Monday, January 5, 2015

Study Proves Law School Innovation Works

"Law schools can't teach practical skills."  Ha.  Get a load of this, you empty-headed sugar-blooded rat mosquitoes:
The study, led by IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, found that students who graduated from the University of New Hampshire’s Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program outperformed lawyers who had been admitted to practice in the state within the past two years.
Boom!  UNH has a practical program for honors students, and it's kicking ass compared to all the other students at all the other law schools in New Hampshire who also joined the New Hampshire bar.  Maybe other schools that heavily feed into New Hampshire should consider funneling honors students into a practical program and then comparing them to the rest of the student body on a practical-based exercise.  That sounds like it would prove bunches.

According to the Wall Street Journal as quoted by the Wall Street Journal [welcome to 21st century journalism, friends]:
The study compared the standardized client-interview assessments of 123 lawyers who didn’t graduate from the program with the assessments of 69 of the honors students. Daniel Webster scholars scored an average of 3.76 out of 5, compared with an average of 3.11 for the lawyers.
That's science, motherfucker.  Trust me, I'm a doctor.  A juris doctor.

I'm sad, though, that I must dissent from one of my inspirations, Brian Leiter, who at the end of the article says "One of the mistakes in American legal education has been the tendency of all law schools to adopt the same model."  I don't know what Mr. Leiter is talking about.  This isn't a mistake.  The best model for all law schools is as follows:
1.  Make as much money as possible, no matter how unjust.
2.  Dress for the part.
3.  Talk incessantly about justice to cover up 1.
Uh, that's a 2-credit course's worth of material, right there.  If I ran NYLS, that's be like $5,000 or something.  Be thankful I'm not the greedy sort and I'm willing to share my largess of knowledge.

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