The Bad Boy Law School of Arizona

Phoenix School of Law n/k/a Arizona Summit has been placed on probation by the ABA for low bar passage rates, admissions issues, whatever.

The American Bar Association put Arizona Summit Law School on probation Monday for a variety of issues, including low passage rates on the bar exam and the school's admission policies.
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The bar, in a letter on Monday, said that Arizona Summit is out of compliance regarding admission practices, academic standards, and support and bar passage.

The letter says the law school is now in a position where "only immediate and substantial action can bring about sufficient change to put the Law School on a realistic path back to being in compliance within the time allowed."

I want not to criticize a law school that obviously knows what it's doing.  Staying in business at least thirteen years is a proud achievement for a small business, buoyed by delusions of greatness and scandalous federal loan programs or not.

But sometimes I think law school marketing has got it partially wrong.  Maybe, instead of everyone trying to be Harvard, we need a mix of law schools, diversifying the types of legal education available to America's future Justice League.

Just as any public high school worth its cheap tile flooring and rotating staff of soon-deflated freshmen English teachers has social cliques, maybe the law school community should have cliques of its own.

Just as Harvard and Yale are the snooty rich kids, schools like Arizona Summit and Charlotte can be the bad boy rebels who don't give a fuck.  Perhaps one of the problems with such "toilet schools" is that they pretend to be something they're not, namely honor roll students with still-marrired parents and functional health insurance.

But law school needs diversity.  If aspiring lawyers want to go to a law school that smokes at lunch and has taken up armchair nihilism with a wardrobe of black clothes, they should be allowed to enroll enroll enroll  For such schools, probation would not be a mark of shame, but a worthy accomplishment.

For bottom-rung law schools feeling an enrollment pinch, it's hard to see the downside.  Stop merely being bad, and start acting bad.  Own it, fifth tier.  Be bold.  Be true to yourself.  Drop out and get an 8th-grader pregnant.  Many kids no doubt want to go to Harvard and Yale and, like, make money for the corporate-government meritocratic-o-matic.  But others obviously are willing to take on unpayable debts and tattoo their resumes with bad-assery. 

They should have a law school, too, and you can sell to them.  Instead of saying "probation, oh no!" spit in the ABA's face, grow your hair out, and give the proverbial middle finger of admitting a thousand more underqualified prospects to have window seats on the Million Dollar Express.

Fare Thee Well, Dr. Jay

Not unexpectedly, given the hysteria of some when a going concern suddenly loses its primary source of revenue, Jay Conison, Charlotte Law Dean, has gone the way of Matasar and Larry Mitchell, although he'll be remaining on the faculty:

With his school’s future hanging in the balance, the dean of the beleaguered Charlotte School of Law is stepping down.

Jay Conison has led the uptown, for-profit school for almost four years. Charlotte Law announced his departure with a four-paragraph statement Monday afternoon. Conison will remain on the faculty, the statement said.

Conison brought the thunder to Charlotte from Valparaiso, which apparently was not enough of a scam-challenge for his Herculean talents.  Like upping the difficulty level on a video game, say, Lemmings (PC, 1991).

He had the misfortune of taking over Charlotte Law School a good two years after the national media awoke to the unfiltered swindle of the lowest-tier law schools.  Nonetheless, his efforts to keep Charlotte and its Infilaw backers well-fed pigs rather than well-slaughtered hogs were noble. 

But alas, his move to Charlotte seems akin to many a classical, tragic hero, they who overreached their grasp and exposed a fatal flaw.  In Conison's case, he left the relative comfort of a midwestern low-tier school attached to a longstanding university for the one of the south's most notorious sinkholes and targets for reformers who think for-profits are evil and non-profits walk on water.  It's sort of like leaving a sniper's nest for the front lines.  Balls, yes, but the chances of them getting blown off...

He puts the GOAT in scapegoat.  Let us remember the good times.

Million Dollar Express Chuggin' Through Boise

Right on schedule.

The University of Idaho College of Law’s efforts to begin a first-year law program in Boise have come to fruition, after the American Bar Association gave the plan its seal of approval this week, the UI announced Wednesday.

Yes, the University of Idaho - flagship of a state with a thunderous, expanding population of one and a half million - has found itself a two-campus solution, following such successful examples as Penn State, Rutgers, and the Widener College of Law.

“We expect to have 60 students at Boise and approximately the same number in Moscow next year,” Adams said. “There’s a really strong demand for both locations.”

Adams said each campus offers distinct benefits: Boise is surrounded by the business and legal community, while in Moscow students benefit from “the advantages of deep ties to other programs, dual degrees on UI campus and also at WSU.”

With Concordia University's law school already in Boise like a slowly growing tumor leaking blood, Idaho is finally catching up to the rest of America by realizing that there's absolutely no downside to over-saturating the population with lawyers, the only people capable of stopping various vague but urgent catastrophic insults to the Rule of Law.

A mere decade ago, this massive state had but one law school to fill its ranks of lawyers, leading to employment scores at lofty, anti-competitive levels like 80%.  Now it has three law school campuses.

That's what progress looks like.  I truly wish our lingering one-flagship states like Wyoming and North Dakota take note so their citizenry, too, can know the bounty of a properly saturated marketplace.

Movin' to Nebraska

It's been almost six years now since then-Prof. Sara Stadler told law school graduates they might have to move to Nebraska to hop on the Million Dollar Express.

Behold, from the Omaha World-Herald, we have the glistening, steaming, huffing, full-speed-ahead reality.

The article is unnecessarily pessimistic, natch, claiming that law school enrollment has ticked up without a commensurate boost in the job market, Faustian journalists being wont to bias their "work" towards the scandalous in exchange for sales and clicks. 

You know, what life's like in an actually dying cesspool of a once-proud profession.  Compare and contrast.

Instead, one has to read between the lines of this yellow rag to see the robustness of the job market in Nebraska.  First is the pessimism boldly displayed in the front window, so to speak.

Chris Schmidt had struggled to find a full-time teaching job in social studies a few years ago. One of his pickup basketball friends happened to be Richard Moberly, currently the interim dean of law at NU.

One day Schmidt told Moberly he was thinking about going to law school. The hesitation in Moberly’s response and the advice he gave surprised Schmidt at the time.

“Just be sure it’s what you really want,” Schmidt quoted Moberly as saying that day several years ago. 

The set-up here is pure pessimism.  Prospective students - lazy, we know - may read to this point in the article and receive only the caution from the now-interim law school dean.

But there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!  That thing you covet is in the back room, so to speak!

Schmidt has a one-year job clerking for a federal appellate judge in Omaha and a spot lined up with a Lincoln firm after that.

The Omaha Whatever might have viewed this as some sort of "a-ha" moment like a joke's punchline, the twist in a Maupassant or O. Henry story, or the obnoxious ending to a Paul Harvey radio bit, but let's be honest: very few prospective law students can read an entire news article and comprehend the greater message therein.

So I'll say it here, as elegantly as an Aesop fable summary:  if you play pickup basketball with the interim dean, serve as editor in chief of the law review, and graduate with highest honors from the state flagship, you too can work for a U.S. Court of Appeals and have a job in hand when the exit door opens.

Reports be damned, that's a Million Dollar Express that's working just fine. 

Still time to board for fall.

The Summit Spreads 2100 Miles

Back in August, I wrote on Arizona Summit (in Arizona - I know it's odd, but the name is not misleading...at least that part) and Bethune-Cookman (Florida) entering into a $12.5 million dollar partnership.

Now they've signed an affiliation agreement.

Arizona Summit Law School has signed an affiliation agreement with the private, nonprofit Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
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Bethune-Cookman President Edison Jackson said in a statement, “Together, we aim to be a leading force in disrupting a legacy of exclusion that has persisted into the 21st century.”

Details are imprecise, but one thing's for certain: dynamic synergy will commence. 

When looking at a school like Arizona Summit, it's hard to not see the truth in President Jackson's words.  For years, Arizona Summit has put out a fine crop of good young lawyers.  Yet they find it unduly difficult to land long-term positions in the legal sector, and most recently a disproportionate amount of them have been barred from being barred altogether by the elitist, anti-competitive bar examination.

If Bethune-Cookman can help Arizona Summit break that pernicious legacy of exclusion, the only regret is not signing this agreement years ago.

Plus, getting married to this fine Floridian institution is changing Arizona Summit for the better.

The agreement doesn't make Arizona Summit a nonprofit school. However, Lively said the school is working toward nonprofit status.

 See?  You complain enough about for-profit education, the for-profits affiliate with a school on the other side of the country and look for ways to change their status.

Can we get federal loan money back to Charlotte now?  Please?

Please?  They're doing good work here!  They can speak in euphemism!

We bring in students who are in catch-up mode.

Shouldn't every law school?

Praise Be to God for the Trump Effect

Somehow I missed it last week when hero-worthy-of-psalms Nick Allard fired yet another thunderous sniper-shot from the right side of history:

Almost single handedly, President Trump has made lawyers the breakout stars in the early days of his new administration.

Praise be to God for giving having our peers scurrying to airports like maggoty mice who just discovered a bread factory; surely such blessings equals breakout stardom profession-wide - and revenue to pay rent, bar dues, and bottles from the top shelf.

Law schools can seize this moment and, like the generation inspired by Woodward and Bernstein to pursue careers in journalism, lead the renaissance in legal education that would revive a profession in need of an injection of youth, idealism, and high-tech savvy.

Praise be to God for sending a 1979 law school graduate to deliver the Good News of salvation in youth, idealism, and tech savvy.

Praise be to God for the generation of journalists inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, who led a euphoric cloudburst of hard-hitting investigative journalism that led us to our current most blessed political-media state.

Praise be to God for the coming renaissance; may Botticelli's Venus pull her hair up, wear a gray pantsuit, and reverse Citizen's United.

[A]nother compelling factor is the intense interest among many Millennials in issues of social justice and the urge to make a positive difference.

They are a keenly entrepreneurial generation, and the law and well-trained lawyers are central to success of new ventures.

Praise be to God for the Millennials, particularly the ones who lack the relative pragmatism and thrift of their Gen X counterparts and instead want to pursue social justice as a lifestyle choice.

Praise be to God for the Millennials' open entrepreneurial spirit, readily observable in companies like Theranos.  Prior generations just, like, didn't want to roll the dice and see if their little thimble landed on the Instant Billionaire square.

Praise be to God for start-ups, who love burning capital on cost-effective legal services, usually performed by fresh law school graduates who can "bro out" with them at the Foosball table and not at all on partners at the shiny firms with a choke-hold oligarchy who know what the fuck they're doing.

Praise be to God for the Hamilton name-drop in the middle of the article; that will play nicely with the culturally savvy Millennials.

Praise be to God for furtive Brooklyn Law School advertisements; Brooklyn is now only $245,982 at non-discounted cost, and almost all receive a discount!

Praise be to God and the Rule of Law, whose very existence is just precisely imperiled enough, perpetually, that the solution is more lawyers and neither tanks for the rebellion or, perhaps in security, that would-be law students find something socially productive to do.

Praise be NOT to this blaspheming jackass here, who is obviously just trying to reduce competition for when he gets out of law school so he can profit profit profit.  Trust us; it takes one to know one.

Amen.

Trump Bad. More Lawyers Good.

The non-sequitur.  A classic of absurdist humor utilized by Carroll, Beckett, and everyone in between.  After all, when a bulldozer runs over an alto-soprano mongoose, it sings a bit flat.

But did you know the non-sequitur is also a logical fallacy?  It's true, readers.  Sometimes, sophists establish premises and then draw conclusions that in no rational way follow the presented factual scenario.  Taken seriously, it's not quite as funny as  Monty Python sketch, unless it's taken really seriously. 

Thankfully, the non-sequitur has no application to this article here, which argues that Donald Trump's nascent presidency has made law school "cool" again.  (Does it really lose "cool" status by having a more exclusive appeal?)

Even if law school remains a difficult and potentially costly path, the importance of good lawyers is becoming increasingly clear. “This new administration is challenging some things that we’ve taken to date as long-standing legal truths, ranging from civil rights and civil liberties to administrative regulations,” says Adrienne Davis, a law professor and the vice provost at Washington University. “So yes, we need more lawyers.”

Notice how it follows logically that because we have an administration "challenging some things" that we need more lawyers?  Because - and this is totally implied unless you can decipher the subtext like perspicacious moi* - we developed our present equilibrium of lawyers (where demand equals supply) under the Obama administration.  With an articulate Constitutional scholar at its helm, our prior presidency simply wasn't going to challenge basic tenets of the Rule of Law.  Now that we have a genuine challenger, well, Adrienne, it's time to recruit some more legal Rocky Balboas to put on the gloves.

Much of the article is a masturbatory piece for social justice lawyers (which, remember, is all of us!  we all ride the Million Dollar Express!) and how, you know, you should totally go to a school that has a high return on investment (all of them!).  And of course, there's an "unmet legal needs" claim slipped in the side door like a flood of Honduran migrant farm workers who, swear to God, have all been living in Albuquerque with their families for generations on my very large, labor-intensive farm...

The novelty of the article remains its drawing the astute observation that a Trump White House creates a commensurate need to print more and more law licenses until the cost of legal services hits zero.  One day it's going to happen, by God, and you fat cats and your $140/hr monopolistic rates will feel the wrath of bottom-barrel competition.

You can't make this shit up.  It might even be impervious to parody.  Poe's Law.

But one of [Trump's] accidental accomplishments may be to make lawyering great again.

A slight demurer: it's always been great.

*Perspicacious Moi is the name under which I plan on releasing future solo hip-hop efforts.  Copy it and I will hire one of the impending gazillions of new lawyers to sue sue sue.

New School Alert: Selling Down the (UC-)River(side)

California Needs Another Law School, State Legislator Says.

Be still my grease-clogged heart!

Sabrina Cervantes (D., Corona) - in no way, shape, or form quixotic like the title character of her potential ancestor's greatest work - has proposed a new law school at UC-Riverside.

Cervantes - 29 and daughter of a local politician - is a graduate of UC-Riverside and some program at Harvard, so you know she has the chops and the institution's best interests at heart.

Even if she doesn't have the details yet.

The bill contains a single sentence: “It is the intent of the Legislature to later enact legislation that would provide for the establishment and construction of a school of law at the University of California, Riverside.” The proposal does not include cost or timeline projections—details, Cervantes said, that would be worked out later.

Obviously needed a legal writer or two to tackle the task.  Much like the million dollar law degree, we can figure the pesky details out later.  For now, it's simply time to act, to build a great institution of the law to serve Southern California, a place so devoid of legal education that the closest law school to Riverside is an absurdly ridiculous 22 miles away, which can take up to an HOUR when traffic along Highway 60 is a bitch, the indignity!  How the fuck are you supposed to stop for coffee before class?  Make finals week "work" while not missing Game of Whatever?

This Los Angeles story is timely.  With the Academy Awards this weekend, I would like to pitch my hot-as-burning-zoo screenplay.  It's called Law-Law Land, and it's about a young male lawyer in LA whose only dream is to run a solo firm trying cases like Perry Mason because pretending it's 1960 without the civil rights shit gives him wood.  He meets a spunky young woman who wants to take her case of wrongful discharge from In-and-Out to the Supreme Court so she can be a case title and bathe in the riches and limelight of jurisprudential fame and ain't no 9th Circuit gonna stop her.  There's singin', dancin', foregone bland romancin', and eventually they get everything they could ever ask for in their careers, because life is easy for these PBS millennials with their Twitter and their lattes and their craft alcohol and their iPhone apps and their stockpiles of post-ironic kitsch...

Just go to this new UC-Riverside law school, put a bit of interest in, and you'll be swimming in the river of cash like Scrooge MacFuckstick.  Holy Buddha, Batman, a 29-year-old is in the General Assembly; don't you think YOU, scion of the digital revolution and consumer of Cool Things, can work as a measly lawyer?

Well, don't ya?

Patriotism

Like any good liberal artist, the personified LSTC is familiar with a random smattering of important short fiction, including Yukio Mishima's Patriotism.  In Patriotism, an army officer commits a visceral, detailed seppuku instead of choosing between rebelling against his emperor or leading a counter-insurgency against his neighbors and comrades, selecting the method of self-execution preferred by samurai when necessary to preserve honor.  The case brief-level moral of the story is that when faced with moral dilemmas, one can always killself, just as the author himself did a few years later.

Often, I like to think of lawyers and law students as samurai warriors living by an ancient code, the Constitution our emperor and the rules of professional conduct our bushido.  In the face of certain danger, like rational statistics saying law school is NO NO NO, the best ones wear the kimono of courage and charge headlong towards hundreds of thousands in debt screaming BANZAI like cliched motherfuckers.

With that I give you this:

Melchor Matias flew from Seattle to Detroit every weekend to study for his J.D. at WMU-Cooley Law School-and graduated in January.

A CPA at Boeing in Seattle, Matias did licensing audits on royalty and technology contracts, and designed audit programs. His interaction with the lawyers of Fortune 100 companies sparked his interest in earning a law degree.

This sort of effort is true patriotism in modern America.  For the legal samurai in our times, thankfully no impassable dilemma exists.  In no way does taking an established career for a major company in an in-demand professional certification to Cooley resemble cutting open one's belly for the entrails to disembowel while praying the head is soon mercifully chopped off.

But being a legal samurai paying homage to our Constitutional emperor requires effort.  This gentleman, deprived of an appropriate, accommodating law school west of the Mississippi, flew to Michigan to earn his juris doctor.  Unfortunately, lots of people feel a school like WMU-Cooley is completely unnecessary, a fifth tier toboggan turd sliding out the crusty, wart-lined anus of legal education.

Yet it obviously fulfills a valuable function for people who require a law school for working professionals near major airline hubs and tourist destinations.  Anecdote, you know, is the singular of fact.  To deprive people like this of that opportunity would be to create a moral dilemma for the patriotic legal samurai to choose between his heart and overwhelming rational consensus telling him a lower-tier law school is a stupid idea.  And various feasibility studies show there are literally hundreds of thousands of people interested in signing up for that training.

Perhaps our best and brightest, when deprived of a place to learn The Law, would not resort to actual seppuku.  Perhaps it's more akin to one of them metaphor thingies.

But the truth, as cutting and adamantine as an expertly forged katana, is that if you get in the business of closing law schools, you've eventually got patriotic blood on your hands.  A spoiler for your Lady Macbeths out there: it don't wash out.

Cleaning the Swamp: 3rd Tier Law School Dean Nominee to Head Labor Department

Donald J. Trump, populist, riding to Washington in his shiny black chariot from his New York fortress, a kingdom so removed, so distant from the hustle and bustle of DC that his fair queen can't possibly stomach the culture shock involved in moving to one of the most secure and posh buildings on the planet, has appointed R. Alexander Acosta as his replacement choice to head the Department of Labor:

In Mr. Acosta, Mr. Trump has chosen a nominee with deep experience in labor relations, law and education. The pick answers concerns about the lack of diversity in the Trump administration, in that Mr. Acosta would be the first Hispanic in the president’s cabinet. And his chances of being confirmed appear relatively high, since Mr. Acosta, currently the dean of Florida International University’s law school, has made it through the Senate process three times for different roles.

Talk about a grand slam!  You poor schmucks have been clamoring for widespread, systemic reform for years now - and the dean of a public scam school just zipped right past in the glass elevator on his way to helping set policies to keep the underclass just barely content enough.

According to Law School Transparency, Florida International costs $179,807 for residents increasing faster than inflation.  Roughly 1/3 pay full price and only 1/3 get a discount of more than $5k.  Its employment score is 63.9% with a quarter of all graduates working in small firms and a quarter working in public service.

Lest the "scamblog" crowd think those numbers are "bad," it's objectively one of the top 5 schools in a state that has 11.5 of 'em. Just look at this beautiful back-alley appendectomy of a law school picture.  If sunshine be the best disinfectant, the Sunshine State's law school output is so mercilessly bright it's the equivalent of dumping chlorine bleach into a beer bong.

I'd say the fact that the nominee helped flood the ranks of lower-paid lawyers in a saturated state with an above-average law school more than qualifies Mr. Acosta.  Wouldn't you?