California Bar Examiners Respond to Criticism with Convenient Technical Glitch

Yeah, you know how the bar examiners in California have been getting progressively bitch-slapped harder and harder by law deans in California for failing an ungoldly percentage of would-be Clarence Darrows?

Oops.

The State Bar of California accidentally tipped off law school deans about "general subject matter topics" of its upcoming exam — and now is telling everyone what will be on this week's career-altering tests, the group announced Sunday.

The State Bar normally tells the law schools what topics were covered on the tests after they're taken by aspiring lawyers each February and July.

But the State Bar revealed this sensitive information was somehow sent out on Thursday, well ahead of schedule, to 16 law school deans. The blunder, described as "human error," was only discovered over the weekend.

Human error my fuzzy taint.  You didn't see this shit happen in Montana or South Carolina.  Nope, in California, where law deans have begged and begged for a break from the mercilessness of minimum professional standards, they just gave all of their dopes a chance to ditch certain complex subjects and laser-focus in the last weekend before the bar exam.


I just hope when the appoint a task force to investigate this security breach it's stocked with law deans, ideally the ones who come up with the most clever excuses for why their students still couldn't pass the bar exam knowing what topics were going to be discussed.  Give the token private citizen slot to the lawyer in the article who dropped the b-word.

Dramatically improved CA pass rate, here we come!  Scam on.

Maine Potentially Investing Heavily in Law School

One could argue that Maine is our smartest state.  Indeed, I do so here solely because some blue ribbon report just recommended that Maine invest in its law school.  In 2019.  In Maine, a state that - the naysayers claim - could probably get by with one law school shared between it and half of New England.

A report released Friday calls for sweeping changes at the University of Maine School of Law, including the addition of new faculty and administrative positions, expansion of course offerings and an overhaul of governance and operational practices.
...
“Maine (School of Law) has already begun to cannibalize core functions in order to balance budget priorities,” the report says. “If Maine is to have a law school, then it must be repositioned within three years, funded and led by a skilled team as soon as possible.”

University officials Friday did not have an exact figure on how much it would cost to implement the wide-ranging recommendations of the report, but James Erwin, chairman of the UMaine System Board of Trustees, estimated it would require “millions of dollars at least.”

Fuck, boing, yes.  Sure, this is sorta like the institutional equivalent of buying your 51-year-old wife breast implants and new cheekbones instead of just leaving her on the curb and embracing swingin' singledom, but you work with what you have.

The list of suggestions reads like Christmas in July for a law school sycophant.  Big, new investment in diversity (read: getting non-white people to move to Maine)?  Check.  Investment in specifically training lawyers for rural Maine, which has a dreadful lawyer shortage?  Check.  Expanded tenured faculty and an administrator devoted to fundraising?  Big-dick-energy check.

Of course the article discusses the "financial" "issues" of operating a law school in a remote, small population state.  The government isn't giving them nearly enough, admissions have been stagnant, law applicants nationwide are down, blah blah blah.  It's had to make tuition concessions to draw new students and the faculty has even gone without cost-of-living increases since 2013.

But fold the cards?  No, baby, it's time to go all-in.  Student loan money ain't coming in like it used to?  Well, time to amp up state funding!  Get some new tenured faculty and funnel some o' that ol' internet money or somethin' this way! 

I like the cut of your jib, folks.  Tell that blue ribbon task force to go on tour, please.  I've got a few more states they can visit...

Hail, Columbia! The Seven Figure Law School

This Campos/LGM post is from a month ago, but I read fine-print books instead of playing with electronic gizmos and sending e-texts when I was younger so my brain works better but not faster, you damn kids.

Columbia’s law school has passed a fiscal milestone: for the first time, its estimated cost of attendance for a nine-month academic year will be in six figures ($101,345 to be exact).
...
Students who borrow the full cost of attendance will owe about $370,000 when the first loan payment comes due six months after graduation. (This sum is calculated by assuming average historical COA increases over the next three years, plus accruing loan interest and origination fees).
...
How much did it cost to do this kind of thing when the heart of
rock and roll the baby boom was moving through this and similar institutions?
 
Inflation-adjusted to constant dollars, about one quarter as much. [Example from1980, blah blah blah]

Turn the amps to 11, 'cause speaking of 1980:

Hell's bells!
Yeah, hell's bells!
You got me ringing
Hell's bells!
My temperature's high
Hell's bells!

Rock on, motherfuckers, a $100k/year law school! Much like automobile sales, we've long crossed the point where it's "overpriced" and we're in straight-up "DGAF luxury" Lambo et al territory. You want a Daewoo, you little schmeltz? No, you want a Maserati, jet black like your natural hair age 65, with a phat bitch pre-installed in the passenger seat, stick shift only, mmmbaby!

And with the prestige of a luxury degree like Columbia in a hot, lawyer-hungry market like New York (see my last post), you're sure to be gainfully employed for at least five or six years, more than enough time to pay back any debt. Don't worry, if the long days at Necktie / Noose LLP send you drinkin' like Bon Scott, you'll probably have health care sufficient to cover any incidents.  Probably.

Note that the urbane, progressive Columbia is bucking a distasteful, garish counter-trend to lower tuition in backwater red state hick-holes to "keep the best minds at home" (like any "best minds" would fall for THAT scam!). For example, South Carolina just slashed in-state tuition to what must be unsustainable 2015 levels.

Losers. When people seek out counsel, they don't want some poser who bargain-shopped. They want a grown-up bambino who knows how to spend money, who has no qualms about dumping cash on people who paid rent-controlled tuition. What better way to show clients that you know how to spend money - and that you're willing to invest in their winning case, if need be - than by plunking down $400k for the premier legal education shared by U.S. Grant, Jr.; David Stern; and Roy Cohn?

But why stop there? The market obviously is signalling that top legal education has no maximum price. These little bitches will sign over their damned organs for a Manhattan T13 roll-o'-the-dice. Let's steer this branch of the express to 500, 750, and one million dollars. Why not? This ain't no Highway to Hell.  The rubber stamp's never been wetter and if you tell people there's only a few law schools that'll get them where they wanna go, they'll throw money at you like fat drunks on a strip club bar crawl who know they'll be dead before the bill comes due, only they'll likely be alive, with models, and bottles, and a suit collection featuring every tone of gray.

I mean, you might think a $1M cost of attendance is ludicrous, but you, a starch-eating rational grump, thought a $200k cost of attendance was ludicrous and now that's S.O.P. Buckle up, buckaroos, 'cause mixed metaphors be damned we're shiftin' this baby into warp speed.  By the light of the Million Dollar Express shall we see light.

Cue the music, boys:

I won't take no prisoners, won't spare no lives
Nobody's putting up a fight
I got my bell, I'm gonna take you to hell
I'm gonna get you, [Dean?] Satan get you 

The New York Lawyer Shortage

I'm not making this up - it's a real news article/topic - that NEW YORK of all states (what, not Florida?) has a lawyer shortage!  You know, "hey, why does that place need so many fucking law schools" New York.  "They put the dead ones in Banker's Boxes and no one misses a beat" New York.  "Touro Law School sounds made up" New York.  That New York.

God damn I love this industry.  Give me a fellowship and let me shoot this shit in my veins, drooling passed out in the stacks of the local law library.

Here's the article with the golly-shucks lawyer picture (winning sartorial formula: bow-tie, bold belt, no suit; needs suspenders or jeans ideally, B+) and the one-two punch of anecdotal whimsy ("kids 'r' movin' away!") and context-free data (only 1 lawyer for every 1310 residents, Orleans County, how dare you!).

"Rural justice is a quickly disappearing commodity," the article bellows, tickling my fervid loins like an electric feather and calling upon anyone who can pass the first year at St. Johns and once upon a time read a Richard Russo novel...

These articles all sound the same after a while, but we're used to seeing them pop up about states no one ever wants to visit like Nebraska or Montana, woebegone artless shitholes that have to pay for tourism campaigns with subtitles like "it won't be THAT embarrassing to tell your parents you came here!"  New York has hick places, but you're never that far from a liberal arts campus, a tourist hot-spot, or a big city - the town featured in the article is within an hour of Binghamton and a bit over an hour from Syracuse, after all.  But I guess those expert practitioners cannot drive...

If that place can have a lawyer shortage, the only answer is to start a task force, ask how you can get young people to move to rural communities against their economic and cultural interests to, uh, serve the undefined and debatable greater good, and, hell, just pump more people through law schools, will ya?

Not convinced?  Want to claim that young people are rational economic actors (ha!).  Well, don't worry, the neutral Albany Law School brought science to this church potluck:

A survey by Albany Law School published in April shows the strain facing those left behind. Among its conclusions: Rural attorneys are overwhelmed by their caseloads, suffering financial stress and struggling with limited resources.

Overwhelming work with financial stress?  What could possibly go wrong on the five-lane way to making money hand-over-fist?! Well.... for one thing, Boomer lawyers and their egos could not retire:

Responses like this were typical: “I am the only lawyer handling complex business transactions. I am 69 years old and cannot retire because too many people rely on me.”

If only the State of New York would put the resources in to train lawyers who could handle the complex business transactions of postcard New York.

I guess, again, we'll just have to put out more lawyers until we get one to apprentice for this gentleman and then pay him a generous buy-out in lieu of a retirement account. 

Ditto for Georgia and Maine, which the article also states face calamitous lawyer shortages.  The ABA must act now to correct these things, or else in ten years life will continue unabated and the law school profit-self-righteousness matrix will remain sadly underwhelming.  Scam on.

Dean Satan's Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of Scamcraft it becomes necessary for red-faced administrators to speak in the third person and gesture menacingly at the bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the hypothetical separation.

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that not all men are created equal, that legal administrations are endowed by their Creator with certain surplus uncommon abilities, unimpeachable white-collar manners, and unalienable rights, that among these are Limitless Locution, Licentious Leisure, and the pursuit of Legal Lucre. — That to secure these rights, academic bar associations are instituted among our Special Clique, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Administrative Oversight becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Deans to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Administrative Regime (or just destroy the existing one, por favor?), laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Satisfaction and Greed.

The history of the present American Bar Association is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these Legal Institutions and prevent the Justice of the Inoffensive Exploitation of Student Loan Conduits.  To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

I would list them out Severally and Specifically, the Scorns and Calumnies, but as a Law Dean such a task is beneath me and my Secretary is on Holiday.  Basically, kindly lower bar score thresholds and ensure the rest of us are not going the way of our Lesser Acquaintances.  The soft exploitation of minorities is good, too.  I also would like a free Espresso Bar at the next Tropical Convention.  Suffice to say, the American Bar Association has blown its organizational imperative to fully support its member organizations' earnest efforts of Scamcraft.

Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of my intentions, I do, in the Name, and by Authority of my Supreme Deanship, declare that I am, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent  hereby sternly advising the American Bar Association of my Supreme Consternation. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, I pledge my Life, my Fortune (the fuck?) and my sacred Honor.
 
Govern yourself accordingly.

Scam on,

Dean Satan