Friday, January 24, 2014

SUNY-Buffalo at Cool Kids Table

SUNY-Buffalo has been admitted into the Order of the Coif, an organization that is basically the whipped topping on a sundae; you've already got your ticket to the upper middle class, but this appellation gives you first-class accommodation.  If I told you blankly that Applicant A was a member of the Order and Applicant B was not, who would you hire?

Damn straight.  The only problem with the Order of the Coif is that only 10% of law graduates can get it.

Welcome, Buffalo-ians?
The Order of the Coif — often called the law school equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa — extended the invitation following a lengthy and thorough application process. UB Law is the only new chapter granted this year by the organization. UB joins a select list of law schools that have received this honor, a group that includes Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Michigan, University of California-Berkeley, Chicago, Georgetown and Northwestern.
You forgot Penn and Virginia!  Don't short-change Buffalo on their new dining companions.  Sure, the Order also has Pacific-McGeorge, DePaul, Case Western, Villanova, and the University of North Dakota, but obviously Buffalo's press release wanted to get a snapshot of a more fair representation of the school's in Buffalo's weight class, which, I might add, is much higher up than Columbia, which is still not a member of the club.

7 comments:

  1. Order of the Coif? Sounds like a secret society of hairdressers. Of course, if it were, it could actually get you a job...

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  2. Jesus H Christ. Trying to elevate their toilet by name-dropping Yale and such.

    Well, if a Buffalonian can be admitted to the Order of the Coif, why not also extend the honor to Indiana Tech "Law School"? I see no reason why not. See the criteria that the press release lists:

    "The organization’s criteria for admittance include commitment to superior legal education, a stimulating intellectual environment, dedicated teaching faculty who also produce quality research, instruction in both basic and new areas of the law, and rich and varied co-curricular activities, such as law journals, moot trial and appellate courts. In addition, the school’s student body must have varied educational backgrounds and excellent academic credentials, and the staff of the law library must provide a high level of assistance to the school’s teaching and scholarship."

    Those sound not only like standard propaganda from a law school's glossy brochure but also very much like the criteria that the ABA uses for accreditation. And damn near any law school that doesn't misspell "Law" in its name gets accreditation. So why should this "prestigious" organization not admit every goddamn law school on the planet?

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    Replies
    1. The school misses virtually every criterion on that list.

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    2. No, because those criteria are so vague that any institution might satisfy them—or not, depending on who is making the assessment. How does one evaluate "commitment to superior legal education"? Evidently the Order of the Coif takes a different approach from yours or mine, since a whole pile of stinking toilets were deemed to satisfy this criterion.

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    3. I think there are only about 30 schools that don't miss every criterion on that list.

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  3. Why would a toilet like SUNY Buffalo be accepted?

    Who got paid? What favors were given, etc.

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  4. The thing I've learned about name-dropping over my years of life is that name-dropping doesn't prove how prestigious you are for being able to drop those names, but rather it proves the prestige of the people who's names you drop.

    Being willing to drop the names of Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Michigan, University of California-Berkeley, Chicago, Georgetown and Northwestern means that the people at SUNY-Buffalo believe these schools to be prestigious. It doesn't mean that SUNY-Buffalo is prestigious.

    I doubt that anyone at Yale would mention SUNY-Buffalo in the same breath, sentence, or paragraph as Harvard, Cornell, Georgetown, or their own school.

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