Your ABA Looking Out for You, Blocks Student-Debtor Pay; UC-Irvine Worth It, One of Nation's Best

The ABA recently affirmed the already-standing ban on students getting both pay and credit for performing externships.  As they say in LawLand, they reached the correct result.  Let's get some legal reasoning for the more intellectually-minded:

But a majority of the council sided with critics of the proposed change, who fear that allowing students to be paid for a field placement program for which they receive academic credit would undermine the academic focus of the experience. 

“If this is about the educational experience, it shouldn’t be turned into a job,” said Edwin J. Butterfoss, a professor at Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of nine council members who voted the proposal down.

Seriously.  Academics and money should be separated.  You can't be educated on something while being paid for it.  Everyone knows that once you receive fair compensation for something, you stop learning anything.  That's why corporate America sucks at training people.  Only through the alchemy of signing a master promissory note and sitting with professors like Mr. Butterfoss - or working for free, of course - can one truly clear their mind and learn.

Otherwise, lawyers would be able to learn most of their trade while on the job the first few years.  As we all know, that does not currently happen, as law schools are the exclusive educational source for students, and a complete one at that.  Besides, the companies who choose to have externs instead of hiring law clerks or young attorneys should be rewarded for their affiliation with law schools and the nation's educational mission.  Everyone deserves to get some free labor.

Meanwhile, elsewhere right-minded peoples have found additional reasons to reject such changes:

The Clinical Legal Education Association also opposed dropping the pay ban, fearing creation of a system of unequal access as employers accepted only students they deemed worthy of long-term employment.

Egads.  A system where employers bring on the best potential candidates?  Unheard of.  Thank goodness firms now have the freedom to continue bringing on completely unworthy students.

That was a fun meal, wasn't it?

Here's desert:

As you'll see from the links after the jump, we've written since the UC Irvine School of Law's opening in 2009 about critics who felt California did not need another law school and the world certainly did not need more lawyers. But the law school has soldiered on, becoming among the most respected in the nation.

Yummy yummy.  Take that, critics.  Cali obviously needed a new law school, and you are wrong.  Case closed.