Sunday, January 24, 2016

Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi, Thomas Jefferson?

The recently-widowed Thomas Jefferson spent a few years in France, serving as the young America's foreign minister and hanging out with the Marquis de Lafayette just before the French Revolution.  It was there that he purportedly took up with Maria Cosway and a statutorily young Sally Hemings.

So it's fitting that his namesake legal education institution, the west coast post-graduate analog to Jefferson's esteemed University of Virginia, is also going to France for a little prestigious diplomacy and a little screwing.

For the low price of $3,000, one can go to Nice and study constitutional law in the global context with Justice Antonin Scalia, a man whose record on the global implications of the U.S. Constitution and vice-versa is fairly well established.  But, hey, kids, why do a Google search when you can have a month-long Riviera vacation while you should be building a domestic resume?
The Nice program activities include a day in the French court, a luncheon lecture series featuring distinguished judges, law professors and practitioners of international law and a French class offered for free to all students,” said Susan Tiefenbrun, founding director of the program. “The University of Nice School of Law offers an ideal environment for learning international law in a city that is both beautiful and rich in European culture and history.
Because if you're going to pay $3,000 in tuition alone to go to France for a month, you might as well spend your time learning about law.

Sure, Thomas Jefferson is one of the most transparent scams in all of legal education and should be ashamed at using the name of one of America's greatest minds, but that doesn't mean it has to stop doing it's thing.  Just because it's going to trial on a fraud case and having lenders cash in their chips doesn't mean the French study-vacations with a (surely well-compensated) smug, living imprimatur of unobtainable legal sector prestige have to stop.

Enjoy the vino, your Honor.  Maybe you, like Jefferson, will enjoy the finer offerings of France.  One can only hope, though, that there is no revolution this time around, that the students of Thomas Jefferson remain ignorant to the bubble in which they live, and that the mandarins like you and those who run this fine school may continue enjoying the fruits of Metropolis above-ground while the justice-doers happily work beneath the Earth without a thought of egalite or fraternite in their fourth-tier brains.

7 comments:

  1. The other unranked legal toileTTTT in San Diego offers a month long $5,000 stay in Malta to study about a pro-bono legal program that is headquartered in, get this, Los Angeles! There are dorks who actually live in Los Angeles who travel across the world to hear about a program that operates just down the freeway. They could've spend $20 on gas, walked into their building and pick any brochure, heck, for an extra $5 they could have shaken the director's hand.

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  2. At least there, Antonin Scalia will enjoy France's many fine cheeses, without whining.

    My Admin Law "professor" told our class how Scalia was a lecturer at Third Tier Drake for a week, and how we went absolutely mad because the luncheon for him did not include his favorite Italian cheese. At the student and faculty Q&A, one "professor" had prepared a long question for him, asked it, and Scalia merely answered "You don't know what you're talking about."

    http://www.law.drake.edu/clinicsCenters/conLaw/

    "Eleven U.S. Supreme Court Justices have delivered the Opperman Lecture: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. (pictured left), Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Justice Harry A. Blackmun and Justice Samuel A. Alito."

    I remember listening to Roberts on campus and seeing how everyone was bored to tears at his lecture. Furthermore, I also recall how I read exactly one parsed case in that Admin Law class and earning a B+ or A-.

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  3. Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance KingJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:54 AM

    I am guessing that TJLS wants to distinguish itself from California's Larry Layton School of Law. TJLS is selling a legal education the same way that Volvo sold its top SUV a few years back. For a few thousand dollars more, they flew you out to Switzerland where you picked up your SUV and drove it around. They then shipped it to the US after you completed your tour...It's about SALES!!! This looks "cool" to a young kid who graduated from Central Baptist Torah Tech College with a 2.67 GPA...

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  4. Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance KingJanuary 24, 2016 at 3:11 PM

    One more thing. Politicians shill for products. Bob Dole for Viagra and Senators selling reverse mortgages. Bill Clinton and Colin Powell speak at "Motivational Seminars" for $100 a plate. These guys get money to shill. Same thing with Scalia. Sales. SALES. These young kids won't see through it....

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  5. Overpriced junkets that enable scamsters to rip off even more money while students get a vacation paid for at public expense (since few of them will pay back the loans that fund it).

    French lesson: That's known as an arnaque (meaning 'rip-off').

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  6. This is depraved. Add airfare, meals, and lodging to your junket and see what your tab runs. As for Scalia, I wonder if he'll recuse himself when the inevitable law school case makes it to the Supreme Court? Bwaaaahaaaaahaaaa ... I kill me.

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  7. Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance KingJanuary 27, 2016 at 1:49 PM

    Ethics and Scalia don't belong on the same page. Scalia went on a Hunting/fishing trip with friend Cheney. Cheney had pending legal matters before Scalia. Discuss:

    Quoting Leonard Cohen: "Everybody knows the dice are loaded, Everybody knows..."

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