Investment Lawyer Says "Buy!" for Legal Education

From some surely-reputable website called "ozy.com" we get a rap from Edward Klees, a gung-ho investment lawyer:

Supply and demand is starting to favor the law student. With even a little faith in the future, a young lawyer now has a better shot at success.

Truth.  Supply and demand definitely favors the law student.

 They Want YOU! Corporations need lawyers to meet the huge demand for regulation, which soared after the 2008 financial crisis. 

Uncle Sam in the hizzy!  I wish law schools would do more to promote this truth, instead of re-posting discouraging and obviously-fake job listings for non-JD "compliance" folks on job boards.  Everyone knows regulation means lawyer time.

...you may only need a laptop and a phone. Many lawyers with children or a parent to care for have more flexibility than a doctor, dentist or banker. It’s tougher for courtroom lawyers, but even for those folks, much work can be done outside the chambers.

Kids, one of the great advantages of being a lawyer is the how-low-you-can-go game other people like to play with your personal overhead.  Being a lawyer is great because there's no need for all sorts of things that every stable full-time lawyer stubbornly clings to.  I mean, if you're an investment manager or a sales person or a corporate drone, there's just no way you could ever do that with such minimal items.  And if you're an ER doc, you need, like a full exam room with triage and nurses and shit.  Lawyer you just need a laptop and a phone and you've got your ticket for the 98% lottery.

Investment Law. This field didn’t really exist 30 years ago.

Before that, people would do their own IPO paperwork and standard securities filings and compliance shit and Blue Sky lawsuits apparently without legal specialists.  God damn that must have been a dark age.  Than God Congress passed all this regulation that makes lawyers super-duper-employable.

As financial firms have grown and globalized, a once-sleepy area of the law is now a thriving epicenter of the multitrillion-dollar investment world.

Remember Natty the Natural Disaster Gnat's Number One Rule:  When there's an epicenter of a shit-storm, run headlong to the middle of it.

So forget Mr. Robinson and listen to me. But don’t sue me if I’m wrong.

...but definitely copy the expert disclaimer and Boomer movie references. That's how real lawyers do it. 

Paging Andy Kaufman: Here [the Poor] Come To Save the Day!

Here is a thoughtful article about how Suffolk plans to kick ass.  As part of an "overhaul" of how it does business to meet the demands of a changing world, the article highlights five major take-a-ways about legal education is changing, summarized from a recent interview with Suffolk associate dean of academic affairs.

Amidst some nice buzz-wording, the article notes this:

 Underserved markets will save the day: Legal experts estimate that 85 percent of people in the U.S. involved in civil cases are without legal representation. New models for the delivery of services at reasonable rates will change that dynamic. "This is the law. This is what lawyers do ... So that people who need legal representation can have it, and people who have legal training can do meaningful work."

Such dulcet and harmonious breath you utter!

Let's assume - arguendo! - that shoddy statisticians like Matt Leichter are correct and that there is currently an oversupply of attorneys.  Shit, let's assume a 2-1 oversupply.

If, currently, only 15% of the population is hiring attorneys in situations that warrant the hiring of an attorney, an increase to 30% would gainfully employ every attorney and virtually guarantee a shortfall.  An increase to 60% (which will happen when legal services are more reasonable in price) and suddenly we would be underlawyered by a factor of 2!  And that's assuming - arguendo! - that there currently IS an oversupply, which is about as real as saying global warming exists.

A 1-to-2 undersupply of attorneys would mean that greedy lawyers [a redundancy] could charge more, which would make their services again non-cost-effective for the poor and middle class. 

So, in summation, the poor and middle class are going to start purchasing legal services in the future at a higher percentage because of "new models" [models and bottles, indeed!] that will be "dynamic" in bringing about "reasonable rates."  We should err on the side of oversupplying to meet this potentially massive demand.  QED.

It's economics, folks.

A Serious Post Re: Parody, Charlie Hebdo, and the Law School Scam

This blog obviously trades a great deal in parody, satire, irony, sarcasm, caricature, and similar literary devices (fun fact: these are not all the same thing!).  As a writer, I hold these expressive forms as valuable as journalistic expository writing or bare-all, straight-shooter opinion pieces, and I don't believe a civilized free society can have it any other way.

Writing, like all art, is designed to communicate ideas and provoke emotional reactions.  In the right circumstances, parody and satire can do one or both of these things more effectively than other forms.  These devices are excellent at pointing out absurdities, silly ideas, and wrongful behavior.

For example, this:

Jay Conison is little different than a crumbling sweatshop operator.

is an opinion, expressed in simple metaphor, that someone might hold after reading something like this, which is an excellent straight-up piece.  But one could also say this:

The factory manager, Jay Conison, defended the recent spate of violent machine-related tragedies by stating the following:  "A factory is a complex commercial enterprise delivering a wide range of production-related services. Different factories have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are very strong in safety, others very strong in craftsmanship. Some position themselves to provide opportunity to workers; others, like ours, position themselves to develop an employee pool of diverse, tough survivors who made it through the gauntlet of death that kills 50% of careers and maims the rest."

The hastily-thought parody is not necessarily better, but different, and seeking to convey a slightly different idea.  For a more well-known example of this same concept, you can look at this viral Onion article (likely not workplace safe, unless your workplace is either depraved or chill), which makes an opinion comparison between religions so much more elegantly and poignantly than the blunt opinion of "other religions don't do this shit." 

There is certainly a sliding scale of ease in these forms.  It is difficult to satirize or parody Mother Theresa or Gandhi.  It is even harder to do the same to the humble and pleasant World War II veteran who quietly and dutifully performs volunteer work with a dying body.  It's remarkably easy to lampoon politicians, televangelists, celebrities, newscasters, and all-purpose assholes.  I will leave it to the reader to surmise where law school promoters fall in this matrix.

 The overall point is that satire and parody - which would include visual artists in a tradition including Hogarth and Nast - are a tool in the arsenal of speaking truth to power and engaging public debate, whether that be political, economic, religious, or social.  It can also, I will readily concede, be used for ill purposes, like to promote intolerance.

Often, the powerful can easily deal with negative, straight-shooting opinions; any good politician has thought through opposing viewpoints and knows how to address them.  Any enduring religion has developed a foolproof flow diagram of religious reasoning to counteract the claims of unbelievers and heretics.  For straight matters of opinion and debate, the powerful have usually already won those battles, and can often deflect them easily.

Parody, satire, and its relatives strike a different nerve, and often bring something that the target did not or could not anticipate.  Instead of addressing a powerful person straight on, they strike from an angle, away from the powerful target's home turf.  Often, that's what makes really good parody more discomforting and threatening.  There usually is simply no great response to well-done parody or satire, and certainly no way to compose one in advance, which makes it a volatile force of nature to people who build houses of power and belief on infirm foundations.

And this brings me to Charlie Hebdo.  The crazy people who do things like this aren't lashing out because some juvenile cartoonists violated a sacred tenet of their religion.  Let's be clear on that one.  For one, if extremist terrorists were going to kill because of the violation of Islam's tenets by 3rd parties, they've got much bigger fish to fry.  For two, the whole reason for the ban on images of Muhammad was originally to prevent idolatry (take yourself back to medieval Christianity for a comparison, which ignored its own religious teachings, but that's another story for another day); now the absence of depictions of Muhammad is a form of worship in its own right in some select Islamic interpretations (an irony no doubt lost in the haze of blind faith).  Western depictions of Muhammad, particular those in parody,  threaten them, threaten their ideas and beliefs and, ultimately, threaten what power they have.  The depictions of Muhammad found throughout the middle east and in art history, not quite as much.

And so their reaction is not so much punitive against Charle Hebdo and the staffers who were tragically and senselessly murdered, but rather chilling.  They sacrificed a little to gain a lot: the overzealous respect of Muhammad (or their interpretation of his life and work) in global media.  And for fuck's sake, it worked.  At a time where media outlets should be publishing Muhammad cartoons as items of legitimate news interest in a free society, they're self-censoring.  Because wackjobs exist who feel so threatened by grade-school parody that they will set Paris on fire, Muhammad and Islam have been isolated and are treated differently than other religions.  Of course, this is simply a continuation of the Danish cartoon fiasco from a few years back (and, as an aside, not that far from fair criticism of Supreme Court opinions like Pacifica).  As South Park (I can't believe I'm citing South Park and "The Federalist" in the same paragraph) eloquently put it at the time:

Either it's all okay, or none of it is.

Once you place something in the category of the unimpeachable or unmentionable, you give it an unassailable power.  Any addressing of the idea or person has to now be on that person or idea's own terms.  That's as good as effectively having removed it from the marketplace of ideas.  And if something as big as a global religion can be removed from our marketplace of ideas so easily, we might as well not have one, as it has literally no security.  So for all the media organizations trying to report on these topics while conceding turf to extremists and self-censoring, eat a dick.

I mention all of this now because I can't help but draw comparisons to the law school scam media.  The most salient example is Nancy Leong's crusade of insanity against dybbuk.  Without reheashing the whole ordeal, Dybbuk wrote some sarcastic tributes to her work.  In response, Nancy defended her work with churlish sarcasm, accused him of sexism, accused him of racism against her Hawaiian ancestry, and her and others reframed the debate as one about dybbuk's character and attorney ethical rules.  Dybbuk's speech was and has been chilled as a result, and speech critical of Leong's work has been effectively chilled from other writers.  And given the choice, to be blunt, why would any of us write about Nancy when the Open Road of Least Resistance showed paths to others, like ADPC or Joan King or the 99.99% of others who haven't filed expensive bar complaints? 

It's really tempting to give in to terrorism's logic.

There are other examples, of course, such as the lashing out against Paul Campos (who occasionally dabbles in the above literary devices, as it's difficult to avoid in this industry), or Thomas Cooley suing a critical blogger (which, let's be straight, was entirely about chilling effects).  There are lots of people doing great work in the law school criticism field - Above the Law, Paul Caron, Kyle McEntee, Brian Tamanaha, etc. - who color within the lines, and that's wonderful and necessary (as much as I cringe at Above the Law's editorial tone, they do good work on this front).

But there's absolutely a place for more aggressive and emotion-provoking commentary, and to shut those doors (or deny they exist, like much of the media has done in this area) is to decimate a true marketplace of ideas and to potentially stifle the full capabilities of reform.

I say this not to compare scamblogging to a longstanding publication like Charlie Hebdo or to weigh the relative "badness" of law school bullies and Islamic terrorists.

But as a society and as a sub-culture, we cannot let squeaky wheels get more grease than they deserve.  We cannot offend or criticize only those who are mature adults.  We cannot be deterred by people whose response to criticism is childish whining.  We cannot give them more courtesy than we give reasoned people, or else we perversely enhance their power.  There cannot be a right against being offended.  In scamblogging, either everything is on the table - including certain scholarship and everything accompanying how certain professors found their positions in life, if necessary - or none of it is.  We must resist the temptation to give in to such tactics in any respect.

I considered concluding this essay with a short piece entitled Wet Slippers and the Open Road to Mecca but have decided not to for a lack of space.  Instead, I give the following two quotes:

A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.  - G.K. Chesterton 

I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it. - Voltaire [who, for the record, never said the quote about defending to the death opponents' free speech rights].

Both of these apply fully to criticism of law school.

My sympathies go to the families and friends of those murdered in Paris, and I pray that people honor their memory, not by emptily reciting "Je suis Charlie", but by refusing to alter their speech or behavior out of fear provoked by criminals and genuine malcontents who seek to chill speech and remove topics from the realm of open debate out of their own self-interest.

Where I Declare Myself the 26th Most Influential Person in Legal Education

Words cannot express how happy I was when I got my double-subscription platinum edition copy of The National Jurist this morning and saw that they've named their "25 Most Influential People in Legal Education."

Some of you might say, "uh, the American taxpayer?  whoever is in charge of the loan system?"  But you would be oh so wrong, just as anyone who said "dybbuk" or "nando" or "lawlemmings" or any other traitor.  Guys, face it:  you're not nearly as important as some 4th-tier professors I've never heard of despite monitoring legal education news for the entirety of last year.

National Jurist broke the candidates into four categories:  Innovators, Controversial, Intellectuals, and (shiver me timbers!) Loathed.

Bill Henderson is 1st.  Our hero, Brian Leiter, comes in 3rd and they list him as intellectual, controversial, and loathed.  What an ubermensch.  Villains Tamanaha and Kyle McEntee (who is NOT EVEN A LAW PROFESSOR) are 7th and 8th, respectively.

The editors clearly wanted to send a message by putting whiz kid mathematician Michael Simkovic at 16 while slipping scoundrel muckrucker Paul Campos at 17.  The jab is clear:  math beats empty douche-ridden sophistry.  Million-dollar law degrees, people.

I'll be the first to admit I did not actually read the article (beyond noting certain omissions, of course), but it appears the "loathed" teaser was just for Leiter and Campos.  If anyone actually reads it and discovers otherwise, let me know.

I'm off to consult books on statutory interpretation to figure out the difference between "controversial" and "loathed" in this context.  May also cruise in my Bentley and fornicate with a stewardess.  See those unicorns out the window?  God, reality is fun.  Have I mentioned that I convinced at least 30 people to go to law school last year?  I should really be more public with my statistics so magazines like this can give recognition where it's due.  Not that I'm bitter or anything; I'll just think of myself as the 26th most influential person.  It's like the 5th Beatle debate, only with more sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

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.

Hurray for Law School Renaissances

In looking over our posts from the last year, I wish to provide my readers with some quotes that encapsulate the year it was:

Nicholas Allard, as quoted in the January 9, 2014 entry:

Ten years from now, people will look back at 2014 and say it marked the start of the new world of law, a renaissance where the respect and reputation of lawyers and law schools began to rise by measurable benchmarks...

 [glorious material omitted]


Nicholas Allard, as quoted in the November 11, 2014 entry:

We don't know what evidence you have to support this surprising (and surprisingly disparaging) claim, but we do have evidence about our own 2014 graduates, and it tells us precisely the opposite:  their credentials were every bit as good as our 2013 graduates, if not even better...our graduates were every bit as qualified as in previous years, and just as well prepared...In plan language, I disagree with you: It is not the students, it's the test.

 As Dean Allard no doubt learned, even the best renaissances sometimes have a rough go of it at the beginning.  In February, of course, he had no reason to believe that the nation's bar examiners would suddenly buy into the scamblogger myths and rig their standardized test to make this year's law graduates look less able.  

 I would be remiss as a respected journalist if I did not mention that Erica Moeser, "President" of the NCBE, "wrote" "something" of a "response" to Allard (without giving him the dignity of recognition for his efforts) in their most recent publication (see President's Page, p. 4).

I then looked to two areas for further corroboration. The first was internal to NCBE. Among the things I learned was that whereas the scores of those we know to be retaking the MBE dropped by 1.7 points, the score drop for those we believe to be first-time takers dropped by 2.7 points.... The decline for retakers was not atypical; however, the decline for first-time takers was without precedent during the previous 10 years.

There's a bunch of other garbage about the MPRE (LOL), the problems with using LSATs, etc., but to a common man law school apologist like myself, it reads like blah blah blah.  Blame the test, people.

Regardless of any setbacks caused by "psychometricians" (that can't a real thing!), the renaissance is well underway, as anyone can see by glancing at a job board or peeking into a courthouse, which I would never do, as my allegiance is to the legal academy.  The job market is thawing so much that there's going to be a lawyer shortage next year unless we can enroll more revenue conduits in short order.

Thank goodness America's law schools are capable of meeting the challenges of this renaissance, as they have done in all previous instances, readily observable by a judicial system that is the envy of not just nations, but entire planetary systems.

Allard's quotes don't just summarize 2014, but they set the stage for 2015 and beyond:  noble scholars leading a renaissance of justicing up the country with certain egocentric agitators concocting self-serving points in opposition.

Here's to 2015, where we will do everything we can to ignore the latter and enjoy the continuing renaissance (if I repeat it enough, it will be true).  And with faculties being like herds of buffalo shedding their slowest members,there'll be more alcohol for the rest of us who show up.

We're going to party like it's 18th century France, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

Mississippi Burning ...up the Job Market!

And with the birth of Jesus, your apostle at the LSTC is ready to return to bringing you the Good News, this time from the land of Colonel Sartoris.

From the Jackson Free Press (ed.: as opposed to...?): 

The University of Mississippi School of Law's first-year enrollment has dropped from 199 in 2010, to 156 in 2012 and just 127 students this year.

The decrease was intentional.

Officials began reducing their class sizes at a time when a recovering economy and improving job market began to lure potential students away from law school.

Emphasis added.  See, kids, your "scamblogger" "friends" are telling you that law schools have had to slash enrollment because law school isn't worth it.  Au contraire.  As our friends in Mississippi are telling us, it's because the economy is going so darn good that it's luring students away from law school like Pied Pipers or Sirens or pick your analogy.

Of course, they understand math, too:

"We were much more concerned about placement. If we had a large class that impacts the profession in a negative way when the market isn't real strong for lawyers. What we've found by getting smaller is placement percentages have gone up," law school dean Richard Gershon told The Sun Herald.

Last year, about 85 percent of the law school graduates had a job in the legal field nine months after graduation, Gershon said.

Wow, that sounds excellent!  I mean, their law school transparency numbers are significantly lower (NALP 2013 = 71% bar passage required), but I'm happy Gershon - who the internet says is a pioneer of Charleston School of Law - is here to give us the straight dope without cutting it with malicious anti-law school lies.

"One thing I've found that keeps me optimistic is that people applying, getting in and going to law school really want to be in law school," Gershon said.

 Thank God we're finally getting people who really really really want to be lawyers, as opposed to the class of 2008, whose members were obviously just throwing three years of their lives away, in a much better non-legal employment market, to only sort-of want to be lawyers.  Maybe that's a byproduct of making residents spend around $100k for a public school law degree?

I just hope the improving job market for undergraduates doesn't lure them away.  Otherwise, Mississippi just may run out of lawyers.  So the next time you're in Biloxi or Tupelo, please make sure you talk up the virtues of buying from China or India.  Things simply can't go so well that we risk not having enough lawyers to stock the yellow pages and bench backs.

Dean Satan's Christmas Carols, Volume I

OUR HERO in the Valentino suit with the pure silver cufflinks and the adorable red horns poking through his immovable sculpture of salt-and-pepper hair had a minor problem.

"Applications are still falling," Dean Satan huffed to the boardroom of esteemed faculty and donors.  "Kids these days simply don't understand the long-term benefits of a legal education."

Professor Mammon, a ninety-year-old who hid the smell of cancer with astringent aftershave and jokes from the 70s, slowly raised his shaking hand.  "I think we could use an LLM program in something new and current."  He rustled around in his saddlebag and pulled out a real actual newspaper.  "Russian law," he said.  "Oil law.  Horoscope law..."

"No," Dean Satan snapped.  "We need to attract fresh blood."

"Let's have one of those wine soirees," Professor Sin said, her eyes wide with excitement at the prospect.  "The new students always love those.  Let's just invite the prospectives, get everyone hammered, and have then sign master promissory notes at 2 a.m.  It's how I bought my lake house!"

"Tempting," Dean Satan replied in his grease-slick tone.  "Most tempting.  But I fear not even free mid-shelf booze can remove the torpor of this bunch.  No, we need something truly devious, something truly soul-clenching, revolutionary in its ability to make moderately-intelligent people believe our horseshit."

"A jingle!" Assistant Dean Beelzebub said.  He was just 26 and fresh out of a Supreme Court clerkship term, but he obviously brought with him the cutting insight of the sharpest legal minds.  Shit like this is why he taught courses like contracts and such.  "I've got eight cars because of those holiday jingles.  Surely we can get the suckers to fall in line if we lure them like Pied Pipers to our snowmobiles of jurisawesome!  I mean, most of our arguments for law school are just repeating the same discredited things over and over again.  Why not do it in song?

And what happened, then?
Well, in Hellville they say -
that Dean Satan's small heart
grew three sizes that day.
And when he recovered
in the hospital room
Dean Satan found the idea
simply unable to doom!

"We'll do Christmas Carols to market our law school!" he yelled with a fire of, well, hellfire.  Boom!

...somewhere, on a public access station...

  ...a jazz beat, piano intro...a group of handsome devils sings into a microphone...

Your phone rings; have a listen
Law school calls; your future glistens
A beautiful sight; protect some animal rights
Walkin' in a law school wonderland...

When you're a lawyer you can build a straw man
And sell it to a judge with robe and crown
He's ask "are you smokin'?"
You'll say "Law, Man!"
"And add some costs and fees; let's party down!"

Later on, you'll conspire,
while a-drunk, in the mire,
To face unafraid,
All the models you've laid,
Walking in a law school wonderland...

...key change, mood change to stately, festive...Professor Moloch - late 40s, fatter, bearded, maybe runs a blog on rock music and the law or something - steps up to a microphone...

Good King InfiLaw looked out;
On the Feast of Schemin'
Middling LSATs all about
Deep and crisp and even
Brightly shone their futures bright
Tho' the news was cru-el
When their applications came
"Welcome to our schoo-ooo-el...."

...minor key, somber, like, a hymn or something...Professor Sin steps up to a DIFFERENT microphone...

O Come O Come Emmanuel
And ransom captive all those 0 Ls
That mourn in lonely exile here
where jobs for undergrads have disappeared
REJOICE!  REJOICE!
Emmanuel
Law will change your unemployment hell.

...massive drum beat, Professor M.C. Mephistophales is in da hizzy...

Sittin' in my office readin' my law book hard
And I thought to call up, a champion of justice
Picked up the telephone, then dialed the seven digits
Said, "hey, want to talk wit' me about Hobby Lobby?"

I arrived at her house, knocked on the door
Not having no idea of what the night had in store
I'm like a dog in heat, a freak without warnin'
We talked about the ACA 'til early next mornin'

...at this point, Professor M.C. Mephistophales raps "Me so horny...for law!" in between Dean Satan singing "All I want for Christmas is more butts in seats..."

Abrupt stop...a spotlight shines on a child who has been pushed onto the stage at gunpoint...

Jolly lawyers everywhere,
Lean your ears this way!
I just might, starve real soon
hear what I have to say.

Notice applications swoon,
listen while you can,
my Boomer counsel retires soon
who will replace that man?

When his career strikes at twelve
And fees rise up real steep;
Our promises to justice, well,
how can you claim to keep?

Johnny wants a pair of skates
Susie wants a sled
Me I just want counsel to
protect my home and bread.

 The child is unceremoniously ushered to the pits of hell, which, in this scenario, is a green room with watered-down orange drink.  The piano goes upbeat and Dean Satan, Prof. Mammon, and a ghastly pale figure called Spoiler step forward...

Spoiler:  Alright you lawprofs, ready to sing your song?
Dean Satan:  Every year!
Spoiler:  Okay, Mammon?
Prof. Mammon:  I think I wet myself.
Spoiler:  Okay, Mammon?
Prof. Mammon:  Ready.
Spoiler:  Satan?...Satan?...SATAN?!?!?
Dear Satan:  Ready!

Christmas, Christmas, time is near;
Like the bar, it's every year.
Go to family, advertise!
Dean Satan:  Imagine the view from your high rise!
We can hardly stand the wait; please don't apply here late.

Spoiler:  Okay, fellas, get ready. That was good, Prof. Mammon
Prof Mammon:  I met JFK once.
Spoiler:  I meant the singing.
Prof. Mammon:  My CV is 30 pages long.
Spoiler:  Uh, Dean Satan, only 35% of your students passed the bar exam last year....Satan?...Satan?...SATAN?!?!?!
Dean Satan:  Fuck you, asshole, it's the bar examiners.

Abrupt darkness.  Super-cool laser light show.  Symphony orchestra starts playing "Carol of the Bells."

Hark! Zero Ls
Sweet Zero Ls
All seem to say,
"Debt bombs away."
Law school is here
Build good career
For young and old
Meek and the bold
All really want to study, helps you buddy, any path you may take!
JD, JD, JD, JD 'vantage
JD, JD, JD, JD 'vantage

DING DONG DING DONG DING....

...fade into Prof. Belial strumming at a guitar in the corner...

Billy, the English major,
chose to get a law degree
and if you ever saw it,
you would want to get a J.D.

All of the econ majors,
used to laugh and call him names
then never let poor Billy
play their silly MBA games

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
The big firm came to say
"Billy, with your mind so bright,
won't you lead our bet-the-company fight?"

Then all the MBAs loved him,
and they shouted out with glee,
Billy, the Super Esquire,
You'll go down in history!

ALL:  YOU'LL GO DOWN IN HIS-TO-RY!!!

Editor's note:  I hope you have enjoyed another thrilling adventure in the Dean Satan Chronicles.  I will likely not be posting again until after Christmas.  So, be you hero or villainous whiner or a lost soul in the chasm of unfathomable uncertainty, the LSTC wishes you a happy holiday of your choosing, or just a good December if you dislike all the present options.  

Please feel free to add your own holiday songs for Dean Satan and the gang in the comments section, but please note that particularly good ones may be stolen and incorporated into a future post, as is lawyer tradition.

God bless us, every one, tho' obviously me a wee bit more than others.  Happy holidays---

California Style

Less than half of overall takers of the California bar examination passed the test this year, and, as it turns out, they do it on the west coast the same way they do it on the east coast:  blame the test makers.  First, the sympathy set-up so you're emotionally ready to exonerate the leaders:

"Law school deans are in a particularly difficult situation these days," said Derek Muller, a professor at Pepperdine University who writes on the business of law.

And now the flush:

Muller, the Pepperdine professor, said he didn't believe the drop in bar passage could be entirely explained by the test-takers because the rates fell in so many states. "It strikes me as something internal to the bar," he said.

See, if the results of the bar examination dropped in one state in isolation of all the other states, we could assume it was due to that one state being more stupider than all the rest, but since they dropped everywhere, it's just totally erroneous because everyone knows the entire law student population didn't get dumber overnight.  I mean, that's just dumb.

The opposite of dumb is Gilbert Holmes, who's currently leading La Verne on a thunderous comeback to relevance.  Note how he gracefully slips a soundbite into a sentence ostensibly criticizing soundbite reliance (that he surely knew was going to get published):

Many academics say the drop isn't a concern — at least not yet. "We live in a sound-bite society, but one year does not make a trend," said Gilbert A. Holmes, dean of the University of La Verne College of Law.

And now watch Holmes drop-kick the NCBE's cold remark that the 2014 class was "less able" to pass the bar with words:

"To make such a damning statement of this group of law students, to label them as being as less able based on solely that the average score was lower than the year before, is what got me upset and what got the other deans upset," said Holmes, who signed the administrators' letter.

Yeah, why use averages?  Everyone knows that if you want to reflect a data set properly, you give the median and 25th/75th percentiles.  Thankfully, the article doesn't mention that La Verne's 1L enrollment fell from 166 to 55 in 2011, because that's just another ludicrous and irrelevant data point that would make Holmes angry.

Gilbert Holmes?  More like the John Holmes of Semantics.  Only maybe without the AIDS or the cocaine thing.

The simple truth is that the bar examination is not fair if it precludes an open admissions policy,.  The sooner the powers that be accept this, the sooner we can all get back to our Swedish supermodels and Italian sports cars.  (Or, if you're a public defender, Italian supermodels in Swedish sports cars; there's a reason they call public service jobs a sacrifice).

Law School Worth Investment, Says PhD Liberal Arts Dean

Daniel R. Porterfield is the President of Franklin and Marshall college.  He's also married to an attorney so you know he knows what he's talking about.  And he's on Forbes - leading in with the not-tired-at-all Shakespeare character speaking of killing lawyers - telling the world law school is a good investment.

Let's celebrate some of his best points:

Our society doesn’t work without well-educated legal leaders dedicated to preserving America’s commitments to the Constitution and fair legal frameworks for dispute resolution.

As we all know, our society is now working better than ever.  I don't know about you, but I do nothing but ride unicorns, eat cupcakes, and hold hands with minority business owners.  That's largely thanks to an unprecedented amount of laws, regulations, and lawyers in this land.  Thank goodness all lawyers are dedicated to preserving Constitutional values and securing fair access to courts and other legal frameworks.

But it's not just our nation that's imperiled in the absence of lawyers; it's our money:

...capitalism requires legal checks to ensure fair competition in the economic sphere and protect the rights of employees, consumers, shareholders, and owners alike.

A simpleton might quip that capitalism has been practiced (and is practiced) without any of the above, but they just don't understand a principle I like to call lawfeelgood.  Plus, they don't a PhD, so fuck 'em.

 As he notes later on, law has numerous personal benefits as well (listen up, Sally Selfishes!), from "honing one’s mind" to "earning a living" to "expertly navigating the litigious society that we all inhabit."  I stop and reflect upon that last one. Prior to law school, I used to conduct blasting operations at a chromium factory in a large urban area as part of a horizontal price-fixing scheme while disregarding my child support obligations.  I can't tell you how much law school has helped me navigate the litigious aspects of this country.

His advice?

Sometimes, when a promising undergraduate says she is considering law school, well-meaning people say, “What a shame…”

But we should encourage such aspirations, because we need some of the best minds of this and every generation to become society’s leaders in law.

This follows with what is essentially an advertisement for Franklin & Marshall, which is great, because it apparently has leaders who are more gung-ho for law school than the heretical saboteurs at other institutions that may give their students advice based on statistics, rationality, and probability rather than pop political philosophy and unicorn zoology.

But most importantly, it's absolutely necessary that we send "some of the best minds of this and every generation" to law school.  Because law is super important and even though there's already triple the people to do this work now in a system that is bloated and shrinking, we need more more more gobble gobble more.

I'm off to ride my unicorn (named "Hornylaw") and eat cupcakes of justice as I protect capitalism and democracy.