road.  These are exciting times for fans of the seven schools.  It's like March Madness, but in December.            

Wisconsin’s costly paternalism

Tyler H., a thirteen-year-old Wisconsin kid, was having a really bad day.  First, his brother didn’t like the way Tyler was chewing his food, so he “hit Tyler in the back.”  Then, when the inevitable wrestling match ensued, the boys’ mother got into the act and hit Tyler in “his mouth.”  After getting struck by his mother, Tyler did not react physically; instead, he swore at his mother and smartly “left the house.”  But then Tyler’s mother decided to exacerbate her disastrous parenting by calling the police—that’s right: the police.  And once these government agents were invited into what should have been a family matter, things got even worse for young Tyler.

Wisconsin Supreme Court muddies the waters in plea bargaining

In State v. Frey, the defendant agreed to plead to certain charges and the state agreed to dismiss certain charges outright, rather than read them in, at sentencing.  This distinction between dismissing charges outright and dismissing and reading them in has always been a critical one.  In several cases courts have routinely recognized the distinction.  Even the official plea form that the defendant is required to fill out and sign warns him that the judge may consider read-in charges when imposing sentence.  Of course, in light of this warning, the only rational conclusion is that charges dismissed and not read in, i.e., dismissed outright or simply dismissed, cannot be considered by the judge when imposing sentence.  This makes sense for a couple of reasons.