As an entering 1L I have tried to insulate myself from other people's opinions about what law school is like. UCLA will assume I know nothing about law school on my first day so I want to live up to that ideal.

Avoiding these opinions has turned out to be curiously difficult. Telling people you're headed to law school is apparently an opportunity for them to share their views on the legal profession. NOT THAT I MIND. I'm just not clear why it invites this type of response, more so than "I'm getting a PhD in medieval studies"

For example, recently I was traveling for 2 weeks in South America with random civilians so I had many variations on the stock "what do you do for work" conversation. I just said "I'm starting law school in August".

The standard responses settle into two categories:

It's impossible. "You're going to be overwhelmed by the workload." "You're going to have a tough time finding work after graduation." "What makes you think you'll do well?"

It's foolhardy. "Why on earth would you do that??" "My [close relative] went to [important law school] and she hated being a lawyer." "Joining the dark side, eh?"

Best of all, there's apparently no way to respond. If I gently say "oh, I'm sure it's not THAT bad" I'm given the pitying gaze that people save for the hopelessly deluded.

02 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

The top civilian question: "what kind of law will you study?"

The top answer from me: "no idea".

Recently I ran into a college acquaintance and law school graduate. Aside from being unusually positive about the life of a law student (optimism is already rare) he observed that people tended to approach law school either as vocational school or grad school.

His view was that attempting to prepare for a law specialty during school is pretty useless, since everything you know about practicing law will be taught to you on the job. He advocated the grad school approach -- take the classes that appeal to you. Ignore everything else.

05 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

I found out today from the handy UCLA Parking website that I got a space in a campus garage very close to the law school. Ahhh.

Women don't seem to derive the same deep satisfaction from securing a well-located parking space as men do. Why is this. I like knowing that even if I'm flunking out, I'll still have quality parking.

05 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

Here are some reasons.

Because I need to expand my territory.

Because it seemed more intellectually challenging than buying a liquor store, which I considered. Briefly.

Because I have the time & the interest & the ability.

Because it seems fun.

Because I'm not looking for a grad degree to give me direction in life.

Because I've already had a successful career in a different field.

Because I don't want to repeat myself.

09 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

In the 9 months since I took the LSAT, I have minimized my exposure to most information about law school and can say today I am almost totally ignorant about what happens at law school, the terminology, the work, etc.

Not that ignorance is a badge of honor. But I prefer to let the experience just be what it is, instead of building up a bunch of assumptions that will be largely incorrect.

I seem to be in the minority however. There's definitely a whole category of books, websites and other materials designed to frighten people headed to law school.

I guess I can't get worked up about it. How bad could it be? It's school.

10 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

A new Microsoft product for taking notes, which I considered for school. It has a few clever ideas but like most MS products those ideas are crushed under the hulking mass of the rest of the program.

I like software to be lean & mean. You can trust it. The designers & programmers had a clear idea what they were trying to do, and it's less likely to have functional problems. It may be a little homely but it will not let you down.

I have MS products I like & use (eg Excel) but they always have to shove in a bunch of useless widgets. Consequently any first-generation MS program is usually a huge mess.

As for lean & mean, I will use a basic word processor (WordPad or WordPerfect) and I'm trying an information organizer called Zoot.

10 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

The class of 07 is divided into 8 sections of about 40 people (I'm in #7).

Orientation at UCLA consists of some low-density "information sessions" interspersed with scheduled feedings.

A special emphasis is given to warnings against becoming an alcoholic while in law school.

You get a free sippy cup for the library. I lost mine within 1 hour of receiving it.

Also access cards for Lexis and Westlaw. They're both online case databases, I have no idea what the difference is.

Otherwise the UCLA campus & facilities are pretty awesome, and I mean that in the true sense of 'creating awe'. I went to college on the east coast (Harvard) where the student facilities were rooted in the Puritan ethic of simple & functional.

Compared to Harvard, UCLA is Disneyland. The student union has a store that sells at least 100 varieties of snowboards. Upstairs is a US Post Office, Kinko's, travel agency, large videogame room, and a salon where you can get your bikini wax. Down the hall is a Krispy Kreme.

I have reading assignments for Monday. Yes after 12+ yrs, I have homework again.

20 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

"Beyoncé Knowles earning $4.7 million as part of her five-year endorsement deal with L'Oréal. In return, she's required to tell L'Oréal if she makes any radical changes to her hair and she must keep her hair 'in excellent condition'."

20 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

Here is the single most interesting item from orientation:

UCLA has a policy on classes of larger than 40 people that grades be assigned on a strict curve -- 20% of the class gets A's, 60% B's and 20% C's.

I guess this is a shock to the system for folks who came from massively grade-inflated colleges. To me, restoring statistical value to the A is a worthy goal. The last time I got a C was in 5th grade for 'behavior'. Fortunately in 6th grade they stopped evaluating that category.

20 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

Speaking of grading on the curve: though the IOC is at pains to note that the Olympics is a competition between individuals, not nations, newspapers nevertheless publish the daily ranking of the nations by medal count.

I was thinking today that the medal count is rather misleading since it doesn't take into account the population or wealth of nations. We would EXPECT that the US and China would be at the front of the pack, since we are wealthy and they are populous.

Thus I created my new MB Olympic Ranking, which runs as follows.

1) total up the medals, no weighting for gold vs silver vs bronze (since the difference between the three comes down to essentially random factors of environment, personal condition, judging, etc) Ignore countries with fewer than 5 medals.

2) I got population figures from the UN and calculated a medals per capita index. I got GDP per capita figures from the US govt and calculated medals per GDP per capita index also.

3) I normalized the indexes (or indices, if you prefer) to 1 in each category by dividing through by the lowest index value in the category (thus the "best" score is a 1.0 and they go up from there)

4) I multiplied the two adjusted indexes to create a composite score.

So what we get is a medal ranking weighted by a country's available human & capital resources.

Who's the man now?? All hail BELARUS!!

23 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

I have four classes: Torts, Civil Procedure, Criminal Law and Lawyering Skills. The first three involve large heavy casebooks. The 4th is a hands-on class where we apparently will learn skills like case briefing, writing complaints & motions, research, etc.

Torts is about how injuries (of which there is an amazing diversity) are converted into money -- who pays and why.
Civil procedure covers the life of a civil lawsuit, from inception to completion.
Criminal law is about why & how certain acts are criminalized, and what it takes to establish guilt or innocence.

The workload is not, dare I say it, especially taxing as yet. For each class session we usually have one case assigned, maybe a total of 10-12 pages of reading, though it's usually worthwhile to go through more than once.

The one essential habit that I've picked up is immediately looking up any unknown legal term as I come across it, some of which are common ('certiorari') and others superfluous ('ambit')

The other is taking as few notes as possible during class. I personally get more out of giving my full attention to the lecture rather than taking oodles of notes. Also, it's pretty clear that these classes are not like a history or literature class where you move along a one-way track -- it's more like the snowball model, where you have a key concept that grows and refines as you watch it progress through sample cases.

I expected to be more confused than I am. Since last Friday, I actually feel like I've learned something -- not much, to be sure, but measurable progress has been made.

27 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

As I was preparing for the LSAT last fall there seemed to be endless debate among people not in law school about how predictive the LSAT really is (not that these people are in any position to offer evidence) The conventional wisdom seemed to be that it tests skills that are irrelevant in law school.

If you're planning to take the LSAT, I'm here to tell you that it just ain't so: even after a week of classes it's clear that the question types on the LSAT are well-chosen to be similar to reasoning patterns you use every day in law school.

Reading comprehension - the cases you read are not long but they contain small, important details. You can't just skim over things and get it.

Logical reasoning - most of the cases come from the appellate courts, so there's often a line of reasoning leading to one decision, then the appeals court finds flaws in the reasoning, and puts forward their own theory.

Logic games - believe it or not, these are relevant too. When you read criminal statutes or rules of procedure, you have these interlocking requirements and conditions that all have to be reasoned out to get to the right result.

31 Aug 04 ::: Comments closed

"The state of Illinois sued the Dave Matthews Band on Tuesday for allegedly dumping up to 800 pounds of liquid human waste from a bus into the Chicago River, dousing a tour boat filled with passengers."

02 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

Anxiety of the unknown has dissipated among the 1L class, probably to be replaced shortly by anxiety over the exam. Law school classes each have one final exam, which is your whole grade.

However, they're all open-book and previous exams are posted online by the professors (as well as student answers) Being a curious character I checked them out this week, not because I am a exam-hounding loser but because being a sparse note-taker it gives me some guidance. The largest part of each exam involves a lengthy hypothetical case that you're asked to diassemble & put back together in stages. Seems reasonable.

The single exception is Legal Skills, which has several graded writing assignments through the semester and then a final exam & grade at the end of the year.

Otherwise, the students seem to be acclimated to their instructors (and vice versa) at this point. My favorite class so far is civil procedure. While I could quibble about a few habits of my professors I have to say overall the teaching quality is excellent. When I went to college, half my professors were bored by being there and the other half were barely functional in English. So the little things don't bother me.

03 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

A federal lawsuit from 1990 concerning gays in the military:

High Tech Gays v. DISCO (Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office)

04 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

There were a lot of not especially well-tailored suits wandering the halls today so I asked what the deal was. On-campus interviewing for 2nd year summer jobs.

What I gather is the 2nd summer job at a firm is often an audition for a permanent position so the pressure is on! NOW!!

Unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to participate in this process next year because I would find it entirely too absurd. Not that I disagree that looking the part is an important step towards getting the part. But there's something about putting students in suits that's a little disingenuous and sad (not pathetic sad, wistful sad, the hard laser of reality lighting up the dim recesses of what folks see as 'the future')

07 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

I had my first 'oh shit' moment yesterday. In civil procedure we were reading the famous case (among law students) Pennoyer v Neff and the guy whom the teacher had asked to give a summary to the class was coming up with all this narrative information that I totally missed.

The land was used for logging? Neff lived in California? What? I was flipping through the casebook, assuming my reading & retention skills had gotten very lax very quickly. Then I couldn't find the references, so I was fully confounded.

After class I asked the guy where those tidbits were -- he admitted they were not in the casebook, he had done separate research on the web. Aha ... my self-esteem was restored.

08 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

The torts professor paused class today to give an amusing view of the scaled grading process. Paraphrasing him:

"Your grade only reflects your performance relative to other class members on one exam on one day. Yes, 20% will get Cs, and 20% will get As.

"But if I took all the faculty of UCLA and gave them the exam, 20% would get Cs and 20% would get As.

"If I gave the exam to all Nobel laureates, 20% would get Cs and 20% would get As.

"There is no such thing as a 'hard' or 'easy' exam, since if you find it hard, chances are everyone else does too. The worst that can happen is on the basis of grades, you will be rejected by certain law firms for certain jobs. So what?"

I imagine there are some students who would take issue with the last bit. I thought it was a worthwhile reminder that the real downside of graduating from a top-flight law school is pretty slim.

09 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

I'm not dead yet, nobody is actually. Next week looks to be a little busier, with some extra reading and a couple short writing assignments, but 1L has still been entirely reasonable in its demands.

One word we have yet to hear meaningfully intoned is 'justice'. Not that I came to indulge some (in my case nonexistent) ideal about justice. But even the name of law school draws the distinction: though we'd probably all say that one of the highest ideals of the legal system is implementing "justice", we're not going to "justice school".

I took the most popular undergrad course at Harvard, called Justice, wherein a government professor occupied 15 weeks lecturing about various philosophical concepts of justice through history. As you can tell a lot of it stayed with me.

The various court opinions we've read so far will talk about "fairness" and considerations of morals and social policy but they stay far away from the J-word.

I think the answer is hidden in plain view: the legal system may produce justice as a side effect, but it is not (and could not be) designed to do so. For instance, civil procedure is described by the teacher as a means of dispute resolution -- not a means of producing justice in disputes.

And maybe "resolution" contains the clue: what law provides is solutions. One thing I'm gratified by is how concrete legal education is: there's no hundreds of pages of theory occasionally punctuated by a case that happens to illustrate some ideal behavior. The textbooks are built around the history of actual cases, actual opinions, actual mistakes, actual resolutions.

And what you quickly see is that part of the nature of law is that it's full of holes, some small, some large. Cases roll into those holes and humans have to kind of tow them out of the ditch using logic and common sense and other reasonable but fallible faculties of judgment.

Indeed, part of a successful judicial opinion is that it fills as few holes as needed to resolve the case, and leaves the rest open to another day -- so they can be addressed under the practical requirements of a future case, and not solved as some kind of thought experiment in the present.

10 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

Colorado is considering changing its electoral vote rules to distribute them proportionately by the popular vote, instead of winner take all. Were you aware that states could independently change their elector policy? I sure wasn't.

Even if every state adopted this policy it wouldn't address a more fundamental problem, which is that not every vote is equal in a national election. Though it's unclear whether this is truly a flaw, as the framers of the constitution wanted small states to be somewhat overrepresented in the electoral college, as they are in congress.

The most valuable vote in America is one cast in Wyoming, where they have 3 electoral votes for a population of 500,000, or one for every 167,000 people. At the bottom of the list is Texas, with one electoral vote for every 650,000 people, roughly four times as many.

Here's a list of what every individual resident's vote is worth relative to the 'gold standard' of Wyoming.

13 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

The professors sometimes make (good-natured?) barbs about each others' classes. Professor Civil Procedure, being the most deadpan, is also the most successful at this.

An aside on Torts, while reviewing a personal injury case: "So you're taking Torts right? Duty, breach, causation, damages. I just taught you the whole class."

After a student observed that a Civ Pro word also appeared in Criminal Law: "It means something different there. Who knows what that class is about anyways?"

14 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

Rosh Hashanah is not a national holiday but in LA it might as well be. All our classes were cancelled on Thursday.

This week we had our first two writing assignments, a research project and a memorandum. The teaching assistant was at great pains to insist that we use actual law library books for the research, and not look it up online (which is exactly the same data)

I did the project online and then double checked my work by using the books: it came out the same. There are advantages of using the books to find cases in certain topic areas, because it encourages you to browse in areas you might not have thought of on your own. But getting the cases themselves is much easier online.

The other problem with the books is that generations of law students before you have had the same assignment and have helpfully circled all the cases you need to complete the assignment. No such passive cheating online.

The memo was to practice writing in a heavily structured "objective memorandum" format. Whether actual law firms use this structure, who knows. I doubt it -- it's tedious to read, the format specifies that you state your conclusion 5 separate times.

Today I availed myself of a professor's office hours for the first time. He teaches criminal law, which to me is the most confusing class, but he told me it'll continue to be confusing and that I shouldn't worry, as I have a good grasp of the material. I do? Half the answers I volunteer in class are incorrect. Ah, he says, but at least you show evidence of thinking. It's the people who have said nothing for 4 weeks that he worries about.

17 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

I hate to be a rat but ... a telemarketer (raising money for some shady Democratic organization whose non-profit status was not verifiable) called me today and I said:

"uh, I'm on the national do not call list."
"We have our own list."
"Well, there's a national list now."
"I wasn't aware of that."

Sure buddy. I pried the name of his employer out of him but when he realized what was happening he wouldn't give me the phone number. Nevertheless I had enough information to file a complaint at www.donotcall.gov. I expect indictments to be handed down shortly.

19 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

Another twist on the undergraduate grading motif is all exam grading at law school is done anonymously. When you take an exam (either in bluebooks or, more prevalently these days, on your laptop) you are given a number to put on your exam and the teacher grades the number, not the name. The records office is the only one who knows which names go to which numbers.

According to the student handbook it's a serious offense to include any information in your exam that might imply your identity ("Ever since I was a young man growing up in Singapore ... ")

The result is that brown-nosing as a competitive sport is non-existent. Being nice to a professor, or for that matter being an ass, has no bearing on your final evaluation. He or she will never know.

21 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

Last night I had pork for dinner. This is relevant because I've noticed a correlation between eating pork and having really strange, vivid dreams later on in the evening.

Anyhow, hours after eating the pork, I had a dream that a classmate & I were going to lunch and had somehow finagled Prof Torts into going with us. (Not that we have some waking fantasy to have lunch with him.) Shortly after we get to the restaurant, Prof Torts disappears. We wait a reasonable time and then, mystified, go ahead with our meal.

As we leave, Prof Torts stumbles towards the entrance, now staggeringly drunk. We pause to consider the signficance of his newfound alcohol depedency, and in the near term, how to return him to his afternoon classes with the least fuss.

23 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

I had a magic moment today: I read the following paragraph and it seemed like a concise, clear example of english-language prose.

"An elementary and fundamental requirement of due process in any proceeding which is to be accorded finality is notice reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of the action and afford them an opportunity to present their objections. The notice must be of such nature as reasonably to convey the required information and it must afford a reasonable time for those intersted to make their appearance. But if with due regard for the practicalities and peculiarities of the case these conditions are reasonably met the constitutional requirements are satisfied."

24 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

When you see a warning like this, regardless of how ridiculous, it's safe to infer:

1) somebody attempted the action depicted (rocking the vending machine)
2) they offered the explanation given (expectation of free soda)
3) they were injured (by a falling vending machine) and filed a claim to recover damages.

25 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

I'm in a negative mood this week. I considered cutting my afternoon class so I could leave school at noon (I didn't). I suspect it's the quickly-shortening daylight hours messing with my brain.

One substantive point of law school that bothers me is how many assignments are ungraded --- namely all of them, except the final exam. Forget about whether it makes sense to weight a final exam that much. I just find it hard to get excited about revising a paper that has no bearing whatsoever on my grade. If I spend time on it and do a great job, it has the same effect as if I'd just blown it off until the last minute.

29 Sep 04 ::: Comments closed

The undergraduates have arrived back at UCLA this week so every line on campus is now considerably longer. How is it they can get properly educated starting school so late? Sheesh.

The UCLA daily newspaper (what's it called? The Daily Bruin or something? Are bruins typically a daily occurrence in nature?) is almost indistinguishable from The Onion except that it's, you know, real.

The Onion, you see, exists on two distinct levels of satire. One is its take on the news of the day. The other, which I believe goes over the head of most of us city dwellers, is its parody of small-town papers with their overblown opinion pieces, "local color" columns written by local characters, fascination with minute goings-on not really suitable for journalistic coverage, etc.

Student newspapers I suppose are exempt from some of this scrutiny because despite being meant sincerely, we assume that they're published by people who don't know any better. In the meantime, I savor the feature articles about the outrageous difficulty of purchasing bedsheets in Westwood Village, and the editorial cartoons drawn with ball-point pen on dining hall napkins.

01 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

I don't know what you got in your absentee ballot to remind you how to fill in the card properly, but this is what we in California got. A puppy and a poem. This is the kind of thing that makes me vote against tax increases.

01 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

Come to think of it, I did vote against two taxes. One of them was a tax on people who make more than $1 million per year to support public mental health services. The other was a phone line tax to improve emergency response services.

I always vote against these types of taxes because a tax should tend to fall on the people who benefit from it. Right? Don't we all benefit from social improvements like mental health and emergency response infrastucture? If it's such a great idea, the legislature can find a place for it in their budget. Otherwise it's just freestanding taxation attaching itself to wherever it can find a home.

01 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

The supreme court is entering its eleventh year with the same justices -- the only longer streak was the 12 yrs from 1811-1823; the longest streak in this century was 6 yrs (1975-1981)

While we like to blame republican presidents for the heavy-duty conservatives on the court, let us remember: William Rehnquist was confirmed 68-26 by a democrat-controlled senate in 1971. Antonin Scalia was confirmed 98-0 by a democrat-controlled senate in 1986. Clarence Thomas was confirmed 52-48 by a democrat-controlled senate in 1991 (a straight party-line vote except for, uh, 10 democrats)

Hm, what do you think the chances are the current republican-controlled senate will return the favor as justices inevitably begin to step down in the next few years.

03 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

Contrary to conventional wisdom, legal opinions are not full of portmanteaux like "thereupon" "hereinafter" "notwithstanding" etc. (You're more likely to see those in contracts.) No, the greatest linguistic tic of the legal scholar is the phrase "as to".

"As to" roughly translated means "with respect to" or "pertaining to". It's really a conjunction, and can be useful in a variety of contexts. The state of mind as to the act of robbery. The damages as to the original act of negligence.

However. Reliance on "as to" means that judges & law professors start unnecessarily converting verbs into adjectives. So instead of "Did that answer your question?" you'll sometimes hear "Was that responsive as to your question?" Further down the line, "what was your decision as to eating lunch?" "is there consensus as to ordering another keg?" And so on.

06 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

The Onion on the overruling of certain Patriot act searches:

"That's the way these things happen. First, they overturn one little clause, then they whittle away at the rest. Before you know it, our civil liberties will be totally restored."

06 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

I've been looking into the topic of "jurisdiction stripping". Congress is attempting to pass a law (Marriage Protection Act) forbidding the federal court system from hearing cases on the validity of gay marriage. In general, though federal judges don't encourage it, congress does have the power to add or remove topics from the jurisdiction of federal courts.

However, the issue is unlikely to come up through the courts on those grounds. As our presidential candidates are at pains to note, marriage is historically a state issue and the states need to decide for themselves (this fact allows candidates to take whatever position on gay marriage they want without having to back it up with action -- the president has no power to set marriage laws)

Still, thanks to the full faith & credit clause of the constitution, gay marriage may not be a federal issue but it's certainly a national issue. As soon as ONE STATE fully legalizes it (eg Massachusetts has authorized it, but it's still in the midst of legal & state constitutional challenges) those marriages will have to accepted by all the other states as legit under the FF&C clause.

The net effect is gay marriage will be legal everywhere, even if marriage licenses are not available everywhere. Even if many states pass laws preventing gay marriage from originating in that state, FF&C will let them in through the side door.

Once legislatures figure that out, they will run to amend their laws to close the FF&C loophole, by saying "we accept FF&C except for gay marriage". And there is the federal constitutional issue.

Historically the supreme court has not been generous to states attempting to trim federally-granted constitutional rights down to state parameters. It has also not been generous to laws that discriminate, which goes back to the significance of the Lawrence v Texas decision last year, which struck down the Texas anti-sodomy laws. What the court was really saying is "you can't make laws that selectively target gays".

Eventually the Supreme Court will probably hear a case involving an FF&C restriction that targets gays and if they apply Lawrence as precedent, it'll be a real dust-up on the bench.

08 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

The halfway mark of the first semester of law school. That really wasn't so bad. I guess that's why they have finals in the 2nd half, to maintain a high level of suspense.

Attention is slowly shifting to the exams, which are your entire grade in the class. Law school has a reputation for being cutthroat and competitive. UCLA is pretty mild in this regard but it's an inevitable result of the curve grading system: the goal is not to be good in absolute terms, what's important is being better than your classmates.

Everyone is starting to negotiate that gray area between being overly self-reliant (and missing important points of law) and being overly generous with one's study materials (and potentially giving away a competitive advantage)

I know it sounds horrible. But consider. Law exams are entirely open-book. So one's net performance is going to be a combination of a) the quality of the materials you prepare & bring to the exam and b) what you actually write. If you come up with the greatest torts exam technique ever, it doesn't benefit you to share it.

Believe me, there are people who have an intuitive grasp of all the material who will be weak on the exam; and there are people with a so-so grasp of the material who will prepare great exam materials and ace it. The exam is not a test of being a lawyer. It is a test of specific analysis & writing skills in a limited time interval. To do well, you can't gloss over the executional aspects.

08 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

To those who wonder how the US economy can absorb thousands of law school grads each year, one answer is because lawyers get disillusioned and leave the profession with apparently great regularity.

This leads to a body of written work that might be termed the literature of complaint (perhaps literature of whining is more apt)

These are the books and articles (frequently written anonymously) that all feature a protagonist who, while incredibly successful & important as a lawyer, wakes up one day and realizes its great tragic emptiness. Blah blah etc.

1. These tales speak to no fundamental misery intrinsic to the legal profession, but rather the naive and uninformed expectations carried into the profession by folks who should've known better. I mean, long hours, long meetings, eccentric senior partners, absorption of your life -- this is exactly the experience big law firms promise. Everyone knows this. So then you take a job there and you're surprised when that's exactly what it's like?

2. These ex-lawyers are sufficiently vocal in their discontent that they give the impression there are no happy lawyers. Logic implies there are plenty of firm partners who are busy and rich and like it that way. Those guys don't, as a rule, publish often -- "I'm a Rich Lawyer and Life is Good".

3. So why do disgruntled lawyers feel so impelled to share their suffering? Part of it must be their primal scream against the world in retaliation for their powerlessness. The other is to bend the ear of sympathetic law students, lawyers and ex-lawyers. Misery has always loved company. I guess there is satisfaction in thinking you're revealing The Big Lie Nobody Knows!! But everyone knows.

These guys have no one but themselves to blame for poor career choices. So many jobs in America are awful, repetitive, back-breaking, soul-dulling work. People find some happiness in them because they're dependent on them.

For a white guy (it's always a white guy) with the huge privileges of education and massive compensation to blather on about how it's not fulfilling to him ... I suppose he's entitled to his angst, but angst is itself a luxury most can't afford.

These tales of woe end up circling around a sermon on the importance of "freedom" or "autonomy" or "what's really important". Translation: "it's taken me 8 years to realize that even as a well-paid lawyer, it's a cash flow business, not a capital business. You don't end up amassing some war chest that you can live off of. I chose to develop an expensive lifestyle -- which you think I'm owed, because I'm an important lawyer -- with ongoing obligations and I've become totally dependent on those large ongoing checks."

And for these colossal personal mistakes of common sense, financial prudence and self-awareness, the legal profession at large is held accountable. Very strange.

15 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

There are a wide variety of commercial outlines, case briefs and supplemental textbooks to attract the law student dollar. At the beginning of the term I though "why would I want extra reading?" but now 9 weeks in, I have caved and bought a few.

The problem is, the main textbook in any class is invariably a casebook. From what I can tell, casebooks have developed an idiomatic and not entirely logical format. Cases, usually from appellate courts, are edited down for length and then the casebook editor adds a section of "notes and questions" on the end. Not much space (if any) is given to explaining the doctrine that the case is about -- your best bet is to get a hint from the section heading at the top of each page ("oh right, I'm in Informed Consent ...")

The other problem with casebooks is they're, you know, full of cases. What's good is these are real opinions. What's bad is the judge was not writing the case for your benefit, law student, so teasing out the signficance sometimes seems like a long drive for a short day at the beach.

Anyhow. The supplements, if nothing else, confirm that you actually are following what's going on correctly because they just give you the doctrine and the applications, and often -- this is very helpful -- hypothetical situations to answer questions about. The final exam is going to be full of hypos, not appellate court opinions, that's for sure.

19 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

Today I got back a writing assignment from civil procedure that I totally missed the boat on. The funny thing is, in my first draft I answered the question more accurately, and the night before it was due totally rewrote it, thinking I'd found a sneaky trick. Tricky only to me, apparently.

However, if I missed the boat, it left the dock without too many people on it. The professor told the class with characteristic gentleness that it was not our finest hour (perhaps most tellingly, he didn't bother writing comments on the papers after he got to a certain point in the pile)

Yay for ungraded work!

19 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

Prof Crim, devout Red Sox fan, was absent with "the flu" yesterday (the day after game 5 went almost 6 hrs) and predicts that he will likewise be absent tomorrow (after game 7 is played tonight). Meanwhile the 2 lectures he managed this week were "mystifying clouds of words". If the Red Sox go to the world series he might as well take a leave of absence, he's no use to us in this condition.

Meanwhile I got gossip this morning that a classmate who sits in front of me in Torts has dropped out of law school altogether. There hasn't even been a graded assignment yet and this guy threw in the towel. I guess if I'd already paid I'd have stuck it out and see how I did on the exams, but ... to each his own.

20 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

I've stumbled into my first significant disagreement with an instructor: a memo assignment pertaining to California law about negligent infliction of emotional distress.

I was born with a gene that gave me a low threshold of pain for illogical reasoning. It gets in my brain and makes me crazy, and I cannot let it go until I conclusively win or lose. I almost don't care which: while it's nice to be right, it's the ambiguity that drives me nuts, and it's the certainty I want, not the affirmation that I was on the right side.

Generally this has been a positive in my career, but not always. Certainly there are plenty of times I wish I could've said "whatever" and moved on (and probably should have) Over time I've learned more about how to present ideas with tact and clarity. Also the importance of picking your battles.

In this dispute, I'm quite sure I'm on the right side. Other students agree with me, but -- the professor and the teaching assistant do not. On some level I feel I should drop it. Yet it's a non-trivial issue affecting everyone who takes the course. Hard to know what to do.

23 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

I figured out what to do. Turns out the judge who wrote the opinion in the case which is the source of the below-referenced disagreement is alive & well and working as a legal consultant in San Diego. Dude even has his own website. So I emailed him. We'll see what happens.

24 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

Prof Civ Pro (imagine deadpan delivery): "Federal rule 21 is my favorite. Misjoinder and non-joinder. Just because if I ever leave teaching to have a drag queen act, that would be a great name. Miss Joinder."

Update: Prof Civ Pro informs me he has used the joke for 10 years. I guess we always forget that every professor's act has been honed by many years of trial & error.

25 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

I didn't hear back from the judge. (though I may still -- there are generational differences in how often people check email. I only get my postal mail once a week) The professor ended up agreeing with me on one of the cases in contention. It will not lead to any curricular re-evaluation of the assignment but at least I wasn't smokin' dope.

Some days at law school I get caught in the gap between my curiosity about topics and the whole "don't rock the boat" principle familiar to me and anyone else who has held down a job. I mean, law school is just another work environment, and the people working there have the same motivations -- wanna get paid, wanna get a good performance review, wanna get hired back next year.

I myself don't have anything to lose by making hay out of certain topics, but it doesn't mean it's going to rise to a level approximating interest for anyone else. It would be nice to think professors cared about every allegedly brilliant idea students came up with, but what's in it for them?

It's another application of the principle I used to call "your emergency is not my emergency" back when I was working. The conundrum is, you can't do your job (or your studies or whatever) without the help of other people, but you can't necessarily get them to pay attention either, since whatever is the most important thing to you may rank low on their list.

When I learn about something new, I want to find out all sorts of things about it. But the guy who's been teaching the first-year course for 22 yrs is maybe not quite as fulfilled by the inquiries as I am.

28 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

A fair number of fiirst year students seem to have bypassed any anxiety about exams and moved on to anxiety what they will do for work next summer. There are two schools of thought on the issue:

1) since you have completed a whopping one year of law school, you are not tremendously useful to anyone so whatever job you could get is going to be pretty menial, strictly of the resume-padding sort, not of the meaningful learning sort.

2) law firms recruit on-campus during the fall of second year for summer jobs AFTER second year. These are considered important because they tend to lead to offers for jobs after graduation. Thus doing something interesting THIS summer gives you an advantage during interviews next fall.

I tend to believe (1). But that's mostly because I don't plan to participate in (2). The law firm recruiting process resembles the baseball draft, where kids coming out of school are put into the minor leagues to see how they perform before they get an offer to join the majors.

To fully buy into (2), you have to sorta believe that what you do the summer after your first year has major consequences for potentially the next 20 years of your professional life. That seems a stretch, doesn't it.

30 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

2/3 done with fall semester.

30 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

Why will I not participate in on-campus recruiting next fall? I have no interest in working at a big law firm.

This is not a position of idealism. Except for a couple isolated exceptions, every lawyer I've met who worked at a big firm I found to be an insufferable idiot. Every lawyer whom I liked and respected (or hired to represent me) has been an independent practitioner or ran their own firm.

As a first-year this position will earn you a mixture of pity and contempt. But I have different motivations for being in law school than many of my classmates, and thus different goals for what I want to do with the degree afterwards.

One major difference is that I already had my "work terrible hours to pay your dues" career experience when I worked in the technology business in the 90s. It was totally worthwhile and totally necessary. I recommend it to all my classmates whose previous work experience may be, shall we say, somewhat light. But having done it once, why would I want to do it again?

Not that I think that because I worked for some years in an unrelated field that should give me some kind of shortcut into the legal field. No, I start at the bottom with everyone else. But the specific costs & specific benefits of working at a large firm do not appeal to me.

NB. A recent insight into big-firm marketing: a second-year student was talking to me about how she had just been flown to New York for a 2nd interview. She was extremely amazed & excited that THEY PAID for her plane ticket & hotel! Woohoo, a free trip! I gently suggested that the trip was not, in the long term, free; she insisted quite firmly that it was. It's great to be new to the working world, I hear they have free coffee and pencils too.

30 Oct 04 ::: Comments closed

I don't care who you vote for. But please do it. My Argentine friend was telling me it's an actual federal crime there to not vote. They don't come out to your house and put you in manacles, but they make a note on your record and the next time you have business with the law ... look out.

I don't know who will win. Regardless of the polls showing them nationally even, the electoral college math is still a little tricky for Kerry. My prediction is that if Bush wins, at the electoral level he'll win decisively -- more than 30 votes. If Kerry wins, he will be squeaking it out in less than 20 votes.

02 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

... great Casey has struck out.

02 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

That was a pretty thorough rout of the democratic ticket wasn't it. Not just the president, but both houses of congress too. John Edwards can't even go back to his old senate seat, they gave it to someone else.

I don't fear the republican rule that much if only because I don't think democrats have done much to push it back in the last 4 yrs. So what's really going to be different? Bush got into office in 2000, promised everyone a straight-up republican-style presidency, and he delivered. Whereas the democrats, time and again, just rolled over and rubber-stamped it.

Now, at least, there's one advantage: when shit hits the fan, republicans will not be able to shrug and say "ah well, if it weren't for the democrats ..." Maybe, just maybe, one party reaped what it sowed; and the other got enough rope to hang itself three times over.

On the bright side, only 18 or so months until the formation of Hillary's exploratory committee.

03 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Prof Civ Pro: "I don't know how to teach discovery. It's like 7th grade sex education class. They put all the parts up on the blackboard but it doesn't really give you a sense of what it's really like. But, I'll put the parts up anyways."

03 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Like just about everyone headed to LA for law school, up until the time I arrived I was thinking entertainment law would be a good specialty. After 10 weeks, having learned nothing about entertainment law and almost nothing about all other law, I have lost all interest.

No one, not a one -- and this includes a number of entertainment attorneys -- has suggested that there is anything novel or interesting about the legal aspect of entertainment law. What pleasure there is seems entirely derived from the refracted glory of your clients (eg the most recent American Idol winner) or your subject matter (eg the most recent crap Lifetime movie) But it does pay well. Yeah, it better.

04 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

The time has arrived to begin the time-honored law student exam preparation habit of "outlining". Since all exams are open-book and you can bring notes, the outline serves as your personal guide to the course as you muddle through the exam. Traditionally this is sold as a lengthy, time-consuming project.

So far I haven't found that to be the case -- the two outlines I've done took about 4-5 hrs each -- but I am an extremely minimal note-taker. Something really extra-special has to happen for me to be sufficiently moved to write it down. So my outline process basically involves moving all my notes into into a single orderly document.

Whereas judging from the constant tapping of laptop keyboards all around me, most folks will wind up the semester with dozens and dozens of pages of notes. So the process of plowing through and finding the outline within will necessarily be more complicated.

The person who has not done themselves any favors is the Stenographer. Every class, they have typed pretty much every word the professor said into their laptop, and they will end the class not with notes, but with a transcript. Then they can re-read the transcript and start, you know, taking notes. I realize everyone learns differently but that just seems masochistic.

I've also heard tales of 20 and 30 page outlines. What possible use is that in a time-sensitive exam situation? I can't imagine how you have time to leisurely thumb through a massively overweight outline.

04 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Some have suggested the ambitious push this year to get gay marriage noticed as a national issue backfired: conservative voters turned out en masse to approve constitutional provisions blocking it, and while they were there, touched the screen on behalf of W.

So I was wondering, why is there so much resistance to gay marriage? Recently I heard Sen Rick Santorum on the radio asking -- if we let gays get married, who's next? Bigamists? Shepherds? etc. The slippery slope argument.

I regret to admit the Senator made me think: why do we have an intuitive sense that some groups "deserve" civil rights but that others don't? What informs that intuition? Gay marriage backers don't endorse bigamous marriage. But is that based on anything but the same kind of arbitrary morality that leads others to oppose gay marriage to begin with?

So I arrived at the question that may be so red it's blue: when we award civil rights to groups, are we performing some kind of compensatory calculation?

05 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

I just read the thirteen cases provided for our graded memo. My eyes are crossing.

But my tip for you tonight: unpublished opinions on Lexis are gold for research. I found a couple that neatly summarize the reasoning of the main cases I had to read. Is that lazy? Good research is all about laziness. The last thing you want to do is have to froth up a legal argument unsupported by authority. My main lesson from my last memo is: don't think too hard. The answer has been hidden in plain view.

06 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

I became a member of the California Bar this week. Pay toll, $76. I have really no idea why it's necessary to charge law students for this privilege. Apparently you have to register within 90 days of arriving at law school or you get to pay $150. So I was driven by no positive benefit, simply the annoyance of having to pay $74 extra for something about as useful to a 1L as tonsils.

08 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

At home enjoying the 4-day weekend. Occasional thoughts of graded memo dance in my head.

13 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

We were given our first class evaluations to do today. You fill in a few circles and write a few comments. There seemed to be an emphasis by the registrar's office representatives to get them done as quickly as possible -- does that encourage fairer feedback? -- I spent, oh, 4 minutes on mine & was one of the last people to leave the room.

I have to admit, the class was not my favorite so I was a little torn about how vigorous to be in expressing my lack of enthusiasm. The evaluation process seems designed to create an aura of critical feedback & accountability when really it's highly unstructured and not likely to lead to much more reflection than "I loved it" or "this sucked".

15 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Prof Legal Writing: "I'm not telling you to lie. But if you need someone to say that you had malaria first semester and that's why you didn't do better on your exams ... I can do that."

16 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

I made the mistake of cheerily greeting Prof Civ Pro this morning, who then said great, you can take us through today's case. The very case where, for the first time, I barely skimmed it and thought eh, somebody will walk us through it in class. Bad luck.

The split-second of panic gave way to a triage technique, where I announced the two facts I knew about the case, and each time the professor talked for a few seconds, I scanned the pages looking for more useful details, hoping that I would be able to stay one step ahead of his questions. I ended up giving the impression of knowing quite a bit more about the case than my preparation would've suggested. Too bad that technique won't help on the exams.

16 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

My birthday was this week, making it one year since I literally woke up and thought "hey, I wonder if I could get into law school." That night I was on the web registering for the LSAT. And now ...

To this day I'm not entirely sure why I had such a sudden motivation. Honestly I hadn't considered law school seriously in my life up to that point. I know, some folks are focused on it from the day they set foot in college. What I learned from this is: procrastination is never a barrier to graduate school.

18 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Eight more class days ...

21 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Prof Torts & Prof Crim Law spent a few too many class sessions indulging students with lengthy, aimless discursions so they are now having to clamp down and resort to more straight-up lecturing in the final 2 weeks to get through all the material.

Prof Civ Pro is right on schedule.

Why is it the professors who would most benefit from a planned syllabus are the ones who never have one. Surely, year after year, they find themselves in the same predicament at Thanksgiving. Crazy!

21 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

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21 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Could everyone please learn the pronunciation difference between "demur" and "demure". Thank you that is all.

21 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

From an article on the Daily Bruin op-ed (!) page on Monday entitled "Bruins go for the gold when hooking up":

"Wearing scrubs or carrying a law school book is a surefire way to invite people to the party in your pants. We are a competitive bunch of nerds here at UCLA, and having a goal or career path in mind will get you laid faster than anything else."

The authors seem to mean "gold" as in "quality"; the second meaning as in "digger" is apparently unintended.

24 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Man oh man. One more week to go. I will be assembling my attack plan for exams this weekend.

26 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

At the beginning of the semester I was speculating that law school didn't seem that difficult, with the caveat that I might turn out to be woefully wrong. I wasn't. The workload ebbed and flowed but never drifted above manageable. Over 15 weeks I've only taken a casebook home to do reading maybe twice. I've had my nights & weekends 95% free of law school encroachment.

So where does this myth of the horrors of 1L come from? Does UCLA have unusually low work requirements of its students? No reason to think so. Do I not see it because I have some unusual ability to absorb the material? Definitely not.

What is true is I didn't buy into the myth coming into school, so perhaps that prevented it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what do people get out of buying in? All it yields is pure fear & intimidation. Where's the benefit.

Perhaps -- for folks who have their own pre-existing sense of fear & intimidation, mapping that onto the institutional 1L myth creates a safety in numbers effect -- I can cope with the fear more easily knowing that it's not intrinsic to me, it's part of the experience and everyone has to deal with it.

27 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

The good news is I did a sample exam question over the weekend and did ok with it. It didn't make me feel like law school exams will be some hopeless morass of despondency.

The bad news is though professors have been at pains to put anxious minds at ease by reminding them "the exam is open book!", that is true only nominally during a 3-hr exam. If you had a week-long take home exam, you could get some value out of the books.

But it was clear to me taking the sample exam that you just don't have time to be flipping through casebooks or supplements. A lean & mean outline will help, but people who can access the material from memory will have a clear advantage, as one of the most common complaints of the law school exam taker is "I ran out of time".

29 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

We did our last two class evaluations today. In one class with a somewhat, shall we say, not uniformly well-liked professor, I happened to see a sheet dropped in that had the lowest possible marks in every category. Now, this professor had his flaws, to be sure, but that's just ice cold.

I ended up giving him decent marks, because empirically he had a lot of good qualities as an instructor. He just had these occasional in-class freak-outs that were incomprehensible. Imagine dating someone with looks, brains and humor, but who belched loudly whenever you were out in public. While no one expects perfection, certain flaws can be dealbreakers all by themselves.

But what really is the purpose of the evaluation anyhow? These people have tenure. We can't exactly vote them off the island. It's like telling a fat person, hey dude you're fat. Yeah, no kidding. After a while teachers know very well what their strengths & weaknesses are. What is the incentive for a tenured teacher to get any better at their craft?

I know, professors are selected for other reasons besides their pedagogical ability. Still, I can't really think of any other pocket of work culture in america that features lifetime appointments, and the only basis for discipline or dismissal is a gross breach of ethics or dereliction of duty.

29 Nov 04 ::: Comments closed

Yesterday, the prof mentioned below delivered a short but hot-blooded sermon in class about the perils of arriving unprepared, after discovering a few people had not done the reading.

Here are the topics this same professor has taken time out of class to complain about, or offer as an explanation for his own occasional lateness or less-than-100% class preparation through the semester.

Color blindness.
Nerve damage.
Bacterial infection.
Immune system disorder.
Funeral.
Poor eyesight.
Poor memory.
Favorite baseball team loses playoff game.
Favorite baseball team wins playoff game.
Child care issues.
Child transportation issues.
Moving violation.
Use of new casebook.
Surgical procedure.
Traffic.
Flu.
Certain emails from students.
Recent move into new office.
Other law school faculty members.
The eroding pedagogical culture of America's colleges.

Wow, my recall's pretty good, too bad that won't be on the exam.

01 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Read about the Mysterious Michael Paloma

01 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Today is the first day of the semester I've actually felt really tired. Though I'm thinking that had more to do with staying up just a little too late playing GTA San Andreas. It may have been a mistake to bring that into the house prior to exams. I use it to run through crim law hypos. "Hm, if I pick up my gang members in the car, are they immediately accomplices?" "If I throw molotov cocktails near the gang house, is that attempted arson?" "Is there strict liability for possessing grenades?"

02 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Here is the greatest procrastination technique ever. Prof CivPro confessed that after deciding he needed to take the California bar exam, he concocted the heroically absurd idea of getting legislation passed to automatically admit law professors to the bar. To spare him the trouble of actually studying for it.

But perhaps it makes perfect sense for a civpro teacher to attempt to find a procedural fix to a substantive problem.

02 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

A professor who shall remain nameless used the word "appendice" as the singular form of "appendices", as in "you can find that note in the appendice".

03 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

From E! Online, my source for vital legal news: "A group of Greek lawyers upset over Oliver Stone's portrayal of Alexander the Great as bisexual backing off threats to sue the filmmaker and Warner Bros to add a disclaimer stating it was not historically accurate."

I believe they wouldn't get past my favorite rule of civil procedure, 12(b)(6): failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. Nor would they get past the hearty belly laughs of the judge.

03 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Over breakfast today I told two classmates I expected the torts exam to be the most difficult, crim law in the middle, and civ pro the best chance of a decent grade. They said "uh, everyone thinks they'll do well on the civ pro exam."

That is true. Everyone enjoyed the civ pro professor so naturally we all think we'll do great on that exam. But thanks to the curve, 20% of us, even if we are all civ pro geniuses, will nevertheless get C's. And on the torts exam, though we may all dread it, 20% of us will nevertheless get A's.

So in fact, the exam people feel generally most confident about will be the one that's most likely to produce a grade below expectations. And vice versa. Man, I hadn't thought I'd get a better grade in torts than civ pro but I've just convinced myself it could well happen.

03 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Classes are now over. My first exam is next Friday.

04 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

ah, exams ... what can I say? I find the process of preparing for them more tedious than difficult. Actually that applies to taking them as well.

This is my theory, perhaps soon to be proven wrong. Performance on an exam (probably any exam) is a combination of three factors. Your preparation, your exam taking skill, and your natural aptitude for the material. The aptitiude you can't do anything about. The preparation is under your full control.

The exam skill, half and half: you can take practice exams and hone your technique but are still people who are naturally better able to get out more ideas in unit time. So that really means only half of your total performance is under your control.

I started the semester with a pass/fail mentality, but as the weeks went on I could feel myself raising the bar ... "at least Bs" ... "at least one A" ... ugh, talk about inconsequentialities. I had to pause and ask, what do I really care? Like any good student I have been propelled through my academic career with a deep sense of responsibility to continuing earning the best possible grades.

But if anyone should be able to attest to the saying "grades don't matter in the real world" at this point it should be me, and it's certainly been true so far. For me there's something about taking an exam that puts me back in that student/teacher inferior/superior dynamic. It somehow occludes the truth of the situation: the professors are doing their job, they don't really like grading exams any more than I like taking them.

I'm back to a pass / fail mentality. The law degree is valuable to me; being ranked high in the class has extremely little incremental value to me compared to the work that would be necessary.

06 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

I apologize for the comment spam onslaught. I just familiarized myself with Blacklist and have purged the castle.

06 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

This week, the week of his exam, one professor has canceled his ABA-mandated review session and all office hours due to family commitments. (?!) Though he's offered to answer all email questions, he hasn't answered either of mine, and I know he's responded to other people. (?!?!!) What's the story dude?

08 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

I am one of the people who is convinced Anonymous Lawyer is entirely fictitious, though I continue to meet people who disagree. If you haven't seen it, it purports to be the blog of an overpaid hiring partner at a large law firm.

Thing 1, the guy's personality encompasses every stereotypical element of the Lawyer Who is a Giant Asshole -- it's too good to be true. It suggests someone listed these fabled qualities and then made sure to work in evidence of each.

Thing 2, suppose the personality exists, because hey, stereotypes often arise out of some nugget of accuracy. Doing a blog is fully at odds with his personality type. I have met narcissists in positions of power. Believe me, a blog is not going to satisfy their yawning need for attention & approval, it's too one-sided. Narcissists also utterly lack the capacity for introspection that Anon Lawyer displays.

Though, there is a lot of detail that has the ring of truth. While it may be based on a real person, I think it's much more likely that it's perpetrated by an associate who is in the radius of an Anon Lawyer-type partner who writes the blog as a form of caricature. And of course, a cry to be noticed.

09 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

It's 75 and sunny in LA today ... the perfect day to sit indoors and write a torts final.

UPDATE: 5000 words and 4 hrs later, I'm DONE. It wasn't so bad really. I think maybe the prof didn't respond to my email since it referenced 4 different issues that ended up on the exam.

I had a momentary panic at the beginning because I put the exam software on my other laptop (we did this exam over the internet, from home) and it wouldn't download the exam. When I switched to the original laptop it worked, but I deserved to get burned for violating one big rule of computers -- don't change your configuration on game day.

Otherwise, we were called upon to contemplate the usual vast tragedy and suffering typical for a torts exam. I felt pretty good about it, which just means there's 79 other people who felt pretty good about it.

More usefully, I didn't feel either overprepared or underprepared -- the level & type of studying was just about right. Though I did, at the last minute, decide to go through and look at EVERY note case again, just to get all those odd little fact patterns juggling in my head ... sure enough a couple of them came up and I could say "yep, know what happened there". Tomorrow, they will have flown away like so much pollen in the wind. Or dandruff.

10 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

As I've been preparing my crim law outline, I keep saying to myself "could it really be this simple? Because it sure didn't seem this simple in class."

Prof Crim maintained for 15 weeks that he was unusual in his refusal to "spoon-feed" us the material. Fair enough, but the cost of that style is that so much time & energy is spent apprehending the basic doctrine that there's not much time to go into more sophisticated applications of the material.

I'm sure the prof would say the concepts only seem simple now because we've tangled with them for three months. Well ... maybe. It seems like there are plenty of hard topics in crim law however. Why not let the simple ones be simple so the hard ones can be hard. Instead of making the simple ones be hard, and the hard ones beyond the range of comprehension.

12 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

The professor has maintained through the whole semester that despite the complications of his lectures, his students routinely find his exam to be "simple and straightforward". Having now done three of his old exams, I can't say I agree. I would not say the exams are unfair, but I also wouldn't call them simple.

In college, preparing for an exam just meant finishing the reading, reviewing your notes, etc. Most exams I had in college were closed-book, so you'd arrive, prepared as well as you can be, and take whatever comes.

In law school, most of the exams are open book, so part of the preparation is making an outline of your notes to take with you into the exam. The other thing is that professors all make past exams from their class available. So the good news is, since professors very rarely change the format of their exams dramatically, you know kinda what to expect.

The bad news is, taking practice exams becomes a core part of your preparation. So instead of taking three exams over 10 days, you're taking more like 10 exams, 3 of which are graded. Joy.

PS to anyone who is studying for the LSAT --- yep, taking old 3-hr exams repetitively without losing your mind is yet another LSAT skill you can take to school.

14 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

The crim exam is done. It was not so bad really. It was one of those exams where you get a a little confidence going in the first few questions, but then later in the exam you get questions where you think "hm ... this seems totally simple and obvious ... but I must be missing something ... "

Probably one of the worst things you can do in an exam situation is distrust your intuition. After days (weeks?) of preparation and sample-exam-taking, to get to the exam and be like "I'm pretty sure it's X, so I'll write Y' is a bad bet. I found myself doing it at one point, looking at a note on my outline and wondering "maybe that's wrong ..."

Then the little voice says dude it's in the outline! The outline was triple-checked with the notes & textbooks! Don't be hatin' the outline! OK, fair enough.

I did improve my outline format a lot from torts to crim. My torts outline was quite detailed and printed quite small. It ended up consolidating a lot of information I had memorized, so about half of it was useless as note material. For crim, I just made big checklists so that I wouldn't forget any of the necssary elements of certain defenses.

Right this minute I have a greater-than-normal interest in taking the day off but ... our last challenge awaits, the civil procedure exam.

16 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

In all the spam we get from UCLA admin ("Come join us for a presentation by Random Professor from East Coast on Thursday ... pizza will be served") nobody noted that UCLA law alum Kelly Perdew had advanced to the final round of the Apprentice, and last night won.

I have seen three episodes of the Apprentice in my life, including last night's finale. All of these people seem like feckless dopes who should not be given responsibility for anything more complicated than opening their lunchbox. Not a single person on the show seemed to have anything approaching a calm, professional demeanor. But I guess they don't select the true pros to go on the show. They want the people who are severely unpolished, it makes better television.

17 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

... whoops, I mean undocumented foreign nationals. This is a sort of big ongoing issue here in California and LA in particular, given that we're the 2nd biggest latino city in the world. And we have a lot of cars on the road.

While I hate to agree with republicans, I have a hard time understanding the argument in favor of making these licenses available. I don't have a problem with immigrants coming to LA and becoming legal residents. I don't have a problem with them NOT becoming legal residents either -- let's face it, it's like teens having sex, you cannot preach abstinence. It's just part of the mix.

But a driver's license is a privilege granted by the state in exchange for all the taxes you pay for the road maintenance, for the cops to patrol the roads, etc. It's not some inalienable right that the state is recognizing with a plastic card. It's a quid pro quo.

17 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

My education is put to work every day when I read vital entertainment news. From E online:

"A California woman is suing the producers of mega-bomb Gigli, claiming she fell after being "temporarily blinded" by sun reflectors on the set. The filmmakers allegedly set up the reflectors so that paparazzi wouldn't be able to get shots of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez kissing between scenes."

Thanks to civil procedure I know that most courts use "notice pleading" which makes it very easy to get a lawsuit started. You don't really have to make any showing that your complaint is true or meritorious, you just have to scribble down a few lines of a complaint and boom, you've got a lawsuit.

Thanks to torts I know that this kind of suit, which makes people roll their eyes in wonder at the court system, is likely to fail. The woman has to show the fillmmakers had a duty to protect her from injury based on a specific risk created by the reflectors. Even then she needs to show that the reflectors were the cause of her injury, and not just her craning her neck to get a look at Ben Affleck.

18 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

I had my last exam this morning. I woke up at 4am and couldn't really get back to sleep, I think it's time to admit that the Long March through the last month of graded memo and final exams has taken a bit of a toll. I expect to pass out tonight at about 7pm.

The exam today was the most merciful and kind of our graded assignments -- very similar to past exams, and quite a bit shorter, a 45 min section that had been promised simply did not appear. Most people seemed to feel pretty good about it afterwards. Of course, this means grade expectations will start high and only go down.

But, as the spring semester tuition bill arrives in our email boxes on cue, we are all reminded that despite whatever worst case scenarios we could envision, everyone is going to pass, everyone is going to be back in January, everyone has gotten through the period of law school with what I'd assume is the most stress per cubic inch across the whole 3 yrs. We've completed one semester, the rest are variations on that theme.

[ no more posts until spring semester starts next month ... have a good holiday everyone ]

20 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Several people wrote to tell me Anonymous Lawyer has been unmasked in the NY Times as a Harvard 3L named Jeremy Blachman. Thank you for confirming my prediction. If you didn't believe that lawyers can be world-class whiners, I enter the following as evidence:

"I've turned down the opportunity to make having gone to law school make sense," he wrote last month, announcing that he had passed on a $125,000/yr job offer from the Manhattan firm. "The law doesn't inspire me," he wrote, adding that he had had to wrestle with his fear that his yearning for fulfilling work was a "stupid, childish fairy tale."

"Look, I want to write," he went on. He said that after graduation in June he might move to Los Angeles and look for work writing for television. "I could possibly write for a law show, given my legal education," he said.

It's so perfect in its world-weary entitlement that I would almost be persuaded that Jeremy Blachman is fictitious, but alas I fear he is not. Dear Jeremy: everyone in LA county who read the article knows that "move to LA and look for work writing" is 20-something code for "spend another 5-10 yrs living off my parents".

Statements like "the law doesn't inspire me" are the work of a limp, uncurious mind. The law is a huge, huge field. Pretty much any topic a human being could be interested in has a legal angle that can be mined for fun & profit. I think really what young lawyers mean when they say that is -- "I didn't know I'd have to work so hard to earn that top-tier salary. [long sigh]"

29 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Poor Anna Nicole. The 9th circuit reversed her 2002 judgment of about $85M from the estate of her dead hubsand, J. Howard Marshall, so now she's back to zero. What I like are passages in the opinion such as this:

Vickie Lynn Marshall [Anna's legal name] argues that we need not consider the applicability of the probate exception because it operates only where the federal court has diversity jurisdiction and not in federal question cases. She relies on the 11th Circuit's decision in Goerg v. Parungao...

I just like imagining her in her heels & nails, explaining the subtleties of the probate exception to a panel of federal judges.

The funny thing is, this case has a potential basis for a Supreme Court hearing, since it turns on an issue that has been decided differently by different federal appeals courts.

31 Dec 04 ::: Comments closed

Friends know I am occasionally prone to sermonize on a bête noire of mine: adult children who are financially dependent on their parents. I'm not talking about 23 yr olds moving back home for 6 months. I'm talking about 33 yr olds who have marketable skills but choose to rely on mom & dad to prop up their standard of living, as opposed to earning more money themselves.

Somehow the type is especially prevalent in LA. This was a class of people formerly known as "trustafarians" but it has been expanded widely in recent years.

My basic problem is this setup removes the primary means by which people develop a sense of social accountability early in their adulthood, which is by supporting themselves. Hey if it were purely personal & financial I wouldn't care, it wouldn't affect me. But invariably these folk carry this adolescent approach into work life, friendships, etc. and have a skewed level of expectation.

There was a piece in the Wall St Journal today about this phenomenon, tracing it back to how children of the current generation experienced more divorce, and consequently hang on to their parents longer financially. Or so they speculate. It ended with this choice item:

A judge interviewed a young law-school grad for a job. When the judge asked whether the applicant had any questions, he had only two: "How casual is casual Friday?" and "Can I leave work early to ride my bike home before rush hour?" ... the young man didn't get the job.

06 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

"Spring" semester begins today amidst biblical-scale rain & flooding in LA. A good sign for sure.

10 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

"To help you prepare for class, this book provides Questions and Notes every few pages. Pause after you have read a case and see whether you can answer the questions. Sometimes one cannot give an answer because something is missing. Other questions simply may have no answer."

10 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

As I start in reading the constitution for this semester's con law class, I can't read the preamble without hearing the Schoolhouse Rock melody in my head. That and Conjunction Junction are probably my favorites. I assume thse have gone off the air long ago, and thus may be unknown to many of my classmates.

Here's the lyrics at least.

UPDATE: in the first lecture, the professor admitted he was also infected by Schoolhouse Rock, but sadly refused to attempt to sing it.

10 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

Time to first sighting of solitaire on a student laptop: 23 minutes into the 2nd lecture of the semester.

Last semester internet access was left on during lectures unless otherwise requested by the instructor. This semester, no doubt in response to complaints by professors, they have inverted it into an opt-in system: net access is off unless explicitly turned on.

One of my classmates already found a giant loophole in the system that means her internet and AIM access during class has not been impacted. Out of respect for her ingenuity, I won't disclose her method.

12 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

2 out of 4 grades have arrived. I will do a full report when they're all in but I'll at least say that my prediction came true: through curve magic, I did better in torts than civil procedure.

12 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

I had the luck to be selected for the first in-class quizzing of the semester by Prof Conlaw. "Mr. B, why is Marbury v Madison an important case?" Now that's the softest of softballs.

Fortunately he tells 4 people the day before that they will be on the spit. The bad news is if you muff it, you really have no excuse. Other things being equal I suppose I prefer having done my class participation duty early.

I've decided this semester, perhaps to the relief of my classmates, to ask fewer questions in class. I'm always going to have another question that interests me, I don't need to bore everyone else with it.

13 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

The arrival of grades has subtly but unmistakably altered the mood of the class. Mostly it is the fruit of suppression: those who didn't do so well are putting on a brave face (successfully); those who did well are trying not to openly gloat (with mixed success).

Having completed the first major milestone of law school I can feel my expectations rising in the 2nd semester -- of myself, of the school -- and my patience for certain types of mediocrity getting shorter.

Based on the first week of classes I'm thinking I've got two professors who are on the ball and two who are not. I want to see the good in people, really I do. But the more experience you get with things, the harder it is to suppress your bad vibes, because, well, they're usually accurate.

Not that I want to be the guy with the black cloud on his head. In any environment you can be required to work with people you don't have a favorable impression of. Perhaps it's a frustration inherent to not having choice in your subjects or professors in the 1L year. If I chose a mediocre professor, at least I'd feel accountable for the error in judgment. When the school picks the professors for me, the accountability is diffuse.

16 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

Law school is a little like the guy in your office who needs everything ASAP. Right away. Emergency. There's the people who take him at face value and get burned out acceding to his demands. Then there's the others who don't get caught up in the perceived emergency, filter it out, and go about their business.

Law school wants to move you smoothly from one state of hysteria to another. First the hysteria about the LSAT; then applying & getting in; then first semester; then first exams; and now that first exams are over, the 1L summer job; and coming this fall, on-campus interviewing for the 2nd summer job; which leads to your 3L job offer; which leads to the rest of your life as a lawyer.

Whew. Don't forget clerking for a judge for a year after law schoool. So you need to arrange that & the job offer simultaneously.

There's a part of me that wants to respect the process. It may not make sense that things are done as they are, but that is the methodology, and you can't redraft the rules by personal fiat. You have to do your best to color inside the lines.

There's another part that finds it absurd. Because as you pass through each allegedly hysteria-quality milestone, it wasn't really as bad as you thought. So that's when you get to thinking -- maybe the next one isn't as bad either. Maybe I should just relax.

It's easy to get into a mentality of telling yourself "I'm sunk if ____ doesn't happen" over and over again. Invariably _______ won't happen at some point, and you'll deal with it, and everything will go back to being fine. Why not just start with that attitude & enjoy it longer?

17 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

I saw Prof Crim on campus today so I suspected (correctly) he was there to turn in his grades. So the final tally looks like this:

My grades were in the narrowest possible range. So I can't complain. But as for correlation between how I felt before & after the exam and my eventual performance, there is none. But there is a correlation between performance & whether the exam was similar to past exams posted by the professor. I guess I crave consistency.

18 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

Q: Why do Harvard art history students avoid looking out the window in the morning?

A: So they'll have something to do in the afternoon.

(Substitute the matriculators of your choosing in the Q. That's the way it was originally told to me. I think of it every time I pull open the blinds on one of the very few windows in the UCLA lecture rooms.)

20 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

UCLA hasn't ranked its students since 1970. Nevertheless, since everything is graded on the curve, you might reasonably wonder how you did relative to your peers.

I kinda figured it out. Grades in each class were given out 20% A, 60% B and 20% C. There's no stipulation for how many + and - grades within each tier so we leave those off, those rounding errors will tend to even out. Then we assume the grades were randomly distributed -- a little bit of error there too since consistent performance is more likely.

In my section, crim was 4 units (compared to 5 for torts and civpro) so its effect on GPA is proportionately underweighted. But you take your grades, find which row you're on, and the rank tells you approximately where you are as a percentage from the top. If the row doesn't have a value, go to the next one down; it means the GPAs are tied and thus there's no way to distinguish them.

civpro	torts	crim	GPA	prob	rank
A	A	A	4.00	0.8%	0.8%
A	A	B	3.71	2.4%	3.2%
A	B	A	3.64	2.4%	
B	A	A	3.64	2.4%	8.0%
A	A	C	3.43	0.8%	8.8%
A	B	B	3.36	7.2%	
B	A	B	3.36	7.2%	23.2%
A	C	A	3.29	0.8%	
B	B	A	3.29	7.2%	
C	A	A	3.29	0.8%	32.0%
A	B	C	3.07	2.4%	
B	A	C	3.07	2.4%	36.8%
A	C	B	3.00	2.4%	
B	B	B	3.00	21.6%	
C	A	B	3.00	2.4%	63.2%
B	C	A	2.93	2.4%	
C	B	A	2.93	2.4%	68.0%
A	C	C	2.71	0.8%	
B	B	C	2.71	7.2%	
C	A	C	2.71	0.8%	76.8%
B	C	B	2.64	7.2%	
C	B	B	2.64	7.2%	91.2%
C	C	A	2.57	0.8%	92.0%
B	C	C	2.36	2.4%	
C	B	C	2.36	2.4%	96.8%
C	C	B	2.29	2.4%	99.2%
C	C	C	2.00	0.8%	100.0%

20 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

Ah, the summer job search is in full swing. I was planning to be low-key about my search for legal employment but my alumni mentor has, rightfully, pressured me to step up the activity.

The common wisdom is that working for a judge is the best way to go. Ah, but there are so many judges. At the federal level there's appeals judges, district judges, magistrate judges, bankruptcy judges, etc. Then you get to the state, where the judicial population explodes.

In a couple weeks UCLA has its public interest job fair, which I imagine involves many students interviewing for what are probably a tiny number of actual jobs. Which by the way have no pay -- you have to go get a public interest law grant on your own from a 3rd party if you want to avoid working for free.

There's a smattering of big-firm jobs out there for the truly ambitious / masochistic. I'd be interested to hear how similar the summer job experience is to the permanent position experience at a big firm. If they have any sense they'd make the summer job like a dream vacation so that people would think "Damn, I'm getting $2000 a week to wear a suit and eat catered lunches? I could do this for the rest of my life no problem ..."

24 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

I'd like to throw some respect in the direction of my 3L friend who, in his last semester, is getting 5 credits (same number of credits as I got for Civil Procedure) for writing a screenplay for a legal thriller with a classmate.

I salute your ingenuity sir. If this is what 2L and 3L are about, it may be worth the trip. I see myself writing a rock opera ... about permissive joinder ...

25 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

A professor of mine from last semester has asked me to work on a project with him as a research assistant. Being now familiar with the complications involved in sending a check to UCLA, I can't imagine what it will be like to get money out of them.

In the years before I was in law school I had a number of professional activities, one of which was information design. So this project involves converting research data into useful charts & displays. Since law school involves feeling dumb & confused much of the time, it's kind of relaxing to revisit a topic where I have expert knowledge.

Meanwhile I went to Barneys today to get the obligatory interview suit. I have neither owned nor worn a real suit for ... an improbably long time. But according to the female suit critic who accompanied me, I'm lookin' sharp.

29 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

Public interest summer jobs are supported by grants from a student organization called PILF that spends most of its time raising money for the grants. OK, fair enough, and I try to put a couple bucks into the can whenever they have their random, low-rent fundraisers ("Buy a spool of thread from PILF! Only $5")

But I got a good chuckle out of the unadulterated chutzpah of this class-wide email:

This year, for the first time ever, the 1L sections are going to compete against each other to see which 1L section can bring in the most money for the PILF Auction.

HOW TO WIN: Solicit donations from new donors! All of the donations will be added up, and the section with the highest total will get a party from PILF (pizza? ice cream sandwiches? your choice!)

Damn, when PILF says "party", they are not screwing around. I say, let's get those ice cream sandwiches in here and get this joint crunked up.

The total from the winning section must exceed $500.

Remember, lawyers: always read the fine print.

30 Jan 05 ::: Comments closed

This school-wide email takes the cake so far for misdirected outpouring of compensatory sympathy. What I like about it is a) its presumption that one person's bad judgment (leaving her bag unattended) is cause for community spirit and b) it sounds like a George W Bush speech. Just substitute "war on terror" for "laptop" and "country" for "community".

What sets UCLAw apart from many other law schools is the community that exists here, the way we care about one another.  So when there is a violation against one member of our community, it is an affront to us all.   Last Tuesday afternoon, a bag containing a laptop computer was stolen from a busy hallway in our law school.  The victim of this cowardly act was [careless student].  We recognize that when any one of us suffers, we as a whole are diminished.  So we have decided to take action.  Not against the thief, whose reprehensible deed has already been done, but in solidarity with our fellow law student.  We refuse to let one person bear the burden of this assault on our community alone.  As individuals in community, we choose to act for good.  On our part, it would take just one dollar, an inconsequential sum, but when multiplied across our law school community it could counter the significant loss that she has suffered.  Evil need not prevail, we can act with just one dollar, and goodness can win the day.

03 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

I haven't really seen anyone mention it yet, but I was wondering how much the republican push for social security reform is a well-timed attempt to win huge points with what will soon be the largest segment of the population: retired people.

True, Bush can't run for president again, but this is the kind of legislation that's so big, a party can run on it for years and years. Cf. the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was instrumental in insuring the long-term popularity of the democratic party among black voters (and as Johnson feared, the long-term erosion of white support in the south)

The great thing about pandering to retirees is that there's no opposition this time. Does the democratic party really want to come out forcefully against social security reform and be branded a hater of grandma and grandpa? So it's a deft political move in two directions -- the scale of the group on one hand, and the difficulty of mounting pointed public opposition on the other.

04 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

Some days at UCLA, it helps to remember that everyone -- professors, staff, administration -- is a state government employee. I don't get mad at the people who work at the DMV, I just take deep breaths and endure. I should remember to apply that technique on campus when appropriate.

04 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

There is a persistent urban legend that the first 6 weeks of 1L are the worst period of law school. I don't know if it's true, though I do feel worse about school now than I have so far -- it seems like a lot of people are having a similar malaise.

This semester the "section" system of having all your classes with the same people is getting tedious for me. I don't dislike my classmates individually, but it's like we're on this never-ending road trip in a station wagon that fits 80. The enforced togetherness can be dreary.

I also find myself wondering how much of the law school experience I really want to buy into. I enjoy getting the education, but as for some of the career path accoutrements that everyone says you "must" do, I have no enthusiasm at all.

As an adult, the only times I've regretted personal choices is when I didn't trust my gut instinct -- when I let my brain talk myself into something, it's never a happy result.

I think the inherent lack of perspective from being in school cramps one's idea of the possibilities on the outside. Surely it can't be that all the law school students who didn't do law review, who didn't get judicial externships, or who didn't get above a 3.0 GPA, end up on skid row. Because that describes 80% of all attorneys.

06 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

Your grocery list, before taking your legal writing course:

tortillas
peanut butter
soy milk
granola
diet soda

Your grocery list, after legal writing:

IV. Analysis
The plaintiff established Last Week that tortillas were enjoyed with peanut butter. Therefore it is strongly recommended that tortillas be purchased, as well as more peanut butter, if peanut butter supplies suggest that would be appropriate at this time.

As to the issue of beverage, both soy milk and diet soda have been considered in the past. Restatement of Grocery Lists. There has not been found evidence that is strongly dispositive one direction or another as to which has been preferred on a weekly basis. Thus it is recommended that both be procured in the short-term.

The need for granola has been amply demonstrated in many grocery lists prior to this one. It is strongly urged that no deviation from this course of action be taken.

Seriously, the writing teacher today went over the scoring key for the last graded memo. I asked, genuinely curious, "how many points were given for grammar and readability?" And the answer was "none". Good to know for the next time.

07 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

To be fair, the modern legal writing curriculum advises you against adopting what might be termed the classic "legalese" style that most people are familiar with from reading product warranties & such. Opaque or redundant phrases like "notwithstanding anything hereunder" and "wanton, willful and unlawful" are deprecated.

Still, despite the lawyerly penchant for outline-style numbering of headings in documents (I, II, III ... A, B, C), any group of items that might well lend itself to a bullet list is inevitably spun out into a full paragraph of prose.

That was a habit I used to have, until it was drilled out of me when I was working -- you always have to assume you have access to the shortest attention span possible. So lengthy, expository prose, while perhaps accurate and beautifully written, is never preferred over a bullet list, simply because the list is more likely to be read.

Perhaps there's an economic explanation. Most businesspeople are salaried and are not directly billing their hours back to a customer; so they are motivated to get the most done per unit of time.

Whereas for a lawyer in private practice, billable hours are everything, so there's no motivation to create documents that communicate concisely, for either the writer or the reader. (Cutting the other way: it's usually more time-consuming to write a really good short document than a long one.)

The truth is, most legal documents could be shorter. Once, when I needed a non-disclosure agreement, I commissioned one from my lawyer with the stipulation that it fit on one side of a business card. He did it, and I used it.

08 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

My major objection to the UCLA legal writing curriculum is that it puts zero emphasis on critical & analytic legal thought -- all its time is spent on research fundamentals & use of caselaw.

This is not at all a bad thing -- knowing how to use caselaw is a worthy endeavor for the 1L -- but I do notice that the class only meets 3 times a week and still feels well-padded. It's not like there's not time to address some more sophisticated topics.

Apparently law schools have been under pressure in the last 10 yrs to fix up their writing curricula since law firms were tired of hiring recent grads who couldn't write. The new approach seems to arise from the assumption that writing is the prerequisite skill for thinking; however I think it's the other way around.

The net effect is that at the end, 300 people will have gone through a year of law school without completing a single piece of writing requiring critical, creative thinking. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing.

When I am king of legal writing*, the nuts & bolts will be served first semester, and 2nd semester people will have to be more self-directed in finding, researching and writing about a topic.

* ie., never

09 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

Overheard as I walked to lunch (imagine world-weary cadences):

I mean, it's hard as a 1L to even IMAGINE having a day off. I don't know what I'd do with myself. I'd probably just get up and sit there in a stupor.

I don't mean to pick on this gentleman. But law students of the future, believe me, this type of attitude may fit the urban legends of what 1L is about. But truly, it is a choice you make, not your inevitable fate.

Aside from the question of whether not taking days off benefits your performance (it doesn't) a 1L who honestly feels he doesn't have the ability to take a day off is doing something wrong.

14 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

Found in our student mailboxes today:

Howrey Simon Arnold & White is pleased to invite UCLA 1Ls to a Reception to learn about our summer associate program called Howrey Bootcamp...Howrey is one of the largest firms in the country...This will be a general information session for you to hear about our Bootcamp 2006...Applications will be accepted through the Bootcamp website starting August 1 for Bootcamp 2006.

(Not to be confused with the Skadden Arps Summer Sweatshop or the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher Coal Mining Arts program.)

Here's some of your Bootcamp scheduled activities:

Antitrust Law Basics
Discovery Motions Demonstration
Offsite Dinner Event
Deposition Exercise
Indoor Golf Tournament

Gee, it sounds a lot like school, except for the golf tournament (and the $12K stipend)

16 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

I was reading in the paper about Iraqi "pop up" militias who are ad hoc groups that are aiding the US in fighting insurgents. While US troops appreciate the help, there's concern that their allegiances are too flexible to be fully trusted.

One thing you're reminded of in constitutional law is that our country's progress to being a 'beacon of liberty' has been neither quick nor smooth. In the first hundred years we had:

+ a first constitution that failed & had to be replaced
+ a second constitution that legitimized slavery
+ a civil war
+ no voting rights for women

and so on. Why do we expect that countries like Iraq will step, Cinderella-style, directly from the sooty fireplace of dictatorship into the glass slippers of democracy. Maybe our strategy is to help them consolidate their revolutionary war & their civil war, just to save some time.

Well, at least the Iraqi women didn't have to wait 150 years to vote.

16 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

Contracts was cut short today by the wet-vac crew, as the lecture hall had flooded in our extreme rain. The professor gamely acted as if nothing was unusual but had to pause to roll up her pant cuffs and continued lecturing about restitution, standing in a very large puddle.

For my part, I had to skip my last class today so I could go home and lash a tarp to my chimney, which slowly turned into an indoor fountain as I sat last night, researching Federal Rule of Evidence 702.

Yesterday I went hiking in conditions that started as rain but turned into high-velocity hail pellets the size of BBs. That was real nice.

22 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

United States v. Various Slot Machines on Guam, 658 F.2d 697

22 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

Here in LA the Michael Jackson trial is all over the news as it gets wheeled to the freak-show launchpad. A whole lot of people on the A, B and C list are about to be very unhappy because Michael Jackson is planning to call them as witnesses in his molestation trial.

It's one thing to tell the E! Channel that Michael is a good friend and you simply can't believe the allegations. It's quite another to be compelled by law to show up in court and testify under oath about what you really think. Perhaps ... just maybe ... the story will be a bit different.

My guess is that very few of these people will make it to the stand. Jackson's defense can't really afford to call "character witnesses" who wilt under cross-examination.

23 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

I've become very curious about whether Prof Property colors his hair. I mean, he can do whatever he wants. I color my hair, I certainly don't mind if he does. It's just that he's such an old-school playa -- he's over 60, from the midwest -- it's hard to imagine him heading down to a salon in Westwood for highlights.

Yet, for a man of his age, he has no grey hair, in fact he's kind of a sandy blonde. Though today I was noticing along his part that the roots of his hair are indubitably and uniformly grey for about 3/4 of an inch. The color job seems improbable on the basis of character, but scientifically speaking, it's the only reasonable explanation.

24 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

Prof Contracts is from Canada. Which is the only possible reason I can think of that she refers to yesterday as "last day" and tomorrow as "next day". As in "Last day, we were talking about restitution." Is this in fact a Canadian thing? Any first-hand knowledge out there?

Another reason to cherish our world's cultures.

25 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

How to drive your professor crazy
Ask her a question that combines two topics, one from her class, one from any other. Eg. a question in torts or property that includes a little civil procedure. The professor, deeply confused, will act annoyed and announce "Mr. X, this isn't a civil procedure class" -- as if you didn't know that -- and move on.

Translation: "Mr. X, I've had the same amount of civil procedure training as you, except mine was 20 years ago and I probably didn't get as good a grade. That's why I teach this course. Don't make me humiliate myself."

WARNING! Your professor may have taught classes in the past you're not aware of. Maybe your constitutional law professor taught civil procedure. In which case they will do a judo chop and knock you flat on your ass.

How to make your professor's day
Ask her a question that combines two topics, one from her class, one from any upper level class she also teaches. This requires a little advance research. For example, if your torts teacher also has a land use class, ask about how zoning laws interact with toxic torts. The professor will smile broadly and say "Mr. X, that's a great question. It's one I cover in my upper level class, which some of you may want to take. But the short answer is ... "

28 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

"Due to residual fumes from the sewage leak last week, the Office of Career Services will be closed today but will reopen tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. "

28 Feb 05 ::: Comments closed

I came home today interested in blog coverage of the murder of federal Judge Joan Lefkow's husband and mother in her home yesterday. Everyone seems more interested about today's USSCT decision outlawing the death penalty for juvenile offenders.

This is really an astonishing and bizarre crime. Judge Lefkow had ruled against a white supremacist group in a trademark dispute (!!) and one of its members was subsequently arrested for plotting to have her killed in retaliation. The supremacist was scheduled to be sentenced next month.

Someone, presumably associated with the supremacist group, entered Lefkow's home and killed her husband and 89-yr-old mother, and the judge found them on returning from work.

Unbelievable.

01 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

The supreme court ruled two days ago that juvenile offenders can't be sentenced to death. As another blogger put it, "I haven’t read the decision yet, but I can’t imagine how this could be a bad thing."

Gee, why didn't I think of that. My error was that I did read the opinion. Now I'm stuck thinking it's pretty sketchy.

Certainly it's good news for juveniles currently on death row or heading there. Past that, the majority opinion skates on ice that's pretty thin a lot of the time. Scalia, in a majestically tart dissenting opinion, accurately targets a lot of them.

Roper is being heralded as a victory for death penalty and child welfare advocates. Right now, it is. But ultimately the reasoning behind a case is just as important as the outcome itself, because it ensures that the case remains relevant and applicable into the future, and more pragmatically, is solid enough to resist being overturned by a future set of justices.

Though I support the outcome, I wish the majority had found something a little better to hang their hat on aside from a perceived "national consensus" that executing juveniles is morally distasteful. Roper overturned another supreme court decision that was only 15 years old. Without a stronger footing, Roper's attempt to stake out new territory may only survive as long.

02 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

Alongside the social security agenda, George W Bush has been decrying the pains of frivolous litigation and has promised to make it tougher for plaintiffs to file malpractice & other big-money suits.

These are always interesting debates because it's one of the few issues where both sides have a lot of money to throw at lobbying and political donations. On the one side we have businesses, health insurers, doctors, etc who want litigation reform. On the other are trial lawyers, who want to preserve & expand plaintiff's rights.

One large set of people conspicuously missing from these debates are the defense lawyers. When people think of big law firms charging big money to big corporate clients, those guys are typically working on the defense side. Wouldn't we expect to see them standing shoulder to shoulder with their clients, demanding reform?

Maybe, until we realize their financial motivations are aligned with the trial lawyers. If the government makes suits harder to file, that means fewer suits initiated by trial lawyers, but it also means fewer cases for these big firms to defend against. Every time the plaintiff's bar wins another legislative concession, it just means more billable hours for the defense.

06 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

Next week is thet start of the law review write-on competition. More work for everyone (most of all the law review members who have to score the entries) but it's a much fairer way to select people than a grade-on.

A grade-on means the top 10% or so of the class, based on legal writing grades or overall GPA, is automatically promoted to law review. This is a form of regressive taxation. People can do poorly on exams for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with the skills they need on a law review. So the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

People who got lower grades have already been penalized once for their performance; making them ineligible for law review with a grade-on just penalizes them again for the same crime.

That said I'm somewhat surprised that only 1/3 of the 1L class participates in the competition. What's the downside? I mean, aside from spending half your spring break on what amounts to a 40 hr take home exam? That's about as much fun as you can have with your pants on.

08 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

From the NYTimes:

"In yet another apparent theft of consumers' personal data, the LexisNexis Group, a major compiler of legal and consumer information, said today that about 30,000 of its records - including names, addresses and Social Security numbers of individuals - may have fallen into the hands of thieves."

09 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

on the Dave Matthews toxic dumping case:

A bus driver for the Dave Matthews Band pleading guilty to dumping 800 pounds of human waste from the bus onto sightseers on a boat in the Chicago River. Stefan Wohl will serve 18 months' probation and 150 hours of community service and pay a $1,000 fine to a conservation group.

Dave Matthews himself still not charged with flooding America with millions of copies of his particular brand of mellow gold.

10 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

Our final graded memo is due this week. I think everyone hoped it would be less brain damaged than the prior assignments, but that hope was misplaced. Right now I have a pretty complete draft but I'm a page over the limit, so I'm going through looking for excess verbiage to cut. Why say "This is very different from Case X" when you can just say "Contrast Case X"?

I wouldn't wish this on anyone to read due to its mildly abstract use of the english language. Fortunately, it won't be. I learned my lesson with the last graded memo: no points for things like verbs, adjectives, connecting phrases, etc. So, they're gone, a luxury of civilian life.

13 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

When you show up, you inevitably see someone walking around the midway with a 5 foot tall stuffed tweety bird. So you say damn, I've got to get one of those. So then you spend $70 trying to shoot the basketball in the hoop or throw darts at a balloon and all you win is a crap decoder ring.

And you realize, they only have to have a few tweety birds walking around during the evening for everyone to think they have a great shot at getting their own tweety bird. When really it's just a matter of luck. Or knowing the guy who runs the basketball game.

So you go home with your $70 decoder ring. At least it was fun.

14 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

Today the graded memo is due. The professor still was sending out amendments to the assignment as of Tuesday night.

Three hours later, the law review write-on begins.

17 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

1) Why is Sen. Bill Frist, an M.D., maintaining "we should investigate every avenue before we take the life of a living human being"? He knows damn well she's not alive except in purely biological terms.

2) Why is George Bush ready to go back to Washington at a moment's notice apparently because "a woman's life is at stake"? One death is a tragedy, 1000 deaths is a statistic, I guess.

3) Why does anyone think that Schiavo's life, even in its best-case scenario, is any better than being held immobile in solitary confinement?

4) Failing congressional action, maybe they can get a constitutional amendment passed this week. How many states do we need? 38?

20 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

= not much posting this coming week.

20 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

I did finish the write-on. I did not enjoy it. No, enjoyment is not the point of the write-on. Rather, it sent me into a state of strange androidal nihilism, where I was quite compelled to do the best job I could, yet simultaneously completely indifferent about the outcome.

Does anyone really want to be on law review? I'm sure many want the credential and the prestige -- that's why 100 people will attempt the write-on -- but I imagine precious, precious few have been thinking all year "damn, I was born to cite check, baby. I have an uncontrollable urge to Shepardize."

There were two key moments of depression during the write-on: about halfway through, when I'd just written 5 pages of useless dreck (which I'd throw out later) and finishing seemed highly improbable. I worked through it. The other was finishing, and realizing that best case, you make law review and get a 2-yr assignment to do ... more of the same (not least of which is grading next year's write-ons)

Worst case, you don't make law review, and you've just invested half your spring break in the most labor-intensive waste of time of your academic career. Are you left with an interesting research paper? No. Are you left with a credential? No, you can't put "attempted law review write-on" on your resume. Your best bet is just to forget the whole thing ever happened.

I have some words for those who didn't attempt the write-on or abandoned it or don't make it. 90% of lawyers were not on law review. Yet they have managed to find employment and have, you know, productive careers. In the end the write-on is just another freakin' fire drill.

27 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

An interesting decision today from Colorado. The Supreme Court overturned a death sentence after it was discovered some jurors brought bibles into the deliberation room and looked up Old Testament passages.

It's a strange decision. The court wants to assert that using the bible contravened the instruction to not consider evidence outside the courtroom; yet they also acknowledge that a verdict is necessarily based partly on the morals & beliefs of the jury members, which they bring into the room independent of evidence issues.

I would've been hopping mad if I were the defendant finding out I was sentenced according to the Old Testament (guess they didn't get to the page with "thou shalt not kill").

But I'm not sure it's the right decision to overturn the verdict. Juries can find any verdict they want. They can disregard all the evidence and go with their gut instinct. A case is going to have conflicting evidence anyhow -- part of the jury's job is to decide which evidence and which witnesses are credible and which are not.

They also, especially during sentencing, are asked to apply a moral judgment, and that's why we select 12 human beings to do the job and don't just look it up in some sentencing index. The judges in Colorado seemed to think it was important that certain jurors brought bibles into the deliberation room. What if they had memorized the passages? What if it was a secular text?

The court eventually rested its decision on the possibility that jurors might have been unreasonably influenced by the bible passages. But part of what we want jurors to do is influence each other -- that's the most likely way to get a unanimous verdict. It's a puzzling result, and an illustration of why we never ask a jury "why" in a criminal trial.

28 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

The thought of actually being on law review has not gotten any more attractive. Maybe next week.

I think most advice that "you need to do X, it'll be good for your resume" is overstated. First, anyone who did X is not exactly a neutral observer. Second, I've never found it worthwhile to do anything because of some perceived future value of having done it. If you don't have a good reason in the present to do it -- like, enjoying it -- it's a waste.

Here's the problem. You do X because it's useful to get job Y, which you need because it's helpful to get clerkship Z ... and so on. It gets you on this cycle where everything is a stepping stone; nothing is a destination. Small wonder there's so many 3rd-year associates who feel negative about the legal profession and drop out.

Also, there's the issue of opportunity cost. Doing law review means automatically foreclosing other uses of my time in the next 2 yrs before I know what they are. Can I say, right now, that law review is better use of my time than any of them? No. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not.

31 Mar 05 ::: Comments closed

I join generations of law students in pondering the 1L riddle of the sphinx:

Why is constitutional law so goddamn boring?

There's no reason to think it should be. Wars were not fought over torts. Millions of people did not converge on Washington DC to protest prescriptive easements. Con law. In it is marked the struggle of every oppressed group in American history.

Yet, it is freakishly, inexplicably dull. Can we blame the professor? (Always a worthwhile first inquiry.) Con law professors tend to be smart guys. Our professor is. He's kind, he's accessible, he's funny. Can't really complain.

But then he opens his mouth to discuss con law, and it's like a rip opens in the time-space continuum. Time dilates. It's the longest 70 minutes in the day.

Here's my theory. Con law is dull due to the lack of actual law. And by law I mean a set of principles that emerge and repeat themselves in an accretive, fugue-and-variation way.

Instead, every case seems to be its own special bundle of confused and arbitrary reasoning. Everybody is equal, unless they're not. We defer to legislatures on certain types of legislation, unless we choose not to. Rational basis review means one thing sometimes, a different thing other times.

And the reasoning ... my god the reasoning. "This is a fundamental right, arising from the hazy aura surrounding the universal question of what it means to be a human being, at least according to these 6 northern European nations." Uh, ok.

01 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

1) Where can I use my student ID for maximum discount effect? So far I've only managed to save about $5.50 total, all on movie tickets. I'm looking to apply it to staple items, like food, gasoline, or bikini waxes.

2) What is the point of supra and infra? Aren't they redundant? If you're at note 25, why do you need to say "see supra note 15" -- note 15 obviously came earlier than 25. Are lawyers really so bad with numbers that they need supra and infra to give them a hint which direction to look?

03 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

Did you see that announcement in PARADE magazine on Sunday about the class action suit against McDonald's. $11M settlement, $2M going to the attorneys, because McD's didn't change over to their new trans-fat-free french fry oil as soon as they said they would.

Two million dollars for grease. That is inspiring.

05 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

A few years ago I read an interview with Gene Sharp, a nonviolence advocate, on the value of protest:

You have to use your head if you want to succeed. If the issue is only how to express yourself, that's irrelevant and selfish. People do not make the distinction between expressing themselves and doing something that can win.

Law schools have a reputation of being filled with left-leaning people -- students and professors -- certainly this is true at UCLA. What tires me about it sometimes is how it encourages this gap Sharp describes between expressing yourself and winning.

One of the charming aspects of undergraduate leftism, much in evidence on the op-ed page of the campus newspaper, is how 19-yr-old writers act as if they are the first person to notice the injustices of eating meat / poverty / the import economy / drug regulation / etc. For instance: "People need to recognize that racism has been a serious problem in American history." What?! There was racism??

You'd think (?) law school students would move up the evolutionary chain of argument -- to recognize there's two sides to an issue. You can't win by denying there is another view. You can't win by being dismissive of that view. These are hallmarks of legal reasoning in general.

Yet left-leaning positions are often staked out in exactly that manner. "I loved O'Connor's opinion." "Well what about Rehnquist's dissent criticizing her reasoning." "He's crazy." Uh, ok.

This is not a way to win. This is just self-expression. People are entitled to it, but it's a limited way to treat an issue. You don't have to like the dissenting opinion. You do have to treat it in a substantive manner.

08 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

I've always liked to read the Robert Bruss real estate advice column in the Sunday LA Times. But today, I had the uncanny experience of knowing the answer to every question. For a moment I actually thought, hey how the hell do I know all this property law?

Oh right . . .

10 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

A really great article in the NY Times magazine yesterday about Harry Blackmun's inadvertent journey to becoming the first great feminist justice. This is the kind of material I wish had been included in con law: understanding the personal & political dynamics among the justices is like the National Enquirer method of contextualizing their decisions.

The article, an excerpt from an upcoming book, pays special attention to Ruth Ginsburg's relationship with the court, first as an ACLU attorney and then as a justice. For instance: Scalia and Ginsburg were good friends from the Court of Appeals at the time she joined the Supreme Court. Who knew? The book is based on Blackmun's recently released private notes, which show his doubts & conflicts about how to vote in various cases.

11 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

I had a strange dream the other night. The current Supreme Court had been replaced by 8 black women and one gay Mexican man.

Discuss the effect this would have on upcoming cases concerning civil rights & federalism. (75 minutes, 50 points)

11 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

Ah, the candidate statements for the Student Bar Association election. I would certainly prefer Reese Witherspoon, in so many ways. Being as that seems unlikely, let's see what we've got:

"I challenge you to infuse the SBA with your wealth of experiences."
"I will blame you, the students, if anything goes wrong in the next 12 months."

"I will create more effective channels of communication."
"I will widen abuse of mass emailings."

"I am fully commited to continuing the FUN in the law school."
"And by fun, I mean more Lexis training sessions."

"I look forward to involvement in some of the lower profile activities."
"I look forward to getting you to volunteer for the lower profile activities."

"I am committed to making your law school experience an enjoyable one."
"The Zoloft has affected my reality-testing skills. Forgive me."

13 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

I'm not going to take a position on the other student govt races. To be honest I can barely keep straight how many positions are up for grabs. But there is one that matters: secretary. And for that I will formally endorse: Matt Demblowski.

I know all these other candidates are saying they're in favor of accountability, communication, inclusion, and all that other happy bullshit that student govt candidates have xeroxed on flyers for decades. Here's the bad news: these things don't exist. This is not just an academic institution, this is a state-owned academic institution. All our administrators & professors are on the same org chart as DMV employees and CHP officers.

Matt has no pretense to idealism. He recognizes the limitations of the office. I appreciate Matt because he is a realist. He does not promise what he can't deliver. Nobody in student government is going to make the dean of the school accessible; only the dean of the school can do that. Vote for people who can make concrete claims. Start with Demblowski.

15 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

I'm so glad that law student at NYU made such effective use of his opportunity to question Justice Antonin Scalia. That's going to bring the justices out to the law schools in droves, I'm sure of it. Thus:

Top 10 Sophisticated & Clever Things You Can Ask If and When Justice Scalia Visits Your Law School*

10. Does Rehnquist sodomize your wife?
9. Tony Tony Bo-bony Banana Fana Fo-fony. Wazzup, dawg?
8. Is it true that if I look up "butthead" in a 1791 American dictionary, it has your picture?
7. What was it like working with Angelina Jolie?
6. What was the framers' original understanding of the word [vulgar epithet of your choice]?
5. Do you address Justice O'Connor as "Sweet Stuff" or just "Baby"?
4. Am I hot or not?
3. Do you think the constitution recognizes a fundamental right to act like a dildo on the federal bench?
2. Where did you end up on the whole pubic hair / Coca-Cola issue? **
1. Who would be the bread on a Scalia Love Sandwich: Betty and Veronica or Destiny's Child?

* i.e., never
** extra credit for my readers born after 1977: what could this possibly mean?

16 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

I was tipped off by a section-mate that Prof. Contracts and her husband, a USC law prof, have been poached by Boalt. In all likelihood we are her last class after 10 yrs at UCLA.

Prof. Contracts was kind and friendly but a little distracted and unfocused this semester. I guess we now know why. This deal was probably in the bag months ago.

18 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

My negative energy towards law review paid off: I didn't make it. I congratulate everyone who did. Having participated in the competition, I can fully appreciate the depth of your mad legal skillz. You are supremely bad-ass.

As we enter the final week of classes in 1L I find it harder to take law school seriously. For me, the work this year has been reasonable and not especially difficult. What has been tiring is the institutional sense of regimentation and hierarchy that you're asked to buy into on a daily basis.

I'm not griping. I find it more comical than annoying. I mean, the stakes are really quite low aren't they. Even the person who graduates last in the class is still a UCLA-educated attorney, and has career and earning opportunities that put them in the 99.99th percentile of Americans. Sometimes it can be hard to get excited about competing to be in the 99.999th percentile.

20 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

First: Prof Contracts predicts: "I'll bet four or five of you will end up with careers in construction law. It's quite a growing field."

Next: 78 law students twitching and thinking "uh, that ain't gonna be me."

20 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

We're studying title covenants in property. Like most homeowners, I ignored the title report that got made when I bought my house in Hollywood (you get like 2,000 pages of material, it's not necessarily obvious which pages are important). The grant deed from 1928 reads in part:

Said above described lots and parcels must not be sold to, lived upon nor occupied by any other than persons of the white or Caucasian race, except that others may live thereon in the capacity of servants only. No horses, cows, chickens, geese, ducks, guinea fowls, rabbits, goats, hogs, nor any other animals nor fowls may be kept on said lots or parcel excepting that a dog or cat may be kept thereon as a pet only... The breach of any of the foregoing conditions and covenants shall cause such premises ... to be forfeited and revert to the grantor.

The race covenants are now illegal in California, as is the reversion to the grantor. The side effect is I can keep goats and ducks with impunity.

23 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

There were some late breaking possibilities, but the votes are in:

2ND RUNNER UP: the 2L who left her laptop somewhere stupid, and after it got stolen, put out a plea to the UCLA community to donate money so she could buy a new one. The "community" would've done better to pitch in & get her a nice set of sprial-bound notebooks and a pencil sharpener.

1ST RUNNER UP: all the guys who don't flush the urinals in the main men's room. Fellas, they're not like the ones in the airport. You have manually operate them. And it's really quite easy: 1) Reach out arm. 2) Bend handle. 3) Enjoy the satisfying sound of water spiriting your emanations to a better place.

WINNER: Those precious few holdouts who haven't figured out how to turn off the Windows startup sound on their laptops. The first month, I cut you slack. Laptops in school! Neat! But round about Thanksgiving my patience was thinning. And by spring break, there was no possible excuse. You can ace the subtleties of substantive due process and incorporeal hereditaments, but strangely, not the mute button.

Congratulations, you are the DOOFUS(ES) OF THE YEAR.
(Free hint for next year: Control Panel -> Sounds & Audio Devices.)

25 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

Being someone involved in that big 90s websites-for-money scandal I tend to have critical opinions of most web efforts. But I try to be kind because I know how much money & time goes into a large web project. Still, the new UCLA law website really stinks. In no particular order of odiousness:

+ the color scheme: did I die and go to a Dockers outlet store?

+ incessant use of images of chipper-looking UCLA people. This conveys an important strategic message to the outside world: we have color photos of ourselves, and we're not afraid to use them. Boo-yah!

+ there's 14 top level menu choices that appear on every page. Just in case you're looking at the course catalog and suddenly think "Damn! A question about faculty colloquia just popped into my head! What will I click now?"

+ the navigation menus don't wait for you to click on them. So as you move your mouse around you keep inadvertently triggering the menus and trapping your pointer.

+ every page is laid out with the exact same template of fixed-size rectangles. It looks like it was built of Legos. Also, the pages are slow to load.

This was the kind of website big companies thought was really cool in 1998: putting dozens of links on every page to make it look 'complex' and 'smart' when really it was just 'annoying' and 'dull'. If Google can boil the whole internet down to one search box, surely UCLA Law can present itself in a more streamlined manner.

26 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

From a TA's sample answer to a contracts exam problem:

Contract: 1000 x 4000 rupees = 40,000 rupees.

Market value: 1000 x 8000 = 80,000 rupees

Damages: 80,000 - 40,000 = 40,000 rupees.

If you got 40,000 and explained how you got it, you did fine.

28 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

The older (and wiser?) a professor gets, the shorter their exams get. It seems like they all start out as untenured associate professors, giving 8-hr take home exams, because it appeals to their idealistic sense of wanting to test you on "the law", not your ability to write the fastest.

But each time, the exam changes. First they impose a word limit. The word limit gets shorter. The 8-hr take home becomes a 6-hr take home. Then it moves from home to in-class. 6 hrs becomes 4 hrs. Then 3 hrs.

I think it must be that professors eventually realize that giving more time doesn't improve the quality of the answers, nor does it affect the curve. It certainly makes more work for them though. Now if you had tenure, would you be going out of your way to make more work for yourself? No, of course not.

28 Apr 05 ::: Comments closed

I actually find exam time very relaxing. I apologize to those of you who are alternating between double espressos and gin. The hardest part of law school for me has been the relentless procession of scheduled classes. For the last four days I've had ZERO appointments and it puts me in an excellent frame of mind. I've been getting a lot done, I just like to be able to do things when I feel like doing them. I enjoy them more, and I do them better.

Also, I am catching up on Resident Evil 4, which had fallen by the wayside over the last month, much to my disappointment. I love shooting zombies. Don't you?

01 May 05 ::: Comments closed

Do you have Examsoft? It worked for me last semester, though usually I had to reboot a couple times to get it to come up in "secure mode" so I could take the exam. This afternoon, at my contracts exam, no such luck. It just froze on startup. As they announced the exam would start in 60 seconds ... I decided to cut my losses and reached for the bluebooks.

It wasn't as bad as I thought. I mean, exams were done this way for hundreds of years, it shouldn't be a problem right. As it turns out, I can only think about as fast as I can handwrite, so I didn't run out of time with more material to discuss. I did see something at the end and had to append it with the legend "this was supposed to appear at the beginning".

Of course, when I took my laptop down to the IS helper to get it checked out afterwards, the Examsoft screen popped right up, ready for me to start typing.

My left hand curses you, Examsoft.

04 May 05 ::: Comments closed

A colleague told me yesterday that a classmate had an unfortunate laptop meltdown the night prior and lost all of her notes & outlines right before exams. Said colleague was surprised that I refused to feel bad for this classmate. True. I don't.

Like Doofus Runner-up #2, there are certain types of conduct that don't justify sympathetic response. If this person had carefully backed up her work, but then both her laptop & backup were destroyed in an unlikely natural disaster, that would justify sympathy.

But given that the laptop contains months of irreplaceable work, isn't it the cheapest possible insurance to, you know, copy it off the laptop once in a while? I mean, you could just email it to your mother. I'm sure she'd love to read about the entanglement exception anyhow.

05 May 05 ::: Comments closed

... because your constitutional law exam may give you the opportunity to compare how a clinic providing partial-birth abortions is like a barbecue restaurant. As I am doing right now, on a sample exam question.

These are vital marketable skills, people.

05 May 05 ::: Comments closed

Free Legal Advice Forums

OH MY GOD, this is perfect entertainment for a 1L. Because one, you get to hear about the piddling problems members of the public see fit to drag into lawyer's offices. And in a couple years, those piddling problems will belong to Exxon and you'll have to bill 20 hrs writing up a memo about its piddlingness.

And two, all the advice has that tone of authority-without-accountability so popular on the internet. It's so charming when random yahoos assert "the law" and are just utterly, totally wrong. Who are these people? Hobbyists / enthusiasts / fetishists?

Folks, if nothing else, it will convince you how much you've really learned in the last 10 months. Laugh, because you can.

05 May 05 ::: Comments closed

My schedule for my 6-hour constitutional law exam on Monday:

12-12:15 - Check in, coffee
12:15-12:45 - Light calisthenics & stretching
12:45-1 - Read constitution
1-1:30 - Lunch break!
1:30-2 - Nap
2-2:15 - Read exam questions
2:15-3:15 - Get caught up on assigned reading
3:15-3:30 - Drop by student lounge to check sports scores
3:30-3:45 - Answer a question
3:45-4:30 - Ponder "policy issues"
4:30-5:15 - Answer another 2 questions
5:15-5:30 - Protein bar break
5:30-6 - Finish writing exam

This is the 2nd longest in-class exam scheduled at the law school this semester. (Longest = a 7-hr torts exam) The shortest: the 2-hr exam for Sports Law.

07 May 05 ::: Comments closed

Law students of the future: if your professor ever says something like "No really, it's a 3 hr exam, I'm just giving you 6 hrs to do it" ... do not believe it.

10 May 05 ::: Comments closed

I admit I was surprised over the course of the 1L summer "job" search to find out how many of these jobs were unpaid positions. I don't know about you, but when someone says "job without pay" I think, "oh, so you're offering me a hobby?"

I have enough hobbies. I'm certainly not looking to make legal reseach & writing one of them. I understand the public interest folks not paying -- and students taking those jobs can apply for public interest grants to underwrite them -- but less lucky are clerks for federal judges, who get paid nothing. Nothing! Not even tips!

The one law firm job I interviewed for was at a wealthy plaintiff injury firm. They wanted a full-time commitment during the summer ... a promise you wouldn't do something immature like go on vacation ... and then a 20-30 hr commitment during the 2L year. For all this they were willing to pay the princely rate of $6/hr. I'd get a better return spending my time walking across busy intersections, trying to get hit.

I understand the concept of "paying your dues" but this is less than I got paid right out of college, many years ago, to draw computer fonts. This is less than you get starting at In-N-Out on the day shift. Apparently, going to law school for a year has reduced my market value.

I'm not clear how employers do this with a clean conscience. I guess they know jobs are scarce for 1Ls and supply & demand dictates they can pay as little as they want. They also know that many people do things 1L summer that they have no long-term interest in, so there's no point in making an investment. Further, they know many people will have a 2L job that pays $2000/wk, so if you average the two summers together, you still come out OK.

I can't complain -- I ended up lining up a few flexible contract gigs, 2 involving the practice of law & 1 involving research, and all my hours are paid. With time left over for my hobbies.

12 May 05 ::: Comments closed

There is actually one more exam. I think it was a mistake to put this exam last, because it's for our legal research class, and no one can really figure out why it exists. It's like having the opening act go on after the last encore of the headliner.

The exam requires us to produce something called "inference chains". I think I missed class the day the instructor mentioned this. Apparently an "inference chain" is when you take, like, a fact ("Ray is immensely fat") and have to make an "inference chain" to a factual proposition you wish to prove ("Ray eats a lot").

What is an "inference chain"? Glad you asked. Apparently it's a chain of inferences. Watch how this works: Ray is immensely fat. Ray is fat because of how much he eats. (We can infer this because people who eat a lot almost always get fat.) Therefore Ray eats a lot.

You are now as prepared for the final as I am. Do you want to take it for me?

14 May 05 ::: Comments closed

"Now that I've met you
will you object to
never seeing each other again?"

Or so went the song that came up on my CD player when I got in my car after the last exam. I tried to work up some feelings of wistful nostalgia as I left the building for the last time as a 1L ... and failed.

It wasn't really all that bad, certainly not as monstrous as the urban legends would have you believe. I'm still glad it's over. School blows, in general.

Things I didn't do:
Cry.
Become an alcoholic.
Take home any casebooks spring semester.
Sleep with a professor.
Gain weight.

Things I did do:
Start a couple too many conversations with civilians "we read this great case today..."
Cut my hair (somewhat) and buy a suit.
Cheat on an exam.
Go to office hours.
Maintain a personal life.
Avoid slugging that 3L who spent all his time in the student lounge engaged in loud, profane tirades.

In some kind of weird sympathetic mechanical fatigue my phone, internet and laser printer all died within 24 hrs of the last exam. So this comes to you on an internet kiosk at LAX which requires me to avoid putting my fingers in keyboard detritus of unknown type & origin.

17 May 05 ::: Comments closed

Part of my continuing quest to give readers my very, very best.

On Oct 8, 2004 I wrote: "[gay] marriages will have to [be] accepted by all the other states as legit under the [Full Faith & Credit] clause".

Not true. The Full Faith & Credit clause has a "public policy" exception allowing states to not recognize certain civil proceedings, including marriages, of other states.

23 May 05 ::: Comments closed

Law school cut into my videogaming time somewhat this year, so I restricted myself to truly rad games. Here are the 3 I finished during school, I recommend them.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Drive around a California-style region on various vehicles, committing various crimes. Legal angle: Very realistic police response. If you do a lot of property damage and destroy civilian cars, they won't come after you. But if you smack a cop with a nightstick and take his motorbike, they will.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. In addition to the usual guns & ammo, use mind powers to throw objects, look through walls, control other humans, etc. Legal angle: If you enter someone's evil fortress with your mind, is it trespassing?

Resident Evil 4. Kill zombies and other unsavory characters with an assortment of weapons, preferably a shotgun. Legal angle: You can't be convicted of murder if the person is already dead.

Next: God of War.

24 May 05 ::: Comments closed

My speculation about Prof Property's hair has been independently confirmed. Apparently in the past he would get it done over spring break and return fully coiffed, though he didn't this year.

Why? I'm told his wife is hot. And if you're a guy with a hot wife, yeah you gotta keep up. This makes me respect him all the more.

31 May 05 ::: Comments closed

Why is it celebrities have such a good track record avoiding conviction? I was trying to recall this morning the last time a celeb was found guilty by a jury -- maybe Winona Ryder for shoplifting. (I think Courtney Love typically just pleads guilty since there's always cameras witnessing her bad behavior.)

It's always hard to tell from media coverage how evidence plays in the courtroom. I don't think Michael Jackson brought up any witnesses that directly contradicted the people who testified he's a pedophile. Sure, he had folks saying he's a genuinely nice man, that the accuser's mother is a weirdo, etc. but those don't really cut into the heart of the allegations.

But if you're a juror, regardless of whether you love him or hate him, there's got to be some part of you that doesn't want to go down in history as one of the people who sent Michael Jackson to jail for fondling children. And for that reason alone, you would see reasonable doubt.

I hate to say it but I think he'll be found not guilty on all counts.

UPDATE: Yep.

07 Jun 05 ::: Comments closed

McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 9. If you have any bright ideas for figuring out the vote on this one, let me know.

Stevens and O'Connor, JJ., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to BCRA Titles I and II, in which Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Rehnquist, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to BCRA Titles III and IV, in which O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ., joined, in which Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined except with respect to BCRA § 305, and in which Thomas, J., joined with respect to BCRA §§ 304, 305, 307, 316, 319, and 403(b). Breyer, J., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to BCRA Title V, in which Stevens, O'Connor, Souter, and Ginsburg, JJ., joined. Scalia, J., filed an opinion concurring with respect to BCRA Titles III and IV, dissenting with respect to BCRA Titles I and V, and concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part with respect to BCRA Title II. Thomas, J., filed an opinion concurring with respect to BCRA Titles III and IV, except for BCRA §§ 311 and 318, concurring in the result with respect to BCRA § 318, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part with respect to BCRA Title II, and dissenting with respect to BCRA Titles I, V, and § 311, in which opinion Scalia, J., joined as to Parts I, II-A, and II-B. Kennedy, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part with respect to BCRA Titles I and II, in which Rehnquist, C. J., joined, in which Scalia, J., joined except to the extent the opinion upholds new FECA § 323(e) and BCRA § 202, and in which Thomas, J., joined with respect to BCRA § 213. Rehnquist, C. J., filed an opinion dissenting with respect to BCRA Titles I and V, in which Scalia and Kennedy, JJ., joined. Stevens, J., filed an opinion dissenting with respect to BCRA § 305, in which Ginsburg and Breyer, JJ., joined.

09 Jun 05 ::: Comments closed

This week I got to exact my $76 worth of value from the State Bar of California. Some research work for my attorney employer led to a question of legal ethics, and he said "hey, just call up the ethics hotline."

The SBC operates an 800 number that's ready to field all your ethical inquiries. I mean, that have to do with the practice of law in California. Not whether it's ok to get off the highway to pee at McDonald's, when you have no intention of purchasing something, but you did buy an iced tea at a different one about 100 miles back so you feel you're entitled.

When you call, they take your name & number and call you back. The good news is, both people I spoke to really knew their ethics. They could cite & quote large segments of the Rules of Business & Professional Conduct and 1974 cases defining what it means to practice law "in-state".

The bad news is, apparently these people are lawyers. So in both cases they converted the question I was asking into a question they knew the answer to, and proceeded to deliver a monologue which was extremely difficult to interrupt once it got started, like a telemarketer delivering a pitch.

I felt a little bad about cutting short their guitar solo but I felt like I shouldn't hog the ethics hotline -- better to steer them back on topic. "Wow, that's really helpful. [Lying.] So let me ask you a followup question: [repeat original question]."

In related news, a few weeks ago I met a miniature doberman while out walking in my neighborhood. I asked the owner what her dog's name was. "Ethics." The dog's name is Ethics? "Yes." I really couldn't think of a worse possible name for a dog. But I kept that to myself.

14 Jun 05 ::: Comments closed

As part of my summer academic research I've put together a database of supreme court justices of the last 50 years to figure out who was on the court for which decisions. A side effect is I can generate extremely useless information.

Such as: there have been 4 justices who died while on the bench (Rutledge, Jackson, Vinson, Murphy).

Longest retirement after leaving the bench: James Byrnes, 29 yrs (because he resigned after only 16 months -- did he qualify for full pension?)

Shortest retirement: Hugo Black (died 8 days after retiring)

Youngest justice appointed: William Douglas (40 yrs). Oldest appointed: Lewis Powell (64 yrs)

Oldest justice: Harry Blackmun retired just short of his 86th birthday. But John Paul Stevens is 85 and in one more year, will take the title.

24 Jun 05 ::: Comments closed

The court once again has the last chuckle as they push the more contentious nomination to the front, leaving Rehnquist to announce (or not) his own retirement later on.

I'll put my money on Edith Hollan Jones, a 5th circuit appeals judge, as the nominee. I think Bush will save Luttig / Wilkinson / Garza et al to fill Rehnquist's seat as chief justice.

If you'd like to actually make a bet, click here and then choose "Specials ... The Courts" from the popup menu at the top. Jones is running 17:1. Thank me later.

01 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

I don't think Roe v Wade will be overturned in the next 25 years. Nor will it be a priority of republican politicians in the coming nominations. That doesn't mean they won't say it's a priority.

But 15 years ago, republicans were out of power in both houses of congress. So energizing the core constituency was the key goal. Thomas and Souter were nominated with the expectation they would create a majority willing to overturn Roe.

Since the recapture of congress in 1994, republicans have expanded their majority. Here in 2005, they have a lot more to lose than they did in 1990. Overturning Roe would be a huge disaster for them. Many of the moderates in their party would instantly turn against them, and democrats might finally be motivated to get off their ass and run a decent presidential campaign.

For now, abortion has turned into the perfect have-it-both-ways issue for the Republican party. They can attract strict conservative voters by outwardly proclaiming their opposition to abortion. But they can keep the moderate conservatives in the fold by quietly ensuring Roe remains good law.

Consequently I don't think it will be a big factor in who gets nominated to the court.

04 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

I give UCLA law credit for putting just about everything you need as a student online -- billing, grades, course information, student directories, etc.

There is one notable item that is not published on the web: teaching evaluations. Instead, these are kept in a binder, not in the library, but rather in the dean of students' office.

I've been trying to go in for 2 weeks to read up on next year's professors but there is some kind of "carpet installation problem" that has required them to move the evaluations to a location where they're inaccessible. I see.

I'm not really clear what the policy reason is for making the evaluations less than fully accessible. The information is not confidential. So the extra layers of bureaucracy between a student & the evals can only be meant to reduce the use of the evals.

Nobody I know has ever gone in to see a teaching eval. In your first year, there's no point: your classes & professors are pre-ordained. Now, people are curious, but many have day jobs (the dean's office is only open M-F 9-5) and many others are out of town (and it would be inconvenient to schedule a weekend trip to LA just for this).

What's the big secret? Next week I promise to find out, once the carpet issue is solved.

07 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

Ancient trivia from C-SPAN:

"In a bit of acknowledged whimsy, Chief Justice William Rehnquist decided to personalize his judicial robe with 4 gold braid stripes on each sleeve about [10] years ago."

"All the other Supreme Court justices wear the traditional unadorned black judicial robes. The inspiration for the gold stripes came from the costume worn by a character in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, "Iolanthe," first staged in London in 1882."

07 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

There's good news and there's bad news.

Good news: I kinda thought they'd throw away 80% of the evaluations and file a representative sample. Not so. There's a folder of evals for every professor, for every class, for the last 10 yrs the prof's been teaching. You're a law student. You like research. Go to it.

Be aware that going off the numerical scores is pretty useless because everyone uses a different mental scale to rate a professor. It also helps to know your own likes and dislikes. For example, I have a very low tolerance for disorganized or late teachers. Other people, not so much. But if I see 'disorganized' even a couple times in an eval folder, I move along.

Bad news: What you will find out is basically, most people like their classes and their professors. Which means one of two things. Either they are not evaluating them very critically, or they have bad taste. I looked up evaluations from professors I had who were objectively quite bad and they still got pretty good reviews. Did these people go to a different class than I did? Or were they just being kind? Anyways, as I went through, I discounted positive feedback somewhat, and paid a little extra attention to negative comments.

Good news: you do notice a clear difference in evaluation between good professors and great ones. There are some classes where people routinely write "best class I took" or "best professor at UCLA" and those are rare enough that they're worth paying attention to.

To my colleagues at UCLA, I highly recommend you use the evals as a background check on your professors. There are courses (eg. Wills, Bus Assoc, Evidence) where you will have a choice of professors and the evals are handy for ranking your preferences.

You will not find out who are "the best" professors -- there's no overall ranking (sadly). But on classes where you're on the fence, the evals can either push you to take a risk, or encourage you to run away. Far, far away.

12 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

Contrary to most everyone's expectation, though not mine, Rehnquist announced this week he has no plans to retire.

I never really took the rumors too seriously. Here's the thing. The man has spent pretty much all his life around federal government in general and the supreme court in particular. His wife has been dead for 12 years. John Paul Stevens is sitting there at age 85 still deciding cases.

So you're Bill Rehnquist. Do you a) retire from the bench so you can go home and wait to die of thyroid cancer, in the meantime filling your days with matinee movies and NY Times crosswords or b) stay on the bench until you keel over.

Also, one of my summer jobs has been to read a lot of Rehnquist's supreme court opinions. This is a man who's been a very effective politician, but also extremely tenacious. He's not as fiery as Scalia but he can be a bigger stick in the mud. And he's written many solo dissents where the rest of the court went one way, and he went the other.

Long story short: if everyone says it's time to retire, this is a guy who's going to stay on just to show them he can. Maybe the Republicans should try reverse psychology and start talking about how they hope Rehnquist is on the bench until age 100.

17 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

I saved big money on my block of yoga classes tonight thanks to my PHAT 20% STUDENT DISCOUNT. Which they don't publicize. But I overheard someone else asking about it and I demanded justice.

I knew law school would pay out.

17 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

Edith Jones made it to #3 on the oddsmakers list but sadly, not a winner, losing to a nominee who's looking to balance out the bench by becoming the seventh white guy.

19 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

Following the change in our grading curve policy last year (the median GPA is being bumped up from 3.0 to 3.3, and giving out C's is now optional, not mandatory) many students asked our dean, fairly I think, "what is the transition plan?" inasmuch as three years of students will have transcripts with grades collected under both the old and new systems.

Unfortunately, the dean's solution is to send out a math problem to law firms in the form of a transcript cover letter:

Dear Employers:

After surveying the grading policies of comparable law schools, the UCLA School of Law determined in 2005 that its grade distributions were significantly lower than those of many comparable schools.  Therefore, beginning in the Fall 2005 semester, the School of Law changed its grading curve in both the first year and upper division courses to better align our student GPAs with those of similarly situated students at these institutions.  Set forth below are both the previous grade curve at the UCLA School of Law and the new curve.  

[impenetrable numerical minutiae follows]

Lawyers enjoy math about as much as psychiatrists enjoy Tom Cruise movies. This letter, duly attached to hundreds of transcripts, will raise the same thought in hundreds of firm recruiters' brains: What the fuck is this!?? And then, the same response: Guess I better ignore it.

I have a suggested revision to the cover letter, in the interests of clarity.

Dear Employers:

Congratulations! Your relentless focus on GPA as a measure of candidate quality has paid off. UCLA has inflated its grade curve to give you more satisfaction in hiring UCLA grads. By using a proprietary technology called Mathematics (pat. pending), we have in one stroke made all of our graduates appear more qualified -- by boosting their GPAs -- without making them substantively more qualified.

We think this change will make our graduates more competitive in the job market, help them bill more hours, and allow your partners to drive even nicer cars than they do now.

Best regards, etc.

28 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

"A fluid dispenser includes a disposable reservoir for containing a fluid and a tube depending therefrom for dispensing measured quantities of fluid. The tube includes a fluid dispensing orifice and a plunger for forcing measured quantities of fluid through the orifice. A solenoid disposed adjacent tube magnetically engages and moves the plunger in order to cause the plunger to force the measured quantities of fluid through the orifice. A control system is provided which includes a Theremin antenna for sensing the presence of a user's hand beneath the orifice and providing electrical current to the solenoid to enable the solenoid to magnetically engage and move the plunger."

29 Jul 05 ::: Comments closed

"Robert Blake's first wife, Sondra Kerr Blake, stating in a deposition that she heard Blake put out a contract for her life back in the 1970s."

Despite this, she has continued to use his name for 30 years. That's true love.

04 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

The advantage of spending time in private practice this summer is I got to see first-hand that the average quality of lawyers is ... average. And half of them, necessarily, are below.

Because current & future law students may wonder: does a person with one year of law school know anything useful, legally speaking? I'm here to reassure you: yes, you do.

Because when you're in your highly selective law school, every day you're faced with the tedious reality of being surrounded by people who are at least as competent as you and in most cases more so. Your self-esteem just can't catch a break.

But out in the real world, it's a different story. Spelling errors. Mistyped cites. Misquoted cases. Misunderstood statutes. Failure to observe basic rules of procedure. The list goes on. I was working on a project where I discovered such an egregious error by opposing counsel that it took me about half an hour to convince myself it was really there. It's a good feeling.

12 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

Regular readers will perhaps not be surprised to hear that I won't be participating in OCI at all. Not now, not ever.

Last semester, a professor of mine was known for frequently taking a moment out of his lectures to rail against the inanity of big firm jobs and the law school culture that pushes people into them.

Later in the semester, same professor was seen at a reception for new law review members held by a big firm (let's just call them Sk-dd-n A-ps), nabbing some free snacks and advising his students who'd made it to maximize this networking opportunity.

This typifies the "bite hand then kiss ass" relationship law schools cultivate with the world of big firms. Outwardly. they want you to believe that the legal world is your oyster and that you should really devote 20 hrs a week this semester to the Oompa-Loompa Tribal Defense Clinic or whatever because hey man, this could be your career.

But the limits of rebellion are carefully circumscribed by the reality -- graduates need to get placed in jobs (because it's calculated in the US News ranking). The most jobs come from the biggest firms. Hence, when it's time for OCI, who's interviewing? Yep you guessed it. Not the Oompa-Loompas. Rather, the biggest, baddest, whitest law firms on the planet.

I don't have anything against these firms or the people who want to work for them. In fact, I look forward to serving their clients with massive complaints and giving them all more exciting work to do.

For myself, the measure of success in a job search is finding the one job that fits me perfectly, as opposed to flattering myself with 10 offers from 10 firms who happened to think my suit was really nice, and liked my answer to the question "What's your greatest flaw?": That I just can't let myself go home until I know I've done my very best.

15 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

I stopped by school yesterday to pick up a reading assignment and stumbled into the 1L orientation in progress. The three minutes I was there were perhaps the most pleasant spent at law school yet. I was filled with an expansive, peaceful feeling, accompanied by the happy mantra I'm not you ... I'm not you.

1L wasn't all that bad. But this year will be a lot better. I wish the class of 2008 the best of luck.

P.S. You do have reading assignments for Monday.

20 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

This little lady coyote has taken to napping on my patio mat in the mornings.

21 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

I call my fall schedule the "flight to quality". I'm only taking courses with professors whose evaluations ranked them up there with Jesus and John Lennon.

Federal Tax - you can guess what this is about.

Contemporary Litigation - I have no idea what this is about. I've been warned that despite the excellent teacher, it's extremely dull. He says it's about how lawsuits get going, and why and how they stop. We'll see if he's telling the truth.

Remedies - play for cash, play for prizes, it's your choice.

Quantitative Policy Seminar - this will answer the question whether the world's problems can be solved by making excel spreadsheets. I already have an idea for my paper, which is pretty insidious and cruel, but I will try to sell it to the professor.

23 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

Angeles National Forest, elevation 5000 feet, where I was one hour ago. I'm liking this new 2L schedule. I can see why people take 14 yrs to finish a PhD, there's just so much opportunity for high-quality goofing off when you're a grad student.

OK, guess I better go do my remedies reading for today.

PS to 1Ls: this is the "outdoors". You can save it to your laptop for future reference if you want.

25 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

Chilly B passes along this report that law school applications are down everywhere, but the biggest drop in the country ... drum roll please ...

Showing the biggest drop in applications was UCLA's law school, which received 13% fewer, or 6,319 applications, for the upcoming year.

UCLA law school dean Michael Schill said that an analysis of the applicants' qualifications indicated that a decrease represented a group of applicants who the school would be "least likely" to admit.

"Students who really don't have a chance of getting into the law school are not applying as much as they used to," Schill said.

Ah, the old "that's cool, I wasn't really that into you either." Though I'm curious how the admissions office came to this conclusion -- how do you determine the qualifications of people who didn't apply?

26 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

I want all of you playing at home to understand you can't swing a cat here at UCLA without smacking it into a large pizza pie. Whether the topic is sex or genocide, pizza provides the perfect accompaniment to any student gathering.

Under the link below, I will keep a chronicle of pizza as it becomes available in the 2005-06 school year. These are the times of our lives.

31 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

My man "YL" told me my name was on the Jones Day schedule for OCIP. As usual, I was skeptical. But damn! He was right!

I have no idea how that happened. Let me assure you it was quickly fixed. There is now an opening on the Jones Day morning schedule, if you want it.

BTW, doesn't this home page image from the Jones Day website make it look like two partners are about to be assassinated? Or is that just my imagination running wild?

31 Aug 05 ::: Comments closed

From a recent WSJ:

An Australian appeals court ruled last week that a Melbourne man can sue his doctors for misdiagnosing him as transsexual. In 1988, apparently on the advice of his medical team, he underwent a sex change. But he claims that he was left "a mess" as a woman and has now resumed life as a man -- with the help of further surgery. He says that he never should have had the first operation because he had demonstrated "above average" masculinity.

02 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

I went to Corcoran state prison last week with my attorney to meet a client. Corcoran is in the central valley, about 180 miles north of Los Angeles and 45 miles south of Fresno. To a good approximation, there is nothing in Corcoran. Except the prison.

(These photos are pretty bad but you don't really want to be seen waltzing around the outside of a prison in a clear attempt to get quality snaps.)

This was my first visit to a prison. Corcoran is a high-security facility housing about 5000 inmates with 1700 staff looking over them. We met our client in a meeting room with a one-way mirror that always had a guard behind it.

I can't talk about the client or the case obviously. But we spent the whole day with the guy and one thing that struck me was how acclimated he had become to prison life. While clearly he would've preferred to not be in prison, he was blase and even glib about elements of prison life -- the atrocious food, theft of one's belongings, threats on one's life, being put in solitary confinement (aka "the hole"). As if it were all just par for the course.

I guess if you're an inmate and you want to make it through 15, 20, 25 or more years without going totally bonkers, you have to accept prison for what it is to you: normal. In his words, "these are not positive people walking around here."

06 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

Prof. Litigation: Who can tell us what happened in today's case? How about ... (consults seating chart) ... Mr. Rivera.

Mr. Rivera: Uh ... I'll take a pass today.

Prof. Litigation: OK. How about ... (finding name of adjacent student on chart) ... Ms. Holden.

Ms. Holden: I'm sorry, but I didn't read it.

Prof. Litigation: Ah ... (finding next name) ... Ms. Jenkins?

Ms. Jenkins: I really don't know.

Prof. Litigation: OK ... (in admirably even temper) ... Mr. Goldstein?

Mr. Goldstein: I didn't read it either. Sorry.

Prof. Litigation: What's that?

Mr. Goldstein: (more sheepish) I didn't read it.

Prof. Litigation: Ah, I see ... who's next ... (irritation creeping in) ... Ms. Ogilvy?

Ms. Ogilvy: Um ... I don't know.

Prof. Litigation: (balanced between annoyance and fascination) Then ... Mr. Lewis?

Mr. Lewis: (accurately describes case & averts academic crisis)

07 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

How silly of me. Here is a beatufiul overhead view of Corcoran prison, if you're rolling with Google Earth.

08 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

California Bar Rule 3-120. Sexual Relations With Client

(A) For purposes of this rule, "sexual relations" means sexual intercourse or the touching of an intimate part of another person for the purpose of sexual arousal, gratification, or abuse.

(B) A member shall not:

(1) Require or demand sexual relations with a client incident to or as a condition of any professional representation; or

(2) Employ coercion, intimidation, or undue influence in entering into sexual relations with a client; or

(3) Continue representation of a client with whom the member has sexual relations if such sexual relations cause the member to perform legal services incompetently in violation of rule 3-110.

So if I'm reading this correctly, having sex with a client is not a per se violation of the rules. You can have sex with all the clients you want, as long as it's not a condition of your representation, everyone freely consents, and it doesn't affect your, uh, performance.

It's true we have the toughest bar exam in the nation. But membership has its privileges.

10 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

I don't like to pick on my colleagues, but seriously folks, there are some faux pas that you should really tend to before you take that big firm job. I mean, if you're offered that big firm job.

Questionable choices on the gentlemen:

1. Button-down collars. These are for professors and New England physicians. Not you.

2. True or false: any pair of shoes that are black, leather, and not sneakers qualify as dress shoes. False is the correct answer.

3. Purple, pink, or yellow shirts. Does anyone wear pastels on "Law and Order"? No.

4. Cuffed pants have not been hip for about 15 years.

Questionable choices on the ladies:

1. Heels so high you can't walk in a straight line. Don't wear shoes outside your skill level.

2. Heels 1/2" short of qualifying for the fetish ball. Avoid.

3. Cleavage and miniskirts. Nuff said.

Questionable unisex choices:

1. What's with all the black? This is Los Angeles.

2. Overapplication of scented material.

3. Showing up at all.

14 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

The chief justice of the United States dies and there is not a single mention of the event -- not by any professor, not by the dean, not by any student group.

17 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

If you've taken con law you really must read The Brethren by Bob Woodward. I'm reading it now and it's incredibly good -- an inside look at the Supreme Court in the 1969-75 terms.

One of my problems with my con law casebook & professor is that every decision was presented as this neatly packaged product of consistently evolving judicial thought. The reality -- as one might expect -- is much messier. The Sup Ct is just another high-school like political environment, with all the whining, slacking, tantrums and cliquishness you'd expect.

The book covers the arrival of Rehnquist on the court. In honor of the man, a few excerpts.

Rehnquist slipped into the [weekly meeting of all the justices] one day and took his seat. He pulled a magazine from his stack of papers. The National Lampoon had just released its February issue. The centerfold was entitled "Amicae Curiae" -- Friends of the Court -- and it depicted ... all nine of the Justices engaged in a variety of sexual activity.

The Chief [Warren Burger], naked except for holster and pistol, was on the floor licking the boot of an otherwise naked young woman.

Brennan was standing in front of two very young girls holding his robe open.

Stewart was measuring the throat of a young woman with a ruler, apparently in preparation for oral sex.

Rehnquist, clad in a woman's bra and red garter belt, was parading before the others cracking a black whip.

White, a blindfold partially covering his glasses, was apparently engaged in some taxing sexual activity, though the cartoon did not make it clear what that activity was.

Powell was kneeling naked, his hands bound together, while a black woman in underwear marked "Exhibit A" flogged him.

Marshall stood by the side of the bench doing nothing but looking up at Douglas, who sat alone on the bench with a naked young boy at his side.

Blackmun was sodomizing a kangaroo.

Chuckling, Rehnquist passed the issue around the table.

20 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

More on Rehnquist from The Brethren:

Rehnquist didn't share [Chief Justice] Burger's concern with appearances and formality. He was very casual. During the nice weather, he and his clerks sometimes ate lunch in one of the two enclosed courtyards ... as they were picnicking in shirtsleeves one day, Burger's messenger, Alvin Wright, set up a small table with silver service and a white linen tablecloth. Moments later, Burger came out with his clerks, Burger, his jacket on, poured the wine ... as they gazed on the solemnity at the Burger table, Rehnquist's laughter grew almost uncontrollable. He and his clerks had to dash inside.

That said, Mr. Casual's personal judicial obsessions were on full view from the moment he set foot in the court:

The liberals found it hard not to like the good-natured, thoughful Rehnquist. They could even bring themselves to respect his crisp intellect and diligence ... His extreme legal philsosophy worried the liberals. Rehnquist had a very narrow view of the Fourteenth Amendment ... the Court had for nearly a century used this amendment to ensure basic freedoms for all citizens. In Rehnquist's view, the amendment was misapplied when used to give rights to prisoners, women or other groups ... Even more chilling to the liberals was Rehnquist's ideological commitment to keep the federal courts out of certain types of cases.

And he predicted the future correctly:

It was only recently that activism on the Court had become "liberal" activism, Rehnquist reminded them. Only forty years before, the Court's activists were conservatives. The balance was once again shifting back, Rehnquist said.

23 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

I had occasion to read a pile of Rehnquist opinions this summer as part of some academic research I was conducting for a professor. Some of the 'greatest hits' from Rehquist's dissents on equal protection, one of his least favorite clauses in the constitution:

Sugarman v. Dougall, 413 U.S. 634 (1972)

[Court votes to strike down statute discriminating against aliens. Rehnquist dissents.] Native-born citizens can be expected to be familiar with the social and political institutions of our society; with the society and political mores that affect how we react and interact with other citizens. Naturalized citizens have also demonstrated their willingness to adjust to our patterns of living and attitudes, and have demonstrated a basic understanding of our institutions, system of government, history, and traditions. It is not irrational to assume that aliens as a class are not familiar with how we as individuals treat others and how we expect "government" to treat us.

Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986)

[Court votes to strike down race-based peremptory challenges. Rehnquist dissents.]I cannot subscribe to the Court's unprecedented use of the Equal Protection Clause to restrict the historic scope of the peremptory challenge ... In my view, there is simply nothing "unequal" about the State's using its peremptory challenges to strike blacks from the jury in cases involving black defendants, so long as such challenges are also used to exclude whites in cases involving white defendants, Hispanics in cases involving Hispanic defendants, Asians in cases involving Asian defendants, and so on. This case-specific use of peremptory challenges by the State does not single out blacks, or members of any other race for that matter, for discriminatory treatment.

J.E.B. v. Alabama, 511 U.S. 127 (1994)

[Court votes to strike down gender-based peremptory challenges. Rehnquist dissents.] The two sexes differ, both biologically and, to a diminshing extent, in experience. It is not merely "stereotyping" to say that these differences may produce a difference in outlook which is brought to the jury room.

25 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

Who told you Anna Nicole's inheritance dispute could escalate to the Supreme Court? Yep.

And did it escalate to the Supreme Court? Yep.

Thanks for the tip Chilly. Godspeed, Chief Justice Roberts.

27 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

Before I put the full flame on -- do people really not know about the ludicrous "temporary fee" being assessed on professional students this year ($700) and next year ($1000)? This is on top of your already dramatically enhanced tuition bill & professional fee for the next two years.

I've brought it up with a bunch of folks since the start of school and everyone's like "wha?" Are we really that laid back? Don't you want to know how you can recover your $1700?

27 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

In August, Dean Schill sent an email out to all UCLA law students announcing that the Regents had decided to assess an extra-special "temporary fee" of $1050 on UC professional students (except public health, public policy, and international relations) for the 05-06 and 06-07 school year. Because the Regents were late in announcing this fee they decided to only collect 2/3 of the fee ($700) this year, and the full $1050 next year. Total for the next two years: $1750.

Why the fee? In July 03, a class action complaint was filed, Kashmiri v. Regents of the University of California. The complaint alleged three counts of breach of contract against the Regents. The largest of these was the claim that the Regents had promised professional students entering in fall 2002 that their fees would stay consistent throughout their graduate program. After the big budget cuts that year, the Regents raised professional fees dramatically.

The lawsuit alleged this was breach of contract and sought a refund of overcharges already paid. The Kashmiri class also sought & received an injunction against the Regents in Aug 04 to prevent them from collecting any more of the alleged overcharges until the case had been tried.

As a result of the injunction, the Regents didn't collect as much revenue in 2004-05 as they expected to. $13.5 million less, in fact. And they expect to have a shortfall of $9 million this year due to the injunction. Total $22.5 million.

Here's where you come in, dear reader. The Regents considered a few options for recouping this money. First was to assess a temporary fee of $75 on every student in the UC system. That seems pretty reasonable, yes? But no. This was dismissed as "not feasible, given the political environment".

Option 2: charge a one-time fee of $3200 on each professional student. This would've put blood in the streets for sure.

Option 3: a temporary fee of $1050 on professional students only, for two years. This is the option the Regents went with. How did they justify it? By their reasoning, non-professional grad students had an Educational Fee increase of $1050 last year, and professional students didn't. So it only seems fair that now we get our Educational Fee raised by the same amount. Right?

This overlooks the fact that in 2004-05, the Professional Fee was raised from $9473 to $14,473. That's FIVE THOUSAND BUCKS for those of you averse to math. (Current and past fees for all UCLA programs is available here.)

More perplexing, the temporary fee only lasts for two years: in 2007-08 they will switch over to a system-wide fee of $60 per student to recover the remainder of the injunction costs.

Does this just strike you as, like, a total rip? The Regents screwed up. They breached a contract with the Kashmiri class. OK, there hasn't been a judgment on the merits yet, but when a judge grants a temporary injunction, it's an indication that he thinks the plaintiffs are likely to prevail.

Professional students in general, and law students in particular, get charged more because we derive more economic value from our UCLA degree. Fair enough. But the Regents could've made a reasonable system-wide fee of $75 to recover the injunction costs. They chose not to, in order to avoid some vague political unpleasantness. Apparently it is more politically pleasant to raid the piggybanks of professional students yet again.

But wait! That's not all. You might say to yourself, "if the Regents win the case, they have the right to collect the disputed fees from the Kashmiri class, correct?" Correct. But according to the minutes of the May 2005 Regents' meeting:

[T]he University believes its position in this case is correct ... Even if the University ultimately prevails in the litigation, however, at the end of this current term the majority of students who have benefitted from the injunction prohibiting collection of fee increases ... will have graduated, and it will be very difficult to collect the revenue at a later date.

Meaning, if the Kashmiri class wins, they win. If the Kashmiri class loses, they still win! -- because the Regents will not pursue enforcement of a winning judgment.

So, your Regents are up there in San Francisco, charging you an extra $1750 to fix their contract breach, and spending a nice chunk of the money to defend a lawsuit which is apparently moot.

I will leave you with a link to the minutes of the May 2005 Regents' meeting. This is the smoking gun -- a look into the mind of the Regents, and what they think of law students in particular. There is too much poetry to cite it all, but this one stands out:

Regent Lee believed that while it was important for the University’s business schools to maintain their [quality advantage], it was less important for its law schools, in view of the abundance of lawyers in the nation. He observed that it would help protect jobs in this country to charge higher fees to law students and lower fees to students in less well-represented fields such as nursing.

Memo to Regent Lee: WTF!?

30 Sep 05 ::: Comments closed

Is there legal recourse against the Regents? Perhaps.

1. Breach of contract

One option would be to file another class action under a similar breach of contract theory as Kashmiri. (In fact, the class entering after Kashmiri has filed their own lawsuit on the same theory.)

Following Kashmiri, the Regents moved quickly to shore up their public documentation so that there were no longer any references to keeping professional fees constant, etc. By the time the students in the class of 2007 were getting literature and applying – fall / winter 2003 – the “contract” had been substantially revised.

2. California Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200

This is California's all-purpose remedial statute for annoying business practices. Unfortunately there is sovereign immunity. Trinkle v. California State Lottery, 84 Cal.Rptr.2d 496 (1999). Dammit!

3. Unjust enrichment

Here's the idea. File an intervenor claim against both the Kashmiri class and the Regents to prevent either of them from unjustly benefitting from the proceeds of this temporary fee.

I liked this idea initially but more experienced legal minds have convinced me it's a loser. First, until some party has actually unjustly benefited, this claim would not be ripe. Second, the Kashmiri class can't be held liable if the Regents choose not to enforce the judgment.

The one situation where it might apply is if the Kashmiri class settles with the Regents and actually pays some portion of the disputed fees. In that case, the Regents really ought to refund the same amount of the temporary fees back to us. If they don't, an unjust enrichment claim could stand, since the Regents would otherwise be receiving double compensation.

4. Equal protection

Con law enthusiasts take note! As a state actor, the Regents are subject to the federal Equal Protection clause. The Regents are making a classification between professional students enrolled in the 2005-06 and 2006-07 school years, and everyone else. The Regents are applying differential treatment to this class of students (the $1750 temporary surcharge). Since there is no “suspect class” at issue, the action would be subject to rational basis review.

In general, there is precedent for lawsuits where the government has penalized plaintiffs depending on when they arrived. For example, in Zobel v. Williams, 457 U.S. 55 (1982), the court held that Alaska’s state dividend distribution program vio-lated equal protection guarantees by favoring established residents over new residents, despite only being subject to rational basis review. However, the issue in these cases is usually the interference with the right to travel.

There is negative precedent for lawsuits brought by students challenging fees. In Vlandis v. Kline, 412 U.S. 441 (1973), an exception to the right to travel was made for extra tuition charged to “non-resident” students. Classifying students by when they showed up was held to be a reasonable classification of citizens, and the non-resident charge was found constitutional.

To overcome rational basis review and the deference typically given to a body such as the Regents, we would have to show the classification was "arbitrary" or based on a "bare desire to harm". Recall the only reason the Regents are not assessing a system-wide surcharge now is because of the “political environment”.

As to "arbitrary", the Regents are taking a system-wide shortfall from the injunction and making a small group of students pay for it -- students who may go to the same schools as the class members in Kashmiri, but otherwise have nothing to do with them or that action. However, the Regents will argue the professional students have always paid more, so there's nothing new here.

As to "desire to harm", I think in the Regents' minds, since the Kashmiri injunction is taking away professional fees, then new professional fees ought to be assessed to replace them. It's almost like "hey the professional students sued us -- well they can pay us back!" I detect a somewhat punitive edge to the decision-making process.

...

The problem is, there's no slam-dunk legal claim here. And to justify the expense of intitiating a new class action, there'd need to be one. Obviously the Regents have the right to increase fees. And they have the right to collect more fees from professional students.

This new temporary fee rankles the conscience because of a) the reason it's being levied and b) the way it seems precisely calculated by the Regents to be as annoying as possible without triggering full-scale mutiny. But it may well be legal. Dontcha wish we still had distinct courts of equity?

03 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Supposing the fee hikes are legal -- what else is to be done? Recall that it was 'politically unfeasible' for the Regents to push through a system-wide fee increase to pay for the Kashmiri injunction. So one thing would be to make it politically unpleasant to proceed with the temporary fee.

I'm not a big fan of organizing pickets in front of the Chancellor's residence and so forth. If you want to get a university's attention, cut off their money. I for one would be willing to tell the UC system that as a UCLA law alumnus and practicing attorney, I will be withholding donations for some length of time -- 5 years? 7? 10? forever? -- in recognition of the fact that they've decided to impose this 'tax' now.

If enough people were to do this, it would get their attention.

Some might say -- withholding donations only hurts the future students. Perhaps. But if the injunction shortfall wasn't paid by me & my cohorts, it would have to be paid by these future students. So as far as I'm concerned, there is direct cost-shifting from the future to the present. I've done my part to financially support those future students.

Not to mention, why should I donate money to an organization that has proven it possesses poor financial management skills?

I went to Harvard during a time where they had revenue shortfalls and were running deficits. Did they impose 'temporary fees' to close the gap? Good lord no. Harvard recognized, as it always has, that squeezing students short-term just costs you in the long-term. Don't piss off your alumni, especially the high-earning ones.

The Regents seem to take the opposite philosophy, which is odd considering that Chancellor Albert Carnesale was provost at Harvard and would know well the costs of a burn-your-bridges strategy.

A well-managed university would not be looking to cover its shortfalls through regressive taxation -- ie. imposing extra fees on the people least able to afford them. Here's some other options: float some bonds on the public market. Do an alumni fundraising campaign. Borrow from capital reserves. These would all solve a shortfall problem without dropping it on the shoulders of a small group of students.

All around UCLA I see large capital improvement projects in the works -- new hospital, new art building, new dorms. I haven't scrutinized the UC's financial statements but I'm betting they made the same mistake as the state of California made -- during the boom years in the late 90s they expanded capital spending dramatically, and then when tax revenues declined (as any financial manager would know was inevitable) they felt an unusually sharp pinch. With more conservative cash management, I'll bet the Kashmiri issue would've been a blip.

But where is the student outrage? Outrage is a lot to ask though. What about sincere displeasure? Mild annoyance? Help me out here peeps. Last I checked the motto of UCLA law school was not "roll over and take it like a bitch". Yet since Dean Schill announced the fee in August there has been a seemingly utter lack of student alarm, interest, or awareness of this situation.

I don't want to impugn those of you who may have been quietly cheesed off. Thank you for your support. However, it's time to come out of the closet. It would be nice to get some collective action going. It doesn't have to be everybody. But I don't know, 20 people? 10 people? 2?

The point to be made is simple. Actions have consequences.

06 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Good news: you don't have to feel guilty the next time you play spider solitaire during a law lecture.

(Not that you did.)

08 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

In addition to "UCLA Law Review - rejected candidate" I can now add to my resume "UCLA Moot Court Honors Program - quitter". I had polish, but now I've got shine.

I signed up for Moot Court last week. I actually thought it sounded fun, compared to the law review write-on -- you know, show up in a fake court, wear a suit, do some fake oral argument.

I guess I was hoping that we would be 'mooting', oh I don't know, a personal injury case or something. Car accident. Dog bite. Something salt-of-the-earth.

What I forgot to figure in was -- law students. Would law students actually do moot court around a dog bite? Oh for gods sake no. What was I thinking?

The first surprise was that we had to do a large written brief. Yeah, I guess that's part of going to court. The Supreme Court, anyways. The court an appellate lawyer is least likely to find herself in during her career. Well OK, I can deal.

Then I ended up with a constitutional issue. That's cool. But then I looked more closely and realized that I wasn't being asked to argue the constitutional violation inside my client's case, I was being asked to argue a large and abstract constitutional law proposition. WTF?!

Wait it's those pesky law students again! Look I don't know about you ... and god bless the people who make it through moot court ... but I can't think of anything more boring than arguing large issues of constitutional law. Because it's vague, it's shapeless, the caselaw is blowin' in the wind, and the outcomes almost always come down to the predictable political moods of the justices.

But the law review write-on six months ago was a huge constitutional law question too. And it was the year before. Why are all these student-run competitions based on con law?

Perhaps because con law serves the same purpose in student competitions as thunderstorms do in movies. It adds drama. It makes you think something important is going on when it's not. It's ok to speak or write in a windy, pompous way about con law in a way that you can't speak or write about, say, contracts.

Moot court about a contract dispute! That would be terrific.

But, it won't happen. And I suppose they have a point. If you're going to have a fake baseball game, do you pretend you're on a minor-league team in Chattanooga, TN or playing the All-Star game?

After reading the research materials this afternoon I realized that moot court is really Grueling Write-On Competition Part II. After that it took me about 5 seconds to email in my resignation.

09 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Last year, a 3L friend of mine told me his biggest regret of 1L year was not making more use of office hours. I decided to take his advice, and availed myself of professors' office hours regularly as a 1L.

So far this year, I have been to an office hour once. I can say to my 3L friend, who is now waiting for the results of his bar exam: you weren't missing much.

Let's just get this right out on the table: law professors are weirdos. All of them. And they are just not the kind of people I enjoy spending 1-on-1 time with.

Certainly, each law professor is weird in his or her own special way. But there are a few broad types you run into at office hours:

Mr. Old School. You can tell him your name when you come in & he won't remember it 3 minutes later. Refuses to make eye contact.

Mr. Hot Air. Fond of long, pointless digressions that never answer your question. So you have to figure out tactful ways of asking the same question over and over.

The Automaton (aka The BSoD). This is a common affliction. You ask the professor some variation on a theme she introduced in class and you get the frozen stare of non-comprehension. After a quick 'internal reboot' she will summarize exactly what she said in class, taking no notice of your question.

Man of the People. Usually a young professor, not yet tenured. Tells you to use his first name (to show you how 'down' he is) but then twitches every time you do (because it reminds him how far he still has to go).

Ms. Befuddlement. Simply doesn't understand the material very well and gets flustered when you inadvertently point out errors and contradictions in her explanation. Sometimes confused with The Automaton. Here's how to tell the difference: The Automaton has mastered the material, but just doesn't care to answer your question. Ms. Befuddlement lacks the cognitive skill to do so.

Mr. Open Door Policy. The professor doesn't have fixed office hours and encourages everyone to drop by anytime because he's "always in his office". 80% of the time you drop by, he's not there. The other 20% he's on the phone and asks you to come by in an hour. At which point he won't be there.

The Shirker. Another common affliction. She says office hours are Weds 3-5pm. You go by at 3pm and there's a note on the door saying 'back at 3:45pm'. You go back at 4:00 and the note's still there.

Ms. Attention Deficit Disorder. Friendly for about 15 seconds but then starts exuding the umistakable vibe that she has about 23 things laying on her desk she'd prefer to be looking at instead of you. Will always take a phone call while you're sitting there. May even do some email. Eventually you'll realize you're better off asking a classmate.

12 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Mercifully, I'm not alone. Not everyone sees moot court as a terrific opportunity to force students to argue large, obscure constitutional law issues.

[In a national moot court competition run by Loyola, the] students will argue a legal malpractice case in which a former criminal defendant who was convicted of a crime sues the public defender who represented him (and their office) because the PD failed to argue that the police "planted a gun" on the defendant. The plaintiff's (former criminal defendant) conviction was overturned when the officer was arrested and later confessed to planting the gun.

Where's UCLA among the competitors? ... hm ... let's see ... nope, not there.

17 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Ah, so much blog crabbiness recently. Well here comes some uplift. Last week I learned one of the most amazing things I've heard yet in law school. No, really. I was truly astonished, which is rare indeed.

UCLA's financial controller gave a talk to my litigation class about the cost structures of large law firms. He asked us to ponder how much it costs to recruit an associate. Naturally we all thought about free meals, cruises on the managing partner's yacht, $2300/wk for a summer's worth of sweet FA.

But that's not the whole picture, he cautioned. Associates and partners have to visit schools to conduct interviews for OCIP. Then they have to do callbacks. These all take time which could conceivably -- actually, would definitely -- otherwise be billed to clients. So that's a measurable opportunity cost.

Then, you have attrition. After all the interviewing, many won't take the summer offer. After taking the summer offer and the wining & dining, some won't take the permanent offer (and some won't get the permanent offer.)

Thus you have to sum all these costs and divide them among the relatively small number of associates that will end up with their well-educated asses warming Aeron chairs on the 45th floor. That is the true measure of what it costs to recruit each of a season's worth of associates.

So what is the number per associate? I want you to think of your answer and then roll over the box below:

Nobody could believe it, but the Controller assured us that it is an accurate estimate for large firms.

Suppose you're a partner in one of these firms. Now wouldn't you be saying to yourself gee, if I could reduce attrition among my associates, I could recruit fewer each year, and just keep that money in my pocket. Judging from the actual attrition rates, I guess this interior monologue is not happening.

Anyhow -- for those of you headed to the world of big law -- if you think you have debt, console yourself by thinking of your employer, who has just shelled out big-time for the pleasure of your company.

18 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

From the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts ... the net worth of the members of the Supreme Court (excluding homes, autos and salaries). For mysterious reasons it's given as a range, but you can get the general trend. There's three basic tiers.

The Full-On Mack Daddies:
Souter: $5.3M - $25.8M
Ginsburg: $5.8M - $24.0M
Breyer: $4.2M - $15.5M

Not Too Shabby for a Government Employee:
Scalia: $2.0M - $7.2M
Roberts: $2.6M - $6.7M
O'Connor: $2.6M - $5.7M
Stevens: $1.4M - $3.1M (however, he's 85 -- did he never learn of the magic of compound interest?)

Dude, Where's My 401(k)?
Thomas: $150K - $400K
Kennedy: $80K - $230K

19 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Another piece illustrating where those recruiting dollars go:

In the fall 2003 recruiting season, Fried Frank lawyers interviewed some 1,100 law students around the country. Approximately 90 partners plus a recruiting staff of six participated in the effort, which began in August and lasted until early December. On each campus, most partners took on one schedule, which included 18 to 20 students, or sessions. During Interview Week, the days started at 9 a.m. and ran at least eight hours, with three breaks ...

At most major firms ... about half the students interviewed on campus get a callback. Maybe seven in 10 accept. Many decline; some never respond. Of the students who accepted callback invitations to Fried Frank's New York office last fall, 57 eventually accepted offers to work as summer associates in 2004.

You got all that? It takes 1100 initial interviews and 385 callbacks to yield 57 summer associates, and some smaller number of those actually become permanent associates.

(What kind of law firm name is that anyways? I see 'Fried Frank' and I think 'corn dog'.)

20 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

I went riding at a racetrack today. How many waivers do you have to sign first? A lot. My favorite part was this somewhat defective summary of California negligence law:

In California, a person may be actively negligent either by doing some act or by participating in some manner in some kind of conduct or omission which caused an injury (for example, a decision made by school staff not to place a flag man at a spot where a collision later occurs) ...

In other words, negligence is defined as causation.

I accept and use all equipment furnished to me "as is", with any defects, whether apparent or not. I intend to release [all the] equipment suppliers from any strict or product liability for my injury or death.

This part got me thinking about Asahi, World-Wide Volkswagen, and whether I could obtain personal jurisdiction over Kawasaki anyhow. Made me a little misty for first year civ pro.

22 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

I just read this morning that Harriet Miers is still the nominee for the Supreme Court! I can't believe it. Now here's somebody who can't take a hint. No wonder she has not been so successful with her dating life.*

I'm sort of looking forward to the confirmation hearings, which will doubtless be the most entertaining since a certain pubic hair once flitted onto a certain Coke. But I think it's more likely that Miers will fake a wicked stomachache and ask to be sent home. Or tell everyone that the White House staff was playing 'truth or dare' and for her turn, it was this or make out with Karl Rove.

* OK that was cruel. But here's the thing. Everyone wants to know how serious a conservative she is, right? And conservative Christians don't believe in premarital sex, right? So a conservative Christian lawyer ... who has never been married ... should be a virgin, right?

While the media is not making this analysis in so many words, there has been a strange fixation on uncovering former paramours, like Jim Martin, a law school classmate:

"She was a lot of fun," he said. "Good sense of humor. Cute. She was athletic. She was a very good tennis player, and we played a lot of tennis. She's just a very good sort of regular person. No airs about her."

One night, after another grueling workday, they met for a late meal at a Denny's restaurant. Over a plate of eggs over easy and ham, they broke it off.

"Our time wasn't our own," he said. "She's a very warm and caring person and would make someone a wonderful wife. It's just that she's extremely focused on her career. In that context, she has never had enough time to carve out a significant relationship that would take a great deal of time."

Doesn't that just break your heart. But "fun", "cute", "athletic" -- come on, you seriously think they didn't do it?

But MB, you argue, how could they have had sex? They were law students. Yeah, good point.

We also have the curious case of Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court:

For 30 years, Hecht and Miers ... have nurtured a kinship that has entranced and confounded their closest friends. They are traditional conservatives content in a modern, nontraditional relationship, one that leaves plenty of time for their true love, their work, to take center stage.

Romantic at times, the relationship has played an important role in their ascent to power — she as White House counsel, he as a justice of the Texas Supreme Court, where he has served for 15 years ...

"We are good, close friends," he said Friday. "And we have been for all these years. We go to dinner. We go to the movies two or three times a year. We talk. And that's the best way to describe it. We are not dating. We are not seeing each other romantically. Not currently."

Can we seriously infer that they have been seeing each other for thirty years and never did it? Now you see what's really at stake in these confirmation hearings.

UPDATE: 48 hrs after this post, Miers has withdrawn. Coincidence? You decide.

25 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Members of my tax class were required to go see Donald Korb, chief counsel for the IRS, speak at UCLA this week. It was pretty weak all around.

To begin, one of our business law professors spent a few minutes kissing Korb's ass. Then Korb got up and kissed his own ass for another 10 or so. It's clear you don't get to be chief counsel of the IRS unless you're a pretty accomplished & talented guy. But Korb went on and on about all the important tax laws he had been a part of in his early career, eg. "Can you believe I was helping design the capital basis recapture rules -- at age 28?" Gee, that's incredible.

It started to make more sense, if not become more tolerable, when it became evident that a major goal of Korb's visit was to recruit students to work for the IRS. He congratulated himself on coming up with their new recruiting slogan "it's a great place to start".

That shows creativity worthy of a federal government agency, I'll grant him that. But doesn't it imply that the IRS may be a great place to "start", but not a great place to "stay"? I think most people imagine if they're going to be mercilessly exploited for the first few years of their career, might as well do it for top dollar in private practice.

The rest of his talk was strangely devoid of any substantive commentary on the state of the tax code or tax policy. His big speculation was considering whether Form 1040 could be redesigned in landscape format, or on two sides of a postcard. He spent a long time on some anecdote about his wife bugging him to clean the garage. And then he left.

To be fair, the kind of people who enjoyed this talk are probably exactly the kind of people well-suited to work in federal govt. So as a recruiting tool, it may be ideal.

27 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

Seen this morning along the entire length of Sunset Blvd.

UPDATE: So many of you UCLA students read this site, and how many candygrams did I get today as token of your gratitude? Yeah, zero. I'm not going to count the certain someone who skimmed off the bits he liked from his own candygram and gave me the rest. It's not really the same, is it.

31 Oct 05 ::: Comments closed

I'm taking a seminar on affirmative action this semester where we have studied how a lot of schools, UCLA included, propound the value of 'diversity' on campus. Black students in the seminar: 0.

While I know black UCLA law students exist, I did a quick count this week:

Black students in tax: 0
Black students in litigation: 0
Black students in remedies: 1
and by the way, black students in my 1L section: 0

Maybe next semester?

UPDATE: After I posted this, I went to see "How the West Was Won" at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. The movie was made in 1963. Part of it depicted the Civil War. There was not a single black person on-screen in nearly 3 hrs of film.

03 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

I grew up in the great state of New Hampshire ("Live free or die") which is one of the most racially homogeneous states around. NH is 0.7% black, compared to 12.3% nationally, which puts it even behind Utah, and slightly ahead of North Dakota.

My best friend when I was 5 was a black kid in my neighborhood named Jamie (who had white parents) but aside from one black student in my high school, that was the entire population of black people I ran into in 13 years as a NH resident.

Diversity policies at universities were meant to benefit people like me: a white kid from a very white state. What did I know about people of color?

Indeed, nothing. But the homogeneity of New Hampshire did not give rise to xenophobic-type racism (as perhaps it does other places). NH is tagged as a conservative state but it's libertarian-style, not wingnut-style. People enjoy being left alone to do their thing -- live free or die, man. That translates into a respect for other people's privacy, and a respect for differences.

For example, there are a surprising number of gay people around Manchester NH (where I grew up). Nobody would think of it as a big gay scene. But the gay people I've met who live in NH enjoy that aspect -- they can just be gay in their own (often extremely boring) way. They don't have to conform to some prevailing culture of urban gayness.

Surely, there are homophobes and racists in NH, like there are anywhere else. But culturally NH is oriented towards a kind of social quid pro quo -- I won't express an opinion about how you live your life, as long as you don't insist that I have to take an interest in it. As an adult, that seems like an eminently fair exchange.

As I've proceeded through higher education & later the world at large, the 'As White As New Hampshire' test has always been my benchmark for diversity measurement. I look around environments that ought to be 'diverse' and say 'why is this place as white as New Hampshire?'

Here's an example: the Bay Area technology industry. There's a large population of blacks in the region, mostly in the East Bay. I worked in technology for six years and dealt with hundreds of people at dozens of companies. I met exactly ONE black person. He was a graphic designer at a software company. I met exactly ZERO black engineers.

Why is this place as white as New Hampshire?

04 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

So, in line with the New Hampshire Whiteness Test, I have mixed feelings about our Critical Race Studies program and other similar programs that are designed to be 'magnet' programs for black / hispanic / native american students and faculty.

At UCLA, the Critical Race program is used as a stealth racial preference -- if you check off the box on your admissions application that you're interested, you get a preference. This is supposed to be a race-neutral preference, but URMs check off the box far more frequently than others.

I support racial preferences in admissions. I support the recognition that race issues are worthy of dedicated academic programs. But I do not support the way UCLA's setup seems to promote cosmetic diversity -- the school can tell the world "we have X% black enrollment" but inside the school, blacks and other URMs are concentrated in certain classes and absent from many others.

By wedding an academic program (Critical Race Studies) to an admissions goal (more URMs) it promotes the formation of a 'school within the school' leading to semi-segregation.

In 1L sections, I have heard students are assigned randomly except by race -- black and hispanic students are allocated so there is a 'critical mass' in a section; if there aren't enough of them, that section will have none.

I say this not in outrage or indignation, but only as an illustration of the way that 'diversity', broadly writ, is the justification for many of these bend-into-a-pretzel policies. But the result, while perhaps satisfying to deans and administrators, is not quite the same on the ground.

The techniques that UCLA has employed to skirt Prop 209 may have led to marginal increases in URM enrollment but I question whether it delivers diversity to the students the way it was intended to. I might as well be taking tax in New Hampshire.

08 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

My college roommate got married in Boston this weekend to his boyfriend of 10 years. At the reception I found myself seated between two very attractive female lawyers -- the good news. The bad news -- they were both married. The on balance good news -- they were married to each other.

They told me they had gone to a law school where they were the only two lesbians in the class, and fortunately they liked each other. They both had checked off 'gay' on their applications and had no doubt it was important to their admissions chances.

When I jokingly called it a form of affirmative action, they assured me it was -- and added that they are frequently beneficiaries of a similar type of affirmative action in social situations, as nobody seems to have a hot, married lesbian couple among their friends. So, in their words, they "fill a gap."

As it turned out, their marriage last year had been the impetus for my roommate & his guy to 'make it legal' -- a form of peer pressure that straight people have endured through gritted teeth for decades, and now may start to grow through the gay population.

They asked if I was dating law school women. I said I was considering it. That got the most voluminous response of the evening, as they detailed the many, many reasons I really should not date law school females. I'm not sure they made that compelling a case, but ladies take note: certain lesbians are out there trash-talking you. In case you want to make something of it.

PS. Congratulations John & Stan!

14 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

TW & MD pass this one along from the SFGate:

Michael Schill, dean of UCLA's law school, was given an annual salary of $290,000 and then received a $270,000 housing allowance when he arrived from New York University in August 2004. UC also paid his actual moving expenses. UC administrators say they need to offer such allowances to recruit the best employees and to speed their transition to UC jobs.

In other news, a full 50% of my fall professors have now declared that they "love" my orange & purple Adidas sneaks. Thank you, gentlemen.

14 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

More from the SF Gate: highest paid people in the UC system. And yes, we have some serious bling babies in our midst.

Salary / total pay in 2004:
Michael Schill: $265,833 / $535,833
Neil Netanel: $180,000 / $351,812
Mark Grady: $225,000 / $343,300
Katherine Stone: $193,600 / $298,410
Khaled Abou El Fadl: $180,000 / $241,158
Joel Handler: $215,000 / $235,998
Stephen Yeazell: $220,000 / $234,999
Devon Carbado: $165,000 / $233,298
Samuel Thompson: $189,600 / $231,733
Richard Abel: $215,000 / $230,000
Mark Greenberg: $125,000 / $228,305
Daniel Lowenstein: $185,000 / $226,111
Grant Nelson: $210,300 / $225,299
Russell Robinson: $125,000 / $224,260
Stephen Munzer: $190,000 / $209,999
Lynn LoPucki: $194,800 / $209,800
Noah Zatz: $125,000 / $208,929
Grace Blumberg: $191,200 / $206,19
Eugene Volokh: $154,700 / $204,950
Lynn Stout: $189,600 / $204,599
David Binder: $189,600 / $204,599

Some of these people started at UCLA in 2004 (Schill, Netanel) so they have fat one-time moving bonuses packed into their compensation. It makes me think I should start indexing my teaching evals to salary. "The class was pretty good, but considering how much we pay this dude, I expected nicer Powerpoint slides."

If you want to know what all the other law professors make, here's the law faculty pay scale.

Now, law professors are somewhat fond of griping about their salaries in relation to the expected earnings of the 25-year-olds entering big law firms each year. To this I say: all of you seem to severely discount the value of tenure.

The big firm associate gets paid well, but he's likely to get burned out & quit long before his 7th year, and trade down to a more enjoyable (but less lucrative) job.

Whereas the tenured professor gets to collect her salary every year ... not subject to performance reviews ... forever. No questions asked. Plus, there seem to be pretty liberal policies supporting extracurricular consulting and teaching very little certain semesters (like, zero). Most people in America would call this a sweet deal.

So the next time you hear the whining of tenured professors, raise your hand and say: Boo. Fuckin. Hoo. Baby.

(props to TW)

16 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

Early in the semester I had the brilliant idea to subcontract the Bluebooking of my seminar paper to an eager law review member who had no life and would appreciate the $10 + 12-pack of MGD I would offer for the privilege.

Somewhere along the way I forgot to write that down. Now I'm doing it myself and don't even have the MGD to show for it.

I'm sure the idiocy of the Bluebook has been adequately described elsewhere on the web. so let me just file a short concurring opinion: The Bluebook is idiotic. How we, as Americans, can have such elegant Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and such dreadful, illogical rules for citations is beyond me.

The worst part of the Bluebook is the maddening inconsistency that makes most of the fiddly rules about when to use small caps or italics useless, since they mean different things depending on what type of source material is being cited. Does that not seem stupid to you? If you're on UCLA L. Rev., don't answer, because I know it will cause the fabric of time-space in your immediate vicinity to collapse.

27 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

Ah, exam time is almost here again. The good news is that since last year, UCLA has inflated its grade curve to increase the A's, decrease the C's, and center the whole distribution around a B+ rather than B. Meaning, I will either get a grade boost for working the same amount, or keep the same grades while working less.

Given the preparation I've mustered so far, it's likely to be the latter. This is what I learned last semester about exam prep. For three classes, I had this "great" outline system and did a ton of sample exams. I got average grades on those exams. For the one class I hated, where I had a crap outline, did 1.5 sample exams and left an hour early, I graded the best.

This either proves a) something or b) nothing.

Actually, I do think I made a mistake last semester, which maybe I can help someone else avoid. When I made my outlines I was trying to get everything summarized in a neat format. I wasn't actually learning the material any better. So this time, my rule is: nothing goes into the outline until I'm convinced I get it. Having the material well-summarized, but just as inscrutable, is not useful.

And this time, I promise to leave all my exams 2 HOURS early, which should launch me into the A++ zone.

29 Nov 05 ::: Comments closed

Here at matthewb.com we specialize in providing a website with no nutritional value whatsoever. But today we have a special feature.

This past spring, when I did the law review write-on, I cursed the fact that there wasn't a way to cross-reference footnotes in Word. Meaning, if you got to the end and had to insert or delete a footnote, all your supras and infras would be screwed up.

Strictly speaking, I should've been cursing my own ignorance, because there is a way to do it, which is a phenomenal freakin' time saver. So in the rare spirit of public service, I present:

How to Cross-Reference Footnotes in Word

1. In the main text, select the number of the footnote you want to cross-reference.
2. From the Insert menu, select Bookmark. Type a useful name for the footnote ("boring_journal_article") and click the Add button.
3. Go into the footnotes and put the cursor where you want the cross-reference. From the Insert menu, select Field.
4. Now, don't get intimidated, this is the most difficult, but magical step. From the Categories popup menu, select Links and References. Then, from the Field Names box below that, select NoteRef. In the middle, you will see a list with your bookmark name in it. Select it and click the OK button.
5. Voila, a cross-reference has been inserted. If you now add or subtract footnotes, the cross-reference can be updated with the right number. You can copy & paste this reference instead of going back to the Insert Field menu.
6. One more important thing. Word doesn't automatically update fields when they change. You have two options: a) go to Tools > Options > Print tab and check off 'Update fields'. This will update all fields before you print. b) Update the fields manually by selecting all the text and typing F9.

matthewb.com is not responsible for any errors or omissions in the above instructions. We are not liable for any direct or consequential damages arising from your use of the above information. You agree that you insert cross-references at your own risk and waive all claims, known and unknown, including those otherwise allowed by Cal. Civ. C. § 1542. Your visiting this website constitutes acceptance of these terms & conditions.

02 Dec 05 ::: Comments closed

My Litigation professor came up with this amazing work of Powerpoint art. In it, he synthesizes all the fundamental metaphysical questions that we humans have coped with since birth. Please enjoy.

02 Dec 05 ::: Comments closed

Those of you who saw the Curb Your Enthusiasm recently where the orthodox Jewish woman jumped from a ski lift ... you did recognize this as the fact pattern from Friedman v. State of New York, 282 N.Y.S.2d 858 (1967), did you not.

If I were a screenwriter I'd get a Lexis account. Why think of new ideas? It's a gold mine. Unfortunately, this was not the end of Ms. Friedman's suffering, which went on to include:

On March 18, 1964, Miss Friedman testified that she "blacked out" and fell on a subway platform in New York City. She went to Dr. Emanuel Dubrow, her family pediatrician, who treated her for a slight laceration of the right labia majora.

See Friedman, 282 N.Y.S.2d at 867.

05 Dec 05 ::: Comments closed

An excellent article in the WSJ today about the high failure rate of the California bar exam. Kathleen Sullivan, recent dean of Stanford Law School, failed this time around. Her soon-to-be employer, William Urquhart, ran interference:

"She is a rock star," says William Urquhart, who last year recruited Ms. Sullivan to join his firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges LLP ... "The problem is not with Kathleen Sullivan, it is with the person who drafted the exam or the person who graded it."

Mr. Urquhart says he does not know Ms. Sullivan's score, but knows she spent little time preparing because she was inundated with work for the firm and Stanford Law School, where she now runs the school's constitutional law center. [Awww, poor little you. – Ed.] Ms. Sullivan plans to take the test again, according to Mr. Urquhart. "She'll prepare more next time," he says. "My advice to her is that she should look at 15 bar questions and 15 sample, perfect answers. That is all she'll need to pass."

Ah, the old 'blame the exam' trick. Does everyone at Quinn Emanuel who fails the bar exam get treated this well? No, didn't think so. Instead of the buck-passing Ms. Sullivan, take your inspiration from this gentleman:

Ms. Sullivan is unlikely to need as many attempts as Maxcy Dean Filer, who may hold the California bar endurance record, having passed in 1991 after 47 unsuccessful tries. The Compton, Calif., man, who says he'll practice any kind of law that "comes through the door -- except probate and bankruptcy," says he always tried to psych himself up before taking the test by repeating, "I didn't fail the bar, the bar failed me."

05 Dec 05 ::: Comments closed

Sometimes professors give out sample answers to old exams. This is useful for finding out what the prof is looking for, but not useful for estimating the quality of your current preparation.

Sometimes you get professor-written answers, sometimes student-written. Those can be a little shaming. For one of my exams I have a sample student answer to a 75-minute essay question given last time – it is 4,000 words long. That's about what I can write in 3 hours ... if I've done a couple 'bumps' and had a triple latte.

To give a fuller perspective of the spectrum of exam performance, I'd prefer if profs provided some non-model answers in addition to the model answers. Namely, what was the absolute worst answer that still squeaked by with a C? Because if there are 4,000 word dramatic overachievers, there must be others who answered it in 500 words plus some doodles of puppies in the margin. That's the person who's going to give me the most confidence.

09 Dec 05 ::: Comments closed

During our first year of law school, it was drilled into us that the age of legal writing that involved words like "hereinunder" and "wherefore" has passed, a dusty relic. Simplicity is in. Normal english words are in. Semicolons are out.

Still, there are certain overused turns of phrase that crop up in the speech & writing of judges, lawyers and law professors (and eventually infect law students). These are phrases that are not needed to convey meaning. They only serve to confirm to the audience: hey, watch me talk about legal stuff. Forthwith:

1. as to. I've already recognized its place in legal education but after another year, it remains the champ. These days I'm less convinced it means anything. The best part of 'as to' is that it commits you to mangling the rest of your sentence with pronouns and passive constructions. Watch the magic —

   The dog sniffed the hydrant.
   As to the dog, he sniffed the hydrant.
   As to the hydrant, it was sniffed by the dog.

   Are these improvements?

2. as between, as among, as against, etc. Cousins of 'as to' but standalone offenders in their own right. Apparently, putting the word 'as' in front of any preposition makes it sound more legally authoritative. With the added benefit of the sentence-mangling features of 'as to'. I'll concede there are certain situations where 'as to' fills a semantic need. But I can't say the same of these.

3. cabin in. A favorite of law professors, as in 'cabin in the jury's discretion to award punitives'. It just means 'limit'. Why do we need to cabin in something when we can just limit it? The image of a log structure out in the woods doesn't add to my understanding.

4. substantive. This term is occasionally useful when you need to make a distinction from its friend, procedural. But most of the time, it's redundant.

   Instead of: The focus of the legislation is silly string.
   You get: The substantive focus of the legislation is silly string.

5. violative of. This is the prime offender in a category of verbs turned into adjectives. The law didn't merely violate the constitution – it was violative of the constitution. These are particularly objectionable because they subtract clarity without adding meaning.

6. arising from. Used anytime causality needs to be shown. I'm sick from eating too much candy. But it sounds better if I have a sickness arising from eating too much candy.

Please, post your own favorites.

12 Dec 05 ::: Comments closed

16 Dec 05 ::: Comments closed

Welcome back, gentle readers. Are you glad to be back in school? Me neither. What I did during winter break:

Nintendogs. The Squid and the Whale. Hiking. Munich. Advance Wars Dual Strike. Brokeback Mountain. Yoga. Syriana. Cooked christmas dinner for 10. Casanova. Half-Life 2. The Matador. Discovering the Glendora Ridge Road. King Kong. Snow activities in Jackson, Wyoming. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

In Harry Potter, I came very close to committing the first intentional tort of my life as the woman sitting next to me made not one but two calls from her cell phone during the movie. Only my awareness of the penalties awaiting in the civil and criminal justice systems prevented me from grabbing her phone and hurling it to the front of the giant Imax theatre, so I could experience the satisfying sound of plastic shattering.

Winter break also reminded me: school blows.

09 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

Up until now, the most frequently asked question has been why are you going to law school?

Over winter break, I noticed that the new #1 question is 'what kind of law will you practice?' Apparently, once you're halfway done people are forced to concede that you'll likely finish, and move on to the next boring question.

I label these questions boring because they are not really 'questions' in the sense of 'statement designed to elicit information'. Rather, they're almost always platforms for the questioner to express their opinion about why going to law school / being a lawyer stinks.

Despite this, I've always answered these questions accurately and sincerely. But recently, when I tell people I plan to practice X type of law, I notice they usually say "well, my uncle / mother / brother is a lawyer and they hate [whatever shit job they have, totally unrelated to my field of interest]"

While I do think many of the slings & arrows complained of by law students and lawyers are either self-induced or overstated, I have to admit the general public seems to have a hidden agenda to broadcast their negativity about the field of law. Why, oh why?

It's gotten to the point where I'm tempted to say 'no comment' just to forestall the inevitable reaction. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for someone to ask 'so, are you studying anything interesting this semester?' That question, as far as I recall, has never been asked.

10 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

Last week I went on a day of snowmobiling in the forests near Jackson Wyoming. While we were having our picnic lunch (at a picnic table while it was 30 deg and snowing), I asked the guide about the status of snowmobiling in Yellowstone – I knew the policy had changed around a couple times and figured it might be the type of question this gentleman would've formed an opinion about.

Oh, yes. He gave a lengthy rundown of the conflict between locals (pro-snowmobile) and the environmental groups (anti) and the litigation that had ensued.

But the best part was when I asked about who was filing the lawsuits. He explained that because the lawsuit named the United States as a party, it could be brought in any federal court. And the Sierra Club & other environmental groups had chosen to file their suits in federal districts likely to have favorable caselaw and/or judges ... snowmobile dude gave a perfect explanation of federal venue shopping.

11 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

The big news this semester is that I have successfully whittled down my on-campus appearances to three days a week. This has dramatically improved my enjoyment of law school.

The downside I suppose is that there are a lot of worthwhile classes that happen to meet on Thursdays. To those professors I offer apologies: I never considered your class seriously. The topic may have appealed to me, but I just preferred having the day off.

Part of the secret to my schedule success is having a three-credit independent study. If you have any capacity to get things done without a syllabus lighting the way, this has got to be the best deal in law school. You write the same paper you'd have to write for a seminar, but without the assigned reading and class meetings. I have no idea why people would let their option for up to 7 credits of independent study work go unused.

13 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

Students are prohibited from helping professors grade exams because it's agreed that they're not qualified to evaluate other students' work.

But in their role as law review editors, these same students are considered plenty well-qualified to evaluate legal scholarship produced by these same professors.

So consider this: tenure offers for law professors depend on published scholarship. Published scholarship is controlled by students. What does that suggest about published scholarship? What does that suggest about who gets tenure?

There are perennial debates about whether student-run law reviews are a good idea. Law professors seem to end up supporting them, but DUH – getting tenure would be hella difficult if you actually had to pass the scrutiny of peers rather than students.

Am I being stupid? You tell me. What if second-year firm associates graded the bar exam? What if undergrad art students evaluated submissions for the Whitney Biennial? What if admissions decisions were made by current students?

Answer: we wouldn't take the results seriously. When a procedure requires judgment & discretion, our confidence in the outcome depends on our confidence in the abilities of the person making the decision.

Consider the market incentives this system creates. A non-tenured professor X is shopping her article to law reviews. Did she have to write the greatest, best-researched article ever? No. It just has to pass scrutiny of editorial boards whose members have 2 years of experience with the law.

Are they familiar with her field or the topic? Maybe a little. Are they familiar with prior scholarship in the area? Probably not. So how much effort is Prof X going to exert if she wants tenure?

I'll let you ponder that one. Here's another observation: professors who have written casebooks, hornbooks, etc. are reliably smarter than those who haven't.

I think the reason for this comes back to market incentives. Unlike a law review article, a casebook has to pass scrutiny with a range of economic stakeholders: the publisher who invests in it, the professors who require their classes to buy it, etc. A casebook is, in effect, peer-reviewed by the free market.

15 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

Last semester I wondered whether my diversity statistics would improve in the spring. Apparently not:

Black students in administrative law: 1
Black students in federal courts: 0
Black students in tax seminar: 0
Black students in my independent study: 0

17 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

Clarence Ray Allen was executed at San Quentin last night:

Only about 300 people turned out to protest the execution ... [it] did not draw the oratory of the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the folk-singing of Joan Baez, both of whom were among the 2,000 people outside San Quentin's walls the night Stanley Tookie Williams was put to death last month.

There's plenty of good reasons to oppose the death penalty. But to me that sums up the problem with the Save Tookie campaign: what passes for principled objection to the death penalty sometimes looks more like opportunistic grandstanding.

Clarence is just as dead as Tookie. Apparently if Clarence had written some children's books – or maybe if Clarence had been black instead of native American – he would've pulled better ratings.

And was Tookie really that worthy of all the attention? It wasn't like anyone seriously thought he was wrongly accused, nor was there DNA evidence waiting in the wings to exonerate him.

He was a bad dude. He was convicted by a jury and it was upheld all the way through the appeals process. He never once took accountability for the murders, which to me made his "jailhouse redemption" quite a bit less convincing. He was like the "Blair Witch Project" of death row inmates: extremely positive word of mouth, but then you see it up close and you're like "why are people so into this?"

Ah, the vagaries of public taste. So let us note the death of Clarence, who suffered the accident of bad scheduling, and had an exceptionally tough act to follow.

17 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

Here at matthewb.com, we so rarely cover any topics of meaningful heft. But in honor of Clarence & Tookie, maybe we should depart from the usual fluff to provide some death penalty fluff.

There's one major reason I don't support the death penalty. But I find some the more popular reasons against it to be less persuasive:

"The death penalty should be abolished because killing is wrong / it's barbaric for the government to kill people / it's cruel and unusual / etc."

You can't disagree with this one without seeming to object to the proposition that generally, Killing Is Bad. So let me agree: Killing Is Bad.

But we don't really think literally all killing is bad. If a policeman is being shot at, and he returns fire and eliminates the assailiant, that's technically a killing, though we excuse it as such.

The problem I get stuck on is that our government has a lengthy track record of killing people. It's been a major part of our foreign policy since 1776. We have a huge military whose members are trained, among other things, to kill people. Lots of them, if necessary. In addition to covert assassinations carried out by quasi-military agencies (CIA, NSA etc)

So I find it hard to explain why it's more barbaric to kill a prisoner who's been convicted of a most serious crime and received the benefit of due process of law, than various citizens of foreign countries.

Ah, you might say, these are essentially self-defense killings. We're killing people who are shooting at us. Really?

The US military admitted dropping a 500-pound bomb on the wrong house in the city of Mosul on January 8, and says the bomb killed five people. The homeowner, however, claims the bomb killed 14 people, including 7 children. The strike was intended for another target nearby. The house that was bombed was intended as a search target, not as a site to be attacked.

This news item passed largely undetected as the media was covering the dead miners story. These were just ordinary Iraqi citizens, and now – whoopsie! – they're dead. Those killings strike me as a lot more "barbaric" than Clarence & Tookie, that's for sure. But they provoked hardly any response.

Bottom line: as a generally satisfied citizen of the United States, I am by implication the beneficiary of a lot of killing. I don't know how to conceptually isolate the barbarism of the domestic penal system the way others apparently can.

20 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

Next possibility:

"We shouldn't kill people because of the possibility of error – how do we know we're not executing an innocent man? We can't undo it afterwards."

I used to buy this objection, but strangely enough, law school has persuaded me otherwise. Because error is a deliberate policy choice of the criminal justice system.

Criminal trials require a finding of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt". It does not require evidence "to an absolute certainty". That's a pretty big gap, when you think about it. So it's flatly incorrect to say that accuracy is the primary goal of criminal justice. It's high up on the list, but not at the top.

We'd like to think we're not punishing innocent people, but statistically, there's going to be a lot of cases that fall into the gap between "reasonable doubt" and absolute certainty. Not maybe. Definitely. When the criminal justice system is working at maximum accuracy, innocent people will still be put in jail.

Could we improve accuracy? Sure, by increasing the evidentiary threshold for conviction. If we required something closer to "certainty" we'd avoid false positives (erroneous convictions). But we'd also increase the number of false negatives (erroneous exonerations). So while we'd know innocent people weren't going to jail, we'd also know a lot of guilty people were going free.

This is apparently not acceptable, so we engage in a utilitarian calculus about how many false positives we're willing to tolerate in return for an acceptable conviction rate. Hence, reasonable doubt.

Maybe you're willing to accept error when it comes to imprisonment, but not for execution. That's fair. Certainly we could increase the evidentiary standard for capital punishment. Even the Constitution requires "the Testimony of two Witnesses ... [or a] Confession in open Court" for a treason conviction, which is typically punishable by death.

I have no idea of certain states use a higher burden of proof for capital cases. Ultimately the problem with this position is that it suggests accuracy is the issue, and that maybe the death penalty would be OK if you had enough evidence. So this is a flawed objection.

21 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

So the objection I find most persuasive:

"The death penalty is a waste of government resources: the time and money spent putting someone to death far exceeds what it takes for life imprisonment [or other equivalent punishment]"

A large incremental price is paid for what is, in terms of punishment, small incremental utility. Though the efficiency varies among states, a death penalty conviction is always the start of a long-term relationship between the courts and an inmate.

Who does this benefit? It turns criminal punishment into epic-length judicial theater. I don't see how this serves any of the social purposes of criminal punishment. (I dimly remember them from 1L crim law)

I think folks don't like this argument because it seems to prioritize govt interest in efficiency over a prisoner's interest in not being executed. But it also makes it more durable – I haven't heard any argument that the death penalty is administratively efficient.

It seems to be couched more in the idea that the victims' interest in retribution is worth any cost. I don't agree with that on principle, and I wonder if victims really feel that way or if it's a politically imposed projection.

THE END
Back to our regularly scheduled idiocy

23 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

The high point of yesterday's class action symposium at UCLA: Judge Marsha Berzon of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals appearing on a panel, and looking exactly like a bored 6th grader as she doodled in her notebook while Elizabeth Cabraser was droning on.

I would've thought that a federal appeals judge would've developed more crafty ways of disguising boredom by this point. Or maybe the joy of life tenure is: you don't have to.

The low point of today's visit by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Ruth came across as this totally sweet lady who happens to sit on the nation's highest court. And she voluntarily scheduled a Q&A with students, so maybe that's assumption of the risk right there. But I could not believe the number of jackass questions my fellow students asked her.

Things could've been worse, I know. But when someone steps up and their 'question' is typed out on multiple pages ... you know you're in trouble. There was the pair of dudes who had a lengthy, ridiculous question about some fussy issue lurking inside a First Amendment case. Guys! It's a published case! Read it!

Then this guy (must be a 1L) in his one suit & tie asks a Bill O'Reilly type question about the effectiveness of the senate confirmation hearings. Ruth pointed out his history was incorrect, and then dismissed his question. Of course, he immediately gets back into line to ask a 'follow-up' question. SIT DOWN!!

Then comes the woman ... the crackpot we were all waiting for ... who had no question, but rather a speech about Native American something something and drug abuse and the ATF or something, I couldn't follow it. She was just reading from a script.

If you thought of Ruth Ginsburg as a lightweight justice, think again. She cut in on the crackpot and said hey, you don't have a question, and nobody wants to hear your speech. All of us in the main hall had to repress our urge to applaud wildly.

27 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

UCLA has received $1 million to endow the David Binder Chair in Clinical Law.

Prof. Binder, as previously reported, makes $189K a year. Add in pension, health benefits, discounts on rice bowls in the student cafe, and you're probably looking at $220K in compensation-related costs.

Now if we invest that $1M at 4.5% a year – and that won't cover inflation – it'll yield $45K. So with this "endowment" the law school can afford to buy about 20% of a David Binder-level professor.

Maybe they'll be selling candygrams to make up the difference.

30 Jan 06 ::: Comments closed

A friend forwarded me an email this morning called the "Stella Awards", purporting to document the most frivolous lawsuits in America (named after Stella Liebeck, the woman who sued McDonald's after being burned by coffee in the drive-thru).

A cursory Google search revealed it as a long-running urban legend email, entirely fabricated. However, I did discover a web site called the True Stella Awards which goes to the trouble of finding actual stupid cases. See if you can spot which ones are real (answers under the link at the bottom)

1. "Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next-door neighbor's beagle dog. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been a little provoked at the time, as Mr. Williams, who had climbed over the fence into the yard, was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun."

2. "Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware sued the owner of a Night Club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out two of her front teeth. This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak in the window of the Ladies Room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses."

3. "Michelle Knepper of Vancouver, Wash. picked a doctor out of the phone book to do her liposuction, and went ahead with the procedure even though the doctor was only a dermatologist, not a plastic surgeon. After having complications, she complained she never would have chosen that doctor had she known he wasn't Board Certified in the procedure. (She relied on the phonebook listing over asking the doctor, or looking for a certificate on his wall?!) So she sued ...the phone company! She won $1.2 million plus $375,000 for her husband for "loss of spousal services and companionship"."

4. "19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently did not notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal the hubcaps."

5. "Bob Dougherty of Louisville, Colo. A prankster smeared glue on the toilet seat at the Home Depot store in Louisville, causing Dougherty to stick to it when he sat down. "This is not Home Depot's fault," he proclaimed, yet the store graciously offered him $2,000 anyway. Dougherty complained the offer is "insulting" and filed suit demanding $3 million."

6. "Christopher Roller of Burnsville, Minn. is mystified by professional magicians, so he sued David Blaine and David Copperfield to demand they reveal their secrets to him -- or else pay him 10 percent of their lifelong earnings, which he figures amounts to $50 million for Copperfield and $2 million for Blaine. The basis for his suit: Roller claims that the magicians defy the laws of physics, and thus must be using "godly powers" -- and since Roller is god (according to him), they're "somehow" stealing that power from him."

04 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

Prof Admin (pointing at PowerPoint slide on screen): "ah, that should actually say public official, not pubic official."

07 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

The New York Law Journal reports that Sullivan & Cromwell has increased associate base salaries by $20,000 across the board. Under the new pay regime at S&C, first-year associates at S&C will get $145,000 a year, before bonus.

Recently, a spate of Los Angeles-based firms raised first-year salaries from $125,000 to $135,000. According to the NYLJ article, Sullivan & Cromwell’s move will likely be followed by other top New York firms...

I'm not one of the people who thinks first-year associates are overpaid.

If you believe there is a free market in legal talent, the "overpaid" myth must, as a matter of economic necessity, be false. Firms are paying exactly what they must to attract a certain quality & quantity of talent – no more, no less. The question folks ought to ask is: what market forces have conspired to create such extraordinary wage rates?

First, members of the UCLA graduating class might view these salary levels as normal, but for those graduating from Loyola, Southwestern, Glendale School of Law, et al., they're the exception. Major firms employ a lot of lawyers, but they still only soak up a small proportion of each year's graduating class. Grads of lower-prestige law schools aren't going to have access to the absolute top-paying jobs. (For that matter, I wonder what the mean salary across the entire class of 2006 is – a much less impressive number than $135K, that much I can guarantee)

Plus, first-year associates are often deeply in debt. So much of these huge salaries are going to pay off school loans. In other words, first-year associates have to get paid well because law professors have to get paid well.

And by most accounts, big-firm work is tedious and bulky (if not especially difficult) and consequently there is huge turnover within a few years of hire. So of all the associates who get these starting salaries, many (most?) of them only earn at that level for a few years.

Let me suggest those of you taking these jobs might even be underpaid. One flaw in my free-market theory is that these top-tier firms are matching each other's salaries. (I won't explore the anti-trust ramifications of that practice.) Bonuses restore some of the differential.

But the flat-pricing practice conceals differences in base salaries that might otherwise exist: some firms would pay less, others would pay more. The ones who would pay more are getting a bargain; the ones who would pay less are paying a premium to participate in the top tier of the labor market. I wonder if the best 'deal' for a law grad in terms of exploiting market inefficiency would be to go to work the firm who bills the least yet is still paying the top-tier salary.

But those of you going to the mega-huge firms, I guarantee you will be doing more than $135K worth of work. (No, I don't believe the urban legend that law firms lose money on first-year associates. That's a crafty bit of marketing to make you think they're doing you a favor.)

Furthermore, law firms can benefit across the board from the negotiation imbalance. You as a law grad have no idea what your skills are worth. You probably haven't ever negotiated a substantial pay package. And the flat-pricing structure gives your firm an easy way of saying "sorry, that's the best we can do". That's another reason there's such large attrition at these firms: once an associate travels beyond the veil of ignorance, you can't keep 'em down on the farm.

Anyways, enjoy your money. You earned it fair & square.

07 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

My wheedling and whining paid off: I'd like to acknowledge the three matthewb.com fans who sent me Chinese New Year candygrams this week.

You may not know: I was born in a prior Year of the Dog so it has special emotional resonance with me. Gettin' a little misty here ...

08 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

UPDATE 2/14: the new Lexis rep for UCLA told me that [name redacted] is now working USC & Southwestern instead of USC & UCLA. So she has not been fired, but rather reassigned.

The nude photo search continues, though it has now taken on a more urban-legend aroma.

UPDATED!

This site's readers have helped out before researching issues of major moral significance. Today, I ask for your help again:

There is a rumor that our campus Lexis rep, [name redacted], was dismissed from her position after posing in a bikini buck naked for postyourgirls.com. In our ongoing quest for the truth, we need a) the photos and b) confirmation that she was sacked for this indiscretion.

If it's true, I want to register a complaint with Lexis. Bikinis are nudity is pretty much the best thing they could do for their service. And [name redacted], I think you need to see an attorney.

08 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

How can you make the most of your summer associate position? Get everyone in the firm to worship you as a god among humans. How? That's the easy part: Device Mastery.

More than any profession I've encountered, lawyers have the biggest gap between the level of technology they insist on surrounding themselves with and their personal competence at operating said technology.

Why is this? Because they're, you know, too busy and important to learn how to use it. Of course, an item of technology that you can't use effectively will on balance waste more time than it saves.

The one I don't get is paragraph auto-numbering in Word and Wordperfect. I have not met anyone who knows how to use it. Yet it is so useful, and doing paragraph numbering by hand is beyond idiotic. So while there are many ways you can exhibit Device Mastery at your job, to keep it simple I suggest:

1. Learn to use the paragraph auto-numbering feature.

2. When you see a complaint drifting around with incorrect numbering, say "you know, if you email me that document, I can make your paragraphs auto-number themselves."

3. Perform the change, which will take about 4 minutes. But then wait another 71 minutes before you send it back, with a note that says "It was tricky but I got it done!"

4. This is the most important: make sure no one observes you during the auto-numbering process. If they ask you to show them how to do it themselves, you respond: "well, it's just so technical and complex, I don't mind showing you but we should set aside an afternoon to do it." That will be the last you hear of it.

12 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

I know some of you are on the fence about the Barrister's Ball. On the one hand, it's the law school prom. On the other hand, it's the law school prom.

So for what it's worth: I am going to the Barrister's Ball. I am making this public commitment so that I won't lose the will to party hearty and back out. I am ready to rock it.

Here's the thing. Many of us don't think about going to the Barrister's Ball because "I won't know anyone there". Completely agree. But if a critical mass of your friends were going, you'd go too, right?

Not that you all were making your plans around me. But by coming out of the closet early, I hope to pave the way for others who might be on the fence. Yes, it's the prom. But you earned it. And you might get lucky.

13 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

Fordham called. They want their home page back.

UDPATE: Wake Forest might also have a beef.

13 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

A happening on the UCLA campus today:

As part of Black History Month, the Black Graduate Students Association will be putting on a dramatic lynching re-enactment today in Bruin Plaza, followed by an art display and panel discussion.

The lynching re-enactment will start outside Powell Library, where a "death march" will also be re-enacted. A student playing the role of the victim will act as if they are being dragged by a mob to their "lynching," which will take place in Bruin Plaza...

[O]rganizers wanted to illustrate the suffering of blacks throughout American history ... "People tend to overlook how much of an oppression African Americans faced in our country."

I wonder what kind of "dramatic re-enactment" we can look forward to in honor of Women's Health Month, which shares February.

15 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

This morning, on my way to a meeting with a professor, I was nearly in a serious auto accident. An old guy in a 1987 Oldsmobile tried to turn left in front of me as I drove through Glendale. Weaned on years of Pole Position and Spy Hunter, I had enough mad drivin' skillz to swerve out of his way, though he still clipped my fender pretty good.

What was most awesome: I was trying to veer left to get out of his way, and instead of noticing the situation and stopping, he continued to drive towards me. He was hell-bent on T-boning me. But I would not give him the satisfaction today.

We got out to exchange insurance information, and he started a tirade about how I was driving too fast. Not true. But even so, this gentleman must never have taken torts class, or he'd know that since my putative negligence was not the cause of the accident, it was irrelevant to the determination of liability.

Anyways. My nerves now substantially frayed, I get back into my car and do a U-turn so I can return home. Unfortuantely this U-turn occurred just after a Glendale policeman passed me. They went through the trouble of turning around and chasing me down. They were unmoved by my tale of having recently been hit by one of their citizens and cited me for an illegal U-turn.

My professor advised me not to fight it in court, but suck it up & do traffic school online. I now hate Glendale. A pox on you all and your shitty drivers.

18 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

I just got one of these. I recommend it to all law students who want to really add sexiness and glamour to their Lexis sessions.

It's a ginormous LCD monitor that plugs into my laptop video port and adds onto my existing screen space. Also, it turns 90 degrees so it can be used in portrait orientation. I can't adequately express how exciting it is to be able to see the full text of ERISA on one screen and both my research papers simultaneously on the other. I still have enough space left over to keep an eye on any vital developments over at postyourgirls.com.

21 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

I've never really understood why law professors' offices are so shoddy and nasty. One prof of mine has these two rickety old ripped-up fabric chairs for guests. What is the story dude? You dress well. Your house is nice. What's with the dorm-room aesthetic at work?

And it's not just him. Law professors seem to like to stuff their shelves with as many books as possible, so that all their files & such can get stacked on the floor, combined with furniture that was apparently left over from when they last redecorated the school in 1964.

I can understand why an associate professor might not want to get committed to an office space. But once you get tenure, isn't that the moment you might want to put together some funds to redecorate? I mean, I'd negotiate for that as part of my signing package. First, new paint and carpeting. Then an Aeron chair, a couple flat-panel monitors, new guest chairs, stereo speakers. Fresh flowers weekly?

But, that's just me. Call me crazy, but I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my career in something that looked like a storeroom at the DMV.

22 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

I admit I got a chuckle from Richard Posner's recommendations to Harvard in the wake of the Larry Summers resignation:

5. The anachronistic institution of tenure should be reexamined and perhaps jettisoned. The market for university professors is highly competitive; a good person whose contract is not renewed can get a comparable job elsewhere...

6. A generous buy-out program should be instituted in order to encourage early retirement and thus provide greater career opportunities for young academics.

If the suggested measures precipitated some, even many, resignations of faculty, the quitters could easily be replaced with individuals of equal or higher quality.

I happen to think life tenure is one of the worst features of academia, an egregiously counter-market policy that has any number of negative side effects. (No surprise that Posner, ever the advocate of policy-setting through market action, would think this way.)

Of course, Posner doesn't pause to consider whether maybe his arguments would also apply to Article III judges...?

Posner's full critique of the tenure model includes his prediction that it will die off:

I do not think tenure makes a great deal of sense any longer in the academic setting, and I expect to see it gradually abandoned (It has already been abandoned in England, for example.) If a university wishes to offer its faculty protection against political retaliation for unpopular views, it can do that by writing into the employment contract that politics is an impermissible ground for termination...

Tenure removes the stick but not necessarily the carrot...

The greater cost of tenure is simply in forcing retention of inferior employees.

27 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

You will recall that UC grad students are being asked to pony up a surcharge of $1750 to cover a $22.5 million revenue shortfall caused by the preliminary injunction in the Kashmiri contract dispute.

But today comes news that the Regents have settled a patent dispute with Monsanto that includes an immediate upfront payment of $100 million, plus an ongoing licensing fee.

I know there's no connection between the cases. But you might hope that the Regents, having leaned on the grad students in their time of a litigation-induced revenue shortfall, might choose to suspend the surcharge – even refund the portion collected this semester! – in light of this ligitation-induced revenue windfall. In the spirit of good sportsmanship, fair play, and all that. Plus, they'd still by up by $77.5 million, by my count.

I won't hold my breath.

28 Feb 06 ::: Comments closed

I barely know who Gary Glitter is, but he's now been sentenced to three years in prison in Vietnam for sexually molesting (is that redundant? is there another kind of criminal 'molestation'?) two local girls (aged 11 & 12)

Criminal justice in Vietnam is apparently a little more freewheeling than here:

In addition to prison time, the former hit-maker will have to pay $320 [!] in restitution to each girls' family along with court costs.

... [Judge] Tung decided against giving Glitter the maximum term of seven years in the slammer, opting to go easier and hand him the minimum three years because the musician paid the victims' families $2,000 each [!!!] back in December. And had Glitter been charged with the more serious crime of child rape, he could have faced death by firing squad if convicted. [!!!!!!!!]

Glitter, who has claimed he was only tutoring the girls in English and allowed them to sleep in his bed because they were supposedly afraid of ghosts, has 15 days to appeal his sentence.

03 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

Top ten items in this Saturday's PILF auction least likely to inspire vigorous bidding:

1. Cup and bowl set
2. Six Metal CDs
3. Reno 9/11 on DVD
4. Three T-shirts
5. Jagermeister party kit
6. Acrylic salad bowl set
7. Bikini wax from Professor Nimmer*
8. Designer diaper bag
9. Lunch with former Governor Michael Dukakis
10. LSAT prep course

* OK, I made that one up

09 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

I was conscripted into attending the PILF auction last night. I bid on a BarBRI course (being as I have no ginormous law firm to pick up the tab for me, but I lost) and poker night with Judge Alex Kozinski (I wasn't willing to pay $1800 for the privilege of losing another couple hundred to the good judge, but I like to think I made it more expensive for the winning bidder)

I admit I have no desire to practice public interest law. Yes, I know, we've got to stand up for the little guy, etc. I'm all for that.

1) What I fear are public interest law organizations. When I was a private consultant (prior to law school) I had to deal with a lot of companies. The non-profits were always, always, the biggest pains in the ass. They could not make decisions, they were permanently disorganized, they loved to waste time on little political vendettas, etc.

Yes, plenty of private companies are the same way. But for private companies, the rubber has to hit the road somewhere, and this is a limit on goofy behavior. For non-profits, this moment never seems to come.

A good friend of mine worked at a prominent public interest law organization last summer and said they had plenty of talented people, but as she put it, "nobody ever knew where the file was". For me, working at a place like that would be a death of a thousand cuts. I like knowing where the file is. I need that kind of basic hygiene in my work environment.

2) I don't buy the idea that it's somehow noble for to take a dramatically below-market-rate job so one can 'serve the public'. Thing one, it's exploitative. Thing two, it's a bad business decision for the person taking the job.

For myself, I've had periods of my working life where I made good money & periods where I made no money. Believe me, the good-money parts are a lot better. I've always felt like you gotta do things for the money before you can do things not for the money.

12 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

I cannot tell a lie: I have had enough of law school. It's a pleasant enough way to pass the time, I suppose. But as we enter the last 6 weeks of 2L, I'm starting to feel the incipient symptoms of 3L syndrome – I can't bring myself to read another turgid supreme court opinion, even heavily edited. My attention drifts away sooner in the 70-minute lecture than it used to.

I find it hard to read anything for my seminar class, knowing that a) there is no exam holding me accountable for it and b) doing the reading does not help me finish my paper, which is the sole graded deliverable.

Am I alone? Forutnately, no. Our own Prof. Richard Sander published an article on 3L called "The Happy Charade" where he presents a systematic view of the 3L brain stagnation syndrome. I can't really improve on his take, so I suggest you go read that instead.

14 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

One of the things lawyers say about law school is that it "changes the way you think". I wasn't sure what this meant before I went – think logically? think clearly? think rigorously? It didn't seem like those would be unique to law school.

But even as a light dusting of impatience settles across my 2L brain, I must admit these folks were right. Somewhat to my surprise, and occasionally to my horror, in the last few months I've found myself questioning longtime positions I've had on certain topics, and finding complexity / ambiguity in issues I thought were simple.

I attribute this change to the effects of becoming generally more interested in methodologies than results. And I blame law school for it.

Honestly, it's annoying. Friends and family have become suspicious of me. Children & animals do not love me intuitively as they once did. Just the other evening I issued the preposterous conjecture "I don't know, would it really be so bad if Roe and Casey were overturned?"

I miss those simple days down on the farm.

18 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

Recently I learned:

• According to a friend, Clarence Thomas sleeps through oral arguments, or at best has his eyes closed. This is apparently widely known to all who appear at the Supreme Court.

• According to a professor, a law researcher studied the reliability of visual vs. transcript evidence. Generally, courts give deference to whatever fact-finder in the chain had the chance to actually see & hear a witness, since this is considered to provide extra clues to their credibility.

A group of graduate students were asked to watch episodes of To Tell The Truth and judge who were the liars. Another group was allowed to read the written transcripts of the same shows. The transcript readers routinely outperformed the video watchers in finding the liars, contradicting the idea that watching someone give testimony produces extra reliability.

A follow-up study was done where another group was allowed to listen to the episodes, but not watch. They apparently outperformed both the watchers and the readers.

So maybe Clarence is just putting himself into that perfect zone of perception where he can, eyes closed and ears open, determine exactly who is lying to him.

Or maybe he's asleep.

20 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

The word "tax" looks a lot more badass if you spell it "TAXX". Compare:

The federal income tax not only waits until the moment of realization to tax an asset, but also requires that the asset has changed in value.

The federal income TAXX not only waits until the moment of realization to TAXX an asset, but also requires that the asset has changed in value.

Yeah, that's hot. Maybe I can work my way up to TÄXXX.

20 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

Have you seen the San Francisco Superior Court information website? I thought sites this ugly were eradicated around 1996.

22 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

Vital news for all UCLA readers:

At the beginning of the school year the Dean instituted a "free lunch" program enabling faculty to take students to lunch, typically at that mecca of cuisine known as the Faculty Center. In typical state-government fashion, professors may get reimbursed for meal costs up to $7 per student. So kids, steer clear of the lobster.

Let's be clear: like most free lunches, there's nothing free about this one either. Your (dramatically increasing) tuition provides the budget for most school expenditures, including these lunches. So it might be more accurate to call it the "no marginal cost lunch".

But what, you might ask, is the point of these lunches? In my experience, professors are not exactly climbing over each other to socialize with students, let alone at their special clubbe.

My unverified hypothesis is that it is part of the Dean's campaign to promote judicial clerkships to 2Ls. My first lunch, Prof Tax* told a long story about how he regretted not doing a clerkship and strongly encouraged all of us not to make that mistake. When I checked with some friends how their lunch with a different professor went, they said she spent most of the time pushing clerkships.

Coincidence? You tell me. To be fair, profs #2 and #3 did not discuss clerkships. So at this point there's 50% evidence for my conspiracy theory. Just one more shred & I'll have a preponderance!

In any case – this program seems to be mostly publicized by word of mouth. I have already hit up 3 out of 4 professors for free lunches this semester and I suggest you do the same. You've already paid for the lunches. You might as well eat them.

* Extra props to Prof Tax for letting us order off the deluxe menu. We blasted past the $7 limit all the way to, I don't know, $10 or $11. And you know what, I think we were worth it.

24 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

26 Mar 06 ::: Comments closed

I am taking the course on federal courts this semester. Often professors have reputations that precede them. Fed courts is one of the few courses with its own reputation: for being obtuse, difficult, tedious, impenetrable, etc. This seemingly stretches across schools. Nobody likes fed courts.

I don't dislike fed courts – it doesn't meet Thursdays, and the class time passes reasonably swiftly – I just have no idea what it's about. A law course usually has at its core, you know, some topic of law.

Whereas fed courts takes all these fiddly, annoying bits of con law, civil procedure and criminal procedure, sticks them together and calls it a 4-credit course. A local diner I frequent has a dish called the Big Mess where they take all the overcooked stuff that's been sitting on the griddle, throw it into a bowl and you eat it. That's fed courts.

Worse still, if you dislike reading supreme court opinions (I do – they're boring) this course treats you to some of the most confusing, tangled opinions ever written.

Also, though it's called "federal courts", it's just as much about state courts and how the two systems interact. So really, it should be called "Courts". If that sounds like a less-than-concise topic for 14 weeks of classes, you're right.

04 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

Before law school, you hear a lot about how hierarchical the legal profession is. I didn't believe it then. But I do now.

What happens is you compete in one hierarchy to figure out which hierarachy you get to compete in next. Near as I can tell, even if you get to be partner at a big firm, it's still a competitive situation. Partners are expected to bring in business to justify their profit participation, and when they don't, they can still get kicked out.

Hierarchy is often treated as a concept that's interchangeable with competition, which it's not. Hierarchy implies something more – that there's a prescribed path you have to follow to move ahead. Even if you're extremely good at what you do, you have to move at the prevailing pace. (Conversely, even those who are not so good get moved along by momentum)

What I didn't expect was that prevailing culture of hierarchy would pour over into the law school faculty, for two reasons: 1) most law school professors left jobs in private practice to teach and 2) if you have life tenure, doesn't that take the edge off?

But no. Cursory examination reveals that profs are quite aware of each other's publishing habits & teaching evaluation scores. An acting prof wants tenure. A tenured prof wants a casebook. A prof with a casebook wants a corner office. A prof with a casebook and corner office wants to be a dean. A dean wants to be chancellor.

And so it goes.

06 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

An actual question from the October 1939 California bar exam. I came across it in a case brought against the state bar by a student who had failed. Cows! Bootlegging! Good times!

Peters owned two cows, Nellie and Bossy, which he grazed upon his ranch, Blackacre. Nellie was stolen in August, 1935, by a neighbor, Daniels, who regularly used her in his dairy until September, 1937, at which time he sold her by bill of sale to one Smith, who was unaware of her previous theft by Daniels. Smith has since kept her together with a calf to which she gave birth in October, 1937.

Bossy was wrongfully converted by Daniels in August, 1938. Peters secured a judgment for her value against Daniels in July, 1939, but has been unable to collect anything thereunder.

In August, 1939, one Jones removed some grain worth $ 100 from Blackacre in the honest belief that the particular area from which the grain was taken was part of an adjoining tract which he had leased. Jones has made liquor worth $ 210 from the grain.

All of the above facts occurred in the State of Magenta, which has a statute providing that an action for the recovery of personal property must be commenced within three years. In October, 1939, Peters asks you whether he is entitled to recover either by suit or peaceable self help:

(1) Nellie and her calf from Smith

(2) Bossy from Daniels

(3) The liquor or the value thereof from Jones

Staley v. State Bar of California, 17 Cal. 2d 119 (1941).

06 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

There are a lot of professional activities that involve the display of personal bios. What I didn't start out life realizing, until I spoke at a conference, is that everybody writes their own bio.

Maybe because bios utilize the third-person voice we assume they come from an actual third person. But of course, they don't. As it turns out, there is no situation where there's a staff biographer who takes your resume, conducts a brief phone interview, and then dashes off a pithy summary of your life and career. That's true of obituaries. But not bios.

Once you know this, you might cultivate (as I have) a hobby of reading bios. Anywhere, anytime. Once you know they're all self-penned, they take on a whole new dimension. A bio represents a person's opinion of how they wish to be seen by the outside world, a rare chance to play Boswell to their own reflexive Johnson.

This is especially true with faculty bios. When a professor writes that he is "beloved by generations of students", that's not a statement put there by the school administration. He wrote it. True or not.

I will go through the UCLA law bios and post some of the better nuggets for you.

09 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

Choice tidbits from UCLA faculty (auto)biographies.

"a nationally recognized criminal law and procedure scholar ... [has] achieved national prominence"

"a prolific scholar"

"As a law student, he felt it his duty to keep levity in the classroom, a practice he continues as a teacher, earning him the gratitude of his students."

"a pioneer ... [who] has published pioneering clinical scholarship"

"Professor ... enjoys music of all kinds and has a large and varied CD collection. Equally large and varied is his collection of (inanimate) ducks and geese."

"Before law school, [professor] enjoyed a series of brief and ill-paid careers"

"[Professor's] articles have stirred debates in the Yale, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Michigan law reviews"

"His interests include Christian theology and sports."

"Current research interests include ... a philosophical exploration of a form of Confucian communitarianism as an alternative to western liberal democracy."

"Believing he is really a jazz guitarist in a law professor's body..."

"listed ... as the third most cited law professor among those who entered teaching after 1992."

"For seven years, he guided the school with exceptional judgment, enhancing the school's national reputation, and engendering the collegial spirit that continues today."

"To escape the weather in Los Angeles, [prof] visits at other law schools."

And our winner, uneditable in its logorrheic perfection:

"In the classroom, he seeks to situate the material of his courses in its historical context, to emphasize how law invariably requires one to choose between competing theories and normative values, and to illustrate the extent to which mesmerizing, value-laden issues are frequently embedded in the seemingly dry, technical issues that permeate the law."

P.S. Sorry that took me a while. If this blog is ever not updated frequently enough for your tastes, you may want to try this one.

14 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

UCLA has moved neither up nor down to #15 on the new US News rankings. Of course, this is hardly adequate for a press release, so our PR office came up with this marvelous (and factually unsupportable) spin:

UCLA School of Law moves up half a spot to claim sole placement at 15th in this year’s U.S.News & World Report survey of law schools.

Yeah, I didn't see where the U.S. News folks were awarding rankings in 1/2 units. I think they limit themselves to integers.

I also don't follow the "moving up" logic. If you and I have waistlines of 33 inches, and you lose an inch, according to UCLA law I have actually gained 1/2 an inch. Um, yeah.

15 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

I know very little about how you go from being an acting professor to getting tenure. I assume it has something to do with the appointments committee deciding whether you might turn out to be an important person in your field. In other words, the same crapshoot as law school admissions.

Let's check in on our acting professors and see if they're putting nose to grindstone and getting some shit published. I'm only counting law review articles or books published after they left law school – you can't coast on student work forever, kids. I'm not counting book reviews either.

Let's rank the field!

UPDATE 4/24: Russell "The Muscle" Robinson has updated his bibliography and moves up two spots.

The Top Producers:
1. Mark Greenberg: 12 articles (6 of which were published while at UCLA, 2nd yr teaching here)
2. Scott Cummings: 11 articles (7 at UCLA, 4th yr)
3. Adam Winkler: 10 articles (3 at UCLA, 4th yr)

The Middle Class:
4. Victor Fleischer: 6 articles (4 at UCLA, 3rd yr)
5. Iman Anabtawi: 4 articles (3 at UCLA, 6th yr)
6. Maximo Langer: 8 articles, but only 3 in english & concerning US law (3 at UCLA, 3rd yr)

The Slackers:
7. Russell Robinson: 2 articles (2 at UCLA, 2nd yr)
8. Gary Rowe: 2 articles (1 at UCLA, 5th yr)
9. Gia Lee: 1 article (1 at UCLA, 2nd yr)

17 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

I want to thank the nice folks at GoToTrafficSchool.com for letting me rehabilitate my good name after my U-turning incident in Glendale. I recommend it for those of you also seeking to avoid points on your license.

I won't tell you how fast I completed the course, as I think it's meant to be gently savored over a whole day. But it's a pass / fail situation, and what matters is the outcome, right?

18 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

Eugene Volokh is available to discuss picketing at funerals.

Eugene Volokh is available to discuss his internet dating strategy.

Thank you that is all.

19 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

I'm not quite sure why the SBA is bothering with an 'election' as all the candidates seem to be running uncontested. My recommendation is not to vote. What difference can it make?

Let's look at the candidate statements and see what this year's candidates have in store for us...

No, actually, I can't do it. Sorry. I tried. It's so stupid I don't even have the energy to mock them. The cruelest thing you could possibly call an SBA candidate is 'SBA candidate'. Where can I really go from there.

Anyways, Wings & Vodka already nailed it.

21 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

Another potential source of 3L impatience is the growing suspicion that your professors are not really that much smarter than you.

What is the difference between a law student and a law professor, after all? Don't say "experience as a lawyer", because that's definitely not true. If your professors were lawyers, they usually spent 1-3 years at a firm, doing whatever mindless grunt work you'll be up to this summer.

You already know that professors tend to be mystified about any area of the law not relating to their own field of research. After your first year of classes, you know as much about torts as 93% of your law professors (nobody seems to choose torts as an academic specialty). We'll call this a horizontal knowledge limitation.

What about in their fields of expertise? Maybe, maybe not. I get the sense that there is also a vertical limitation – a law prof who's taught 1L civil procedure for 20 years knows it better than you ever will. But if you go take Federal Courts, you'll probably have the drop on him when it comes to Article III standing.

Is it the quality of their ideas and writing ability, manifested in their law review articles? Well dude, tell you what. Go read a few articles by your favorite professors and tell me if a) the quality of the 'scholarship' corresponds to the quality of the class experience and b) if you're generally blown away by their brilliance. I'm betting you'll either be bored silly, or just mystified, as the topic seems to be targeted at a minuscule community of interest.

I don't say this to knock law professors. What would we do without them? I just mean that the progress into 3L is a little bit like pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz, inch by inch. Law professor = professional law student? You tell me.

24 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

Is it just me, or is incredibly comical / mystifying when the person sitting next to you, who only made it to about 1/3 of the class sessions, writes on the course evaluation that it was "one of the best courses I've taken in law school".

24 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

Here is the actual ballot for today's SBA "election".

I guess the advantage of only having one candidate in every category (except for 3L rep, for which there aren't enough for the available positions) is that it removes the illusion that there's any difference between them.

25 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

One of the model answers for my federal courts exam contained the phrase "judicial flatulence".

Awesome.

27 Apr 06 ::: Comments closed

From a schoolwide email received the other day:

Over the weekend several students requested that they be allowed to reschedule their Monday final examinations to enable them to participate in the May 1 National Day of Action on immigration rights. After consulting with the faculty who are giving exams that day, Dean Schill has decided to permit any student who wants to participate in the National Day of Action events to reschedule his or her examination to Tuesday, May 2...

I am reminded of the old adage "the show must go on". Scheduling around legitimate holidays is one thing. But this seems a little rich. If you want to spend your day as throngmember #35,141, great. But why should the school make accommodations for you? I mean, can't you go join the rally in the afternoon, after the exam? There'll probably still be space available.

You know, I really wanted to go to Coachella this year to see Depeche Mode and Massive Attack, but it was inconveniently scheduled this past weekend, during reading period. I should've made a bigger stink on behalf of my own special interest group, People Who Enjoy Electronic Pop In The Desert (Or Would Like To, Anyways). Why can't the Dean feel our pain for a change?

01 May 06 ::: Comments closed

No, really, I do. Today I'm starting to prepare for my Administrative Law exam and I have a feeling of joy: at last, this class is over. And with it, the 2L year. The minute I click 'Exit Exam', I'll be free.

There's something satisfying about reaching that yellow exit screen in ExamSoft and knowing "yep, that's 4 more credits in the bank".

Also, preparing for exams doesn't require going to school. I stopped going to review sessions last semester. So it's already been like 10 days of vacation.

Next year, I guess the trick is to eliminate reading and lectures.

05 May 06 ::: Comments closed

Prof Admin Law, April 2006, in reference to the Hoctor case

05 May 06 ::: Comments closed

One of the few reasons I would ever go into the law school computer lab is to avail myself of duplex (two-sided) laser printing. Recently, I got one of these. Now I'm not just laser printing my term papers in duplex, I'm printing them in color. Hot freakin damn. Hopefully, my use of hot-pink and orange tables will blind my professors to the blandness of my ideas and the unoriginality of my analysis.

07 May 06 ::: Comments closed

Eugene Volokh reveals he participated anonymously in this year's UCLA law review write-on. According to a leaked email message from the editor, "he did superbly".

I think this conclusively proves that professors have way too much freakin' time on their hands. The next one who bitches about his teaching load, or what she gets paid, or the tedium of grading exams, gets a boot up the ass.

If the law profession were made of dogs, law professors would be the pampered chihuahuas carried down Rodeo Dr in Louis Vuitton bags by leggy starlets and attended to by full-time dog nannies. If you can name a cushier legal job, me & Tinkerbell are all ears.

09 May 06 ::: Comments closed

I just got this apologetic email message from Tom Horne of LawCrossing, a legal job board that sends me spam through my UCLA address:

Last weekend, an email concerning the website Judged.com was sent out from LawCrossing's email system to a small segment of LawCrossing subscribers. This email contained inappropriate and unprofessional language that was entirely inconsistent with LawCrossing’s editorial policy and corporate ethics...

Contrition always gets my attention, so I looked for the earlier email triggering this regret. (It had been filtered out as spam, but thank god I cc: my inbox to Gmail.) The message concerns Judged.com, a new website.

[...] Judged is the largest insider source of real intelligence on law firms in the world. Find out what law firms don't want you to know!

Judged provides an uncensored free forum where attorneys can rate law firms, discuss what it is like working inside a law firm with the people working there, and read the hottest legal news and have fun. Learn which firms rate the best and which ones rate the worst. Find out which firms have the biggest assholes, hottest staffs, highest salaries and bonuses, most job security, and anything else you could ever want to know...

It's judgment day for law firms! Join now , and find out what many millions legal professionals have already discovered on Judged !

Sincerely, Tom Horne

Gee, I think if they were really able to identify the "biggest assholes", that would be an impressive accomplishment. Why hide your light under a bushel? Or maybe the inappropriate language was "job security", which unlike assholes, you're not likely to find at many law firms.

10 May 06 ::: Comments closed

Last night at 9:24pm I put the last punctuation in my independent study paper and with that, 2L is over. I will be taking a blog vacation for a week or so. I don't have a law firm job this summer. My big plan is to go to Hawaii and get my scuba certification. I feel like that is the highest & best use of my legal skills.

13 May 06 ::: Comments closed

Summer has begun, summer associate jobs have begun, and the annual spate of stories about how cushy and useless summer associate jobs are have also begun.

There's no doubt that a significant component of the summer associate experience is marketing – until you sign on permanently, firms can't afford to treat you like you have no other choices.

But I'm not persuaded by the theory that the big firm summer job is 10 weeks of goofing off on someone else's dime. My uncle, a former personnel executive, used to say that it's pretty easy to tell if someone can do the job; it's a lot harder to figure out if they will do the job.

That is very true. Every employee I've ever fired looked great on paper. They had to, in order to get hired in the first place. It was clear any of them could do the job they were hired for, it just turned out that they didn't.

Big firms love junior associates because they're a core profit engine for the firm. But they're expensive to hire and train. And turnover is already dreadful. And come on people, you're not being asked to do many things your first couple years that couldn't be handled by a good paralegal. If you got a callback, that means the firm was persuaded you can do the job.

The summer associate gig is designed to reveal if you will do the job. And that involves evaluating a lot of 'soft' factors, like how you get along with others, what your energy level for loads of boring work is like, whether you buy into the firm culture, etc. (These factors are often collectively referred to as 'fit', which is sort of an overused HR term, but apt.)

All these are arguably more important determinants of your longevity at the firm than your law school GPA. There's no other way to evaluate them then to have you show up and act like an employee. Summer associates: do you think that the other associates & partners you meet aren't talking about you, comparing notes, etc? Yes, they are, all the time.

As for the call for more 'substantive training' during the summer gig, I think this is misplaced. If big firms convert their programs into boot camps they'll be making their associates more capable, but losing the ability to evaluate fit.

How would the firm benefit? Or, for that matter, the summer associate? There's plenty of time to train later. If the associate washes out shortly after hire because they hate the firm culture – that's an expensive problem to fix, and avoidable.

25 May 06 ::: Comments closed

A couple weeks ago Dean Michael Schill wrote an op-ed in the LA Times about compensation of professors in the UC system. This is part of an ongoing mini-controversy about what the UCs disclose about professor pay.

There are four major problems with this op-ed.

1. Schill was the wrong person to write it. If someone wants to appear on the pages of Calif's largest daily paper to defend UC compensation practices, it should be Chancellor Albert Carnesale, or a joint piece by the Regents, etc. Schill's main motivation seems to be to launch a defense of his own pay, as he was previously identified as a highly-paid faculty member (PS Schill is far from the highest-paid person in the UC system – many members of the medical faculty get paid more.)

2. Schill ignores the core issue. He rolls out a free-market defense why professors are paid as much they are (and, in particular, why he is paid as much as he is). I have no problem with that reasoning.

But the main issue is not how much profs are paid per se. The issue is that the UC Regents have repeatedly violated their own compensation policies by keeping pay packages secret. The original leak of UC salaries through the SF Chronicle was primarily intended to overcome this secrecy. Schill suggests the pay system must be "transparent" and "accountable" without noting this is the core of the current controversy.

3. Schill puts up a smokescreen when he identifies what he calls "the real UC scandal": the declining share of UC costs borne by the state. True, student fees have gone up a lot during the last few years because of Calif's financial difficulties. Even so, attending school at a UC is still significantly less expensive than a comparable private school (e.g. UCLA law is about $10K per year less than USC).

I have to wonder if he's thinking that increased tuition removes one of the competitive benefits of attending UCLA law. If students start saying "Sheesh, for that money I could go to USC", UCLA might face a smaller applicant pool (Oh wait! It already has.) This leads to less selective admissions, which leads to lower GPA/LSAT medians, which can lead to a drop on the U.S. News rankings.

4. Schill is dismissive of private fundraising. At most universities, private fundraising is all there is. The government is not picking up most of the tab. It seems hopelessly retrograde to imagine that UCLA law can maintain its ranking (let alone move up) without getting into serious alumni fundraising.

Near as I can tell, alumni fundraising at UCLA law is dreadful. And Schill may be an excellent administrator but I'm not aware that he has experience leading a major capital campaign, which is a core competency for deans at private schools. Not that they like it. But it must be done.

To be fair, in Jan 2005 Schill was receptive to privatizing UCLA law. Interesting that he didn't mention this in his op-ed.

30 May 06 ::: Comments closed

For the second time ever, I was called for jury duty. But this was the first time I actually was empaneled and had to sit through voir dire (I took French in high school so this looks like "vwah deer" to me, though the judges & attys pronounce it "vore dyre".)

The conventional wisdom is that lawyers & law students don't sit on many juries and that was true today. The first peremptory challenge excused a lawyer from Kirkland & Ellis. The 2nd challenge excused me.

Why is this? Trial lawyers want the jury to buy into their version of events. That requires that the jurors have legally pliable minds. The lawyers probably suppose that a lawyer or law student is going to review the arguments more critically. Thus they are less desirable jurors. They might also be disproportionately influential in the deliberation room: either by seizing control, or from other jurors passively deferring to them.

Part of me would've enjoyed sitting on a jury, and witnessing a whole trial. Part of me was bored to tears at the subject matter – a contract dispute among partners in an LLC about who holds title to certain real property. The judge estimated it would take 10 days to present the evidence. I mean, if it was an injury case with drama and recriminations, that might've been worth staying for. But this is the kind of thing people ought to settle out of court.

Of course, to paraphrase Sartre, hell is other jurors. The highlights included:

• The gentleman above, who napped at every available opportunity outside the courtroom, snoring loudly.

• The TV crewman who said that due to his prior experience on "America's Most Wanted", could not be objective in a civil case, which he said he presumed was about "greed and ignorance".

• The graphic artist who claimed she couldn't be effective because as an artist, she drew conclusions based on visual communication, and oral testimony & written exhibits just wouldn't hold her interest.

• The tatooed psycho with a fauxhawk / mullet and baseball cap who, after approaching the judge at sidebar and being denied an early exit, hissed "FUCKIN' RIDICULOUS" into the courtroom.

I guess the joke's on me, because the last 3 of these folks were excused for cause. If you're looking for an easy out, try one of those techniques, it's less costly and time-consuming than 2 yrs of law school.

The whole of my voir dire interview:

Q: So you've finished two years of law school?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you familiar with summer clerkships?

A: Yes.

Q: Is there a reason you're not doing a clerkship?

A: [pause] Because I didn't want one.

All the attorneys in the room got a good chuckle out of that, for reasons that are unclear.

05 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

In honor of the summer blogging season, we're going to take a break from the usual parade of tepidly amusing anecdotes and run some tepid legal thinking from a paper I wrote this semester. My professor suggested I submit it for publication. The way I see it, if all 6 of my readers make it through this series (and that's a big IF) that'll be approximately triple the readership I'd get in a law review.

Preamble: I think affirmative action is an entirely worthwhile policy for academic admissions. I don't believe there are absolute scales of so-called 'merit' that schools are morally bound to reward with admissions letters. No one 'deserves' to get into school X. Schools should be able to admit whomever they want, for whatever reason, in the interests of delivering whatever kind of academic / learning culture they aim to create. I do not support Calif's Prop 209 as it applies to the Univ of California system (I have no opinion on it outside that context – is that lawyerly precision or what?)

Not only that, I am a beneficiary of affirmative action. Older (30+) students often receive an admissions preference, in support of non-racial diversity. I got into UCLA law school with an undergrad GPA and LSAT that were at or below the median. (And, for god's sake, an art degree – WTF!?) This is conjecture, but I imagine if I didn't have the age / work experience thing going for me, there were many higher-scoring white males who would've had my seat.

Here's the problem. And let me describe it in a race-neutral manner, because it is. Law schools depend largely on a composite of undergrad GPA & LSAT to assess applicants, called an 'academic index'. Preferences work by giving a particular applicant, let's call her Ashley, a numerical boost to her index. For whatever reason, some elite law school wants to enroll more people whose name is Ashley, and without the index boost, this Ashley wouldn't make the cut.

So Ashley gets an index boost, which lifts her into the target index zone, and she gets in. But in real terms, she's near the bottom of her incoming class. This is logical, right? If Ashley needed a boost to clear the lower threshold of the target zone, that means she started below it.

No one would be surprised to hear that success on the bar exam is highly correlated to one's law school GPA, which in turn is correlated to undergrad GPA and LSAT. So what will happen to Ashley? Statistically speaking, since she's starting out at the bottom of the class, she's more likely to end up there, and more likely to have trouble on the bar as a result.

Two thoughts will spring to your mind. 1) Am I saying preferences make people fail the bar exam? Not really. I'm saying that preferences may be effective at getting Ashley in the door, but they don't address the bigger issue – if Ashley's starting out near the bottom of the class, there's a risk it will negatively impact her legal education. It should be clear that this isn't a reflection on Ashley's qualifications in absolute terms. It's a natural side effect of relying on numerical measures so heavily during admissions, and manipulating these numbers to achieve certain effects.

Thought 2): why is it obvious that Ashley won't do well on the bar? Isn't being at the bottom of this elite law school better than being in the middle of a 2nd or 3rd tier school? That's a logical intuition, but the short answer is: no, it's not.

The bottom 10% of students in any school, regardless of eliteness, fare poorly on the bar. The reason why this is true is much debated. But students who end up at the bottom of their 1L class perform worse on the bar than just their admissions numbers would predict. This effect has been verified by the LSAC-BPS, a study of 27,000 law students completed in the mid-90s.

To bring this all together, any beneficiary of an admissions preference – white, non-white, old, young, Ashley – is conceivably susceptible to this problem. It just happens that preferences tend to be deployed in service of admitting underrepresented racial minorities (African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans). And what we see is, indeed, these groups perform worse on the bar exam than whites and Asians. Not because they're intrinsically less skilled, but because the boost from the admissions preference is, like Cinderella's carriage, cosmetic & short-lived. In other words, bar underperformance correlates to race, because of who typically receives preferences, but it's not caused by race.

To be fair, there are reasonable people who would disagree with that last paragraph. Race-based theories of bar performance are out there, like stereotype threat (the idea that racial minorities tend to perform worse purely because they are expected to) or racial bias in the bar exam itself. But regardless of the reason, the underperformance is real – no one debates this. And regardless of the reason, schools need to think about the legal & ethical propriety of not disclosing these risks to students receiving preferences.

07 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

Those of you familiar with affirmative action litigation (Bakke, Grutter, Gratz, Hopwood) may know that all these cases dealt with claims by white students who felt they were unjustly denied admission because of preference programs. These cases all asked: how should the use of preferences be balanced against the rights of those not receiving preferences?

But no case has ever asked: how should the use of preferences be balanced against the rights of those actually receiving the preferences? That's the issue at the heart of the risk disclosure question.

If students receiving preferences will be subjected to greater risk of dropping out or failing the bar, don't they deserve to know this in advance? Or should law schools – who know in detail about the gap in performance – be allowed to remain silent?

When I discuss this idea with people, this is usually the point at which they say "MB, give me a break. Why should law schools disclose risk? That's a silly idea." So if that's you, don't worry. I hear ya.

Think about the public policy behind other risk disclosures. There are products out in the world (e.g. Vicodin) that have a lot of positive benefits. We want access to these benefits, especially if we've had painful dental work. But these products also come with risks (e.g. they might make you loopy & depressed & crash your car).

The law says those risks have to be printed on every bottle of Vicodin. Does that mean if you take Vicodin, you will crash your car? No. But once you're notified of the risks, you accept your Vicodin prescription subject to those risks. You have the information you need to make an informed choice about whether the benefits are worth it. And you waive your right to complain later if you're injured.

Admissions preferences, I would argue, are no different. People who take Vicodin are more likely to crash their car. People who receive preferences are more likely to drop out or fail the bar. Why should one carry a warning label, and not the other?

One criticism of risk disclosure is that it potentially "stigmatizes" students. If we tell Ashley she's at higher risk of failing the bar, the argument goes, we'll be sending her a message of low expectations.

That strikes me as the kind of reasoning that's been used over and over to justify institutional paternalism. It suggests that it's more respectful to the student's intellect to deny her the opportunity to see historical information about performance outcomes. Who's in a better position to decide what's best for Ashley: Ashley, or the school admitting her?

The duty to disclose is proportional to the risk being assumed. Students attending law school are making one of the biggest investments of time and money in their lives. If there's a risk out there that could cause them to lose their investment, that's something they probably would want to know.

They may choose to accept admission in spite of the risks. Or not. But either way, they'd be making a choice as an informed consumer. Currently, they don't have that choice.

But MB, you say, car crashes are really really bad. That's why we warn Vicodin users about them. Can the bar results for students receiving preferences really be that bad?

Tune in next time.

09 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

Between 1991-97 the LSAC (people who run the LSAT) did a study called the LSAC-BPS. They tracked 27,000 law students before, during and after law school to see what factors influence graduation rates and bar passage.

The following charts are based on my own computations using the LSAC-BPS data. Keep in mind that in law school admissions, Asians are not considered under-represented racial minorities, and typically don't receive preferences. Nor, obviously, do whites. Similarly, African-Americans and Latinos almost always receive preferences.

Thnk about what these figures say about the status of racial equality in legal eduation.

Attrition rates prior to graduation
African-American: 19.5%
Asian: 8.8%
Latino: 13.2%
White: 8.2%
Overall: 9.3%

This is the proportion of students of each race who started law school but hadn't graduated by the end of the study. African-American and Latino students are considerably more likely to drop out than Asians or whites.

Failure rates on first bar exam
African-American: 38.6%
Asian: 19.3%
Latino: 25.4%
White: 8.1%
Overall: 11.4%

The disparity in graduation rates becomes even more pronounced at after the first bar exam. This makes sense, since students who scraped by in law school are less likely to be performing at an adequate threshold for the bar. And who are these students near the bottom of the class? Many of them were admitted under preferences.

African-Americans fail their first bar exam at over 4 times the rate for white students. For Latinos, it's over 3 times that rate.

Net bar exam failure rates
The LSAC-BPS didn't track the results for every bar exam taken during the study, just the first and the last. Roughly speaking, that lets us figure out what proportion of the study members ended up with a valid bar membership, i.e. could actually practice law.

African-American: 22.4%
Asian: 8.1%
Latino: 12.3%
White: 3.3%
Overall: 5.2%

In other words, during the time of the study, Latino law students were about 4 times less likely than white students to end up as lawyers. African-Americans were 7 times less likely.

(Actually, the real numbers are even higher, because I'm not factoring in students who dropped out of school, or who graduated and never took the bar. They didn't become lawyers either.)

As for equality in legal education, I think the numbers speak for themselves. I will only add two points:

1) The loss of so many minority students on the way through law school & the bar means admissions preferences are effective for creating racially diverse law students but not nearly as effective for creating racially diverse lawyers.

Worse, the attrition means there's plenty of URM students out there who paid for multiple years of legal education and have the debt to prove it, but not the bar membership. Is it good enough for law schools to admit a diverse student body, or do schools need to make sure these students are actually becoming lawyers?

2) Schools have been on notice for a while now about the disparity in graduation and bar passage rates. Every school knows which students graduate; every school knows which students pass the bar. Is it good enough for law schools to have this information and not share it or act on it?

12 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

You could make three salient objections to the reasoning so far. "(1) MB, students know whether they're coming in with low numbers relative to other students. (2) Once they show up, they've assumed the risk of lower bar performance. And anyways, (3) why should law schools be held accountable? The bar exam is the student's problem."

(1) An observant student may notice that they fall below the 25th percentile GPA/LSAT numbers that are reported to the US News rankings. But how would they possibly be able to infer their statistically predicted bar performance from this information?

This is the 'have it both ways' argument: students apparently know so much already that there's no need for schools to disclose anything further. Do we really think students know that much to begin with? (I don't.) Or, if we accept that proposition as true, what possible harm would result from disclosing information that apparently students are already well familiar with?

(2) The doctrine of assumption of the risk typically extends only to risks that are reasonably apparent to the party in the transaction. If you go to karate school, you assume the risk of getting kicked in the head. However, you don't assume the risk of contracting tuberculosis from the instructor. One risk is apparent; the other is not.

The bottom 10% of law school classes end up struggling in ways that are not predictable purely from their numbers. Students with the same numbers, who go to lower ranked schools, often perform better on the bar. One theory, which I buy into, is that the entering credentials disadvantage widens into something larger as students learn less effectively in classes that are pitched above their skill level.

But regardless of the reason, these mysterious factors seem to materially impact bar performance in the long term. Even if the students assume the risk of coming in with low numbers, they aren't assuming the risk of these mystery factors.

(3) I call bullshit on that one. From the ABA's own accreditation requirements:

Chapter 3. Program of Legal Education
Standard 301. OBJECTIVES

(a) A law school shall maintain an educational program that prepares its students for admission to the bar and effective and responsible participation in the legal profession.

Yep, it's right there at the top of the list. You laugh, but there are law school deans who are sanguine about URM underperformance on the bar. Apparently their view is that even without a bar passage credential, the J.D. has career value.

Um, sure, unless you want to be a lawyer. Also, that opinion is directly contrary to the ABA requirements. I would hate to be a dean who had to testify under oath during a deposition in a lawsuit challenging these practices.

Let me finish with a couple other interesting bits from the ABA accreditation requirements regarding admissions:

Chapter 5: Admissions
Standard 501. ADMISSIONS.

(a) A law school’s admission policies shall be consistent with the objectives of its educational program and the resources available for implementing those objectives.

(b) A law school shall not admit applicants who do not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its educational program and being admitted to the bar...

Standard 509. BASIC CONSUMER INFORMATION.

A law school shall publish basic consumer information. The information shall be published in a fair and accurate manner reflective of actual practice.

Interpretation 509-1:
The following categories of consumer information are considered basic:

(1) admission data; ...
(3) enrollment data and graduation rates; ...
(8) placement rates and bar passage data.

16 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

As I mentioned before, the data suggests when you look at that bottom 10% of a given law school class, and compare them to students at lower-tier schools who had the same incoming credentials, the students at the lower-tier school perform better on the bar.

This suggests one way of addressing the problem of affirmative action: get rid of it. Let URM students compete purely on their numbers. They'll still get into law school, just not the same ones. But theoretically, they'll be more likely to become lawyers. This is a proposal advanced by Prof Richard Sander, who has done much recent research in the area (and whom I've studied with this past year)

I buy into a lot of Sander's findings, but I disagree with him on this point. One major problem with suspending all racial preferences would be that URMs would largely disappear from top-tier law schools. This is exactly what happened to Boalt and UCLA law in the year after Prop 209 (which banned racial prefs in Calif) was passed. I think it's important, both for the sake of the student body & the profession, that elite schools continue to have the tools to admit URMs.

The other problem is the law of unintended consequences. The statistical prediction is just that – a prediction. Removing racial preferences would shift most URM students down to the next lower tier of school. Without knowing which individual schools offer the best success rates for URM students, we can't say with any certainty that this would improve the overall output of URM lawyers. It might decrease it.

I don't think eliminating preferences is the answer. Rather, I think better preferences (ie. those with risks disclosed) and better follow-up (e.g. academic support programs for the bottom 10%) is the way to go. Don't send those students down to a lower-tier school. Work on bringing them up to the standards of the school they're at, so they can enjoy the same graduation and bar passage rates of any other student. As Bill Clinton said of affirmative action 10 years ago – mend it, don't end it.

Risk disclosure is ultimately about accountability. Risk disclosure, if it were required by all law schools, would become a form of benefit disclosure to applicants. If you were a student entering in that bottom 10%, you would have the information you need to compare schools. Students would gravitate towards schools posting the best results, and more of them would eventually become lawyers.

What about the other schools, with worse results? They'll have the competitive pressure of the free market as an incentive to improve. In the short term, they'll probably have to provide tuition subsidies & scholarships to get URMs to attend. In the long term, they'll want to capitalize academic support & other programs that bring URM performance into parity.

Will there be students who, confronted with the risks, change their mind about going to law school? Sure, but I can't say I see that as a bad thing. Right now, there are plenty of low-credential students who are induced to go to law school in spite of the risks. They spend 3 yrs and $100K, but they can't pass the bar. If we deter these students from going to law school, we haven't changed the outcome – either way, the student has no career as a lawyer. At least their time & money haven't been wasted in a fruitless pursuit.

Further reading:
Richard Sander, A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action. Sander's 2004 article kicked off the current reheating of the AA debate. This link includes the original article, a set of critical responses by other law professors, and Sander's Reply to Critics, where he adds some important extra analysis to the original data.

Among other findings, Sander introduces his theory of the 'mismatch effect'. The idea is that students with poor entering credentials start at the bottom, but fall farther and farther behind as they struggle in classes that are aimed above their skill level. It's not a racial theory, nor is it specific to law school. Sander's point is that admissions preferences induce the mismatch effect for many students receiving those preferences.

MB, Addressing Risk Disclosure in Affirmative Action Through Litigation. Could AA recipients make a legal claim against law schools for failure to disclose risks? I expand on the points here. I also explore theories of legal liability in detail. The short answer is, common law fraud and tort claims probably wouldn't work. But consumer protection claims probably would. I think law schools are wide open right now to this kind of suit.

David Bernstein posts on Volokh.com about last week's civil rights commission hearings in Washington DC about affirmative action in law schools. Bernstein testified, as well as Sander. This issue has not escaped notice of the commission:

Several [civil rights] commissioners expressed grave concern about the extraordinarily high rate at which African American law students at non-elite law schools either fail out of law school or fail to pass the bar exam ... while the new [ABA accreditation] standard requires law schools to pursue diversity in admissions, it says nothing about the need to ensure that admittees actually succeed in becoming attorneys. [The ABA representative] acknowledged that the ABA committee that drafted the Standard has no data regarding the failure rate of African American matriculants at particular law schools, nor about how the new standard may worsen this rate.

The ABA can't get its hands on data about URM bar passage rates? Is there anyone who actually believes that? Anyone? Apparently, the Dept of Education is considering suspending the ABA's accreditation authority until some of these issues are worked out – that is a major administrative sanction right there.

Jerry Kang, Fair Measures: A Behavioral Realist Revision of Affirmative Action. This is a new article by Kang, who's a Critical Race Theory prof at UCLA law. Kang relies on 'stereotype threat' to explain differences in racial performance. I don't personally buy this explanation – among other issues, Kang & his psychologist co-author rely on psychological studies, and almost no academic performance data. But it's another view.

20 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

This summer, I am making a weekly visit to local courthouses to observe trials and hearings. I recommend it to all law students. Sitting in court, it strikes me as more than a little ludicrous that I've completed 2 yrs of law school and no one's taken me to see what's going on here. Shouldn't this be, like, a mandatory field trip during the first month of lawyering skills?

Some tips.

• It's ok to go in & out of courtrooms while court is in session. Do it quietly. And if the judge says "all rise", you stand up too.

• If you go to federal court, leave your cell phone in the car – they won't let in any device with a camera or recording capability.

• Judges do post their calendars online. But these are pretty useless, since lawyers are calling up all the time and removing their hearings (because they settled the case, or resolved the issue themselves). The best thing to do is just show up and cruise around, looking for a court in session.

• You'll notice when you do this that most courtrooms on any given day are dark. That surprised me a little. Where is this massive judicial backlog I keep hearing about? But, that doesn't mean judges & their clerks aren't busy in chambers, reading turgid motions to compel discovery, etc. The upshot is, if you have a favorite judge, don't count on being able to watch them in action.

• You will notice that many lawyers just aren't that good. Many juries look very bored. And you will get to see judges opening up the whup-ass on misbehaving attorneys. That's a gas.

• You will also notice that a judge's main job is not really to judge, per se. It's to conserve judicial resources by pushing work back onto the attorneys – in a way, to avoid judging. Each judge has hundreds of cases on their docket. It's just not efficient to treat each one like a special unique flower. Trial, you come to appreciate, is a massive time-waster because it makes the judge unavailable to do anything else. You will see judges berate attorneys for bringing in issues that should've been solved outside of court.

• The Spring St federal building is like a courthouse from the movies. Though the statue of a hunky, topless young Abe Lincoln in the lobby is just a tad more creepy homoeroticism than I was looking for on my way in. By contrast, the Commonwealth Ave state court building is pure Nixon / Soviet era architectural depression.

• I've walked into no fewer than 4 police misconduct trials against the LAPD. Nice to know some things don't change.

21 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

26 Jun 06 ::: Comments closed

This is, by design, a law school blog and thus has, by implication, a predictably finite lifespan.

Postings here will be less frequent during 3L for two reasons:

1) I'll be turning my attention to the for-profit aspects of legal education. That means diverting energy away from noncommercial efforts such as this. However, I will report on my new ventures here with links etc.

2) Right now it's not clear to me how much different a 3L blog would be from a 2L blog. By common consent, 3L isa repeat of the 2L year, but with lower levels of student engagement.

I may have to repeat 2L year, but I don't need to subject you to the same fate. I'll restrict myself to writing about truly novel conflicts among students, faculty, et al.

06 Jul 06 ::: Comments closed

One thing you learn to let go of in law school early on is any affection for quality writing. Lawyers are often bad writers, but law professors really take the cake.

I've recently gotten a copy of Garner's Modern American Usage, which is a work of art. If you like good writing, get this book, because it will have two effects. First, it will improve your writing immediately. Second, it will give you permission to indulge your irritation at those who make absolute claims that prepositions cannot end sentences, that sentence fragments are never acceptable, or that contractions have no place in formal writing.

Garner – who, by the way, is also the editor of Black's Law Dictionary – emphasizes relaxed, clear, simple writing as the ideal. He approves of the practices above (when done appropriately, and in moderation). The innermost circles of Garner's hell are reserved for those who add words, phrases and dependent clauses needlessly, and who use long, formal, pompous or euphemistic terms when simpler words would do.

To Garner, the hallmark of great writers is their ability to make complex ideas simple through language. Conversely, the hallmark of terrible writers is their insistence on encrusting the simplest idea with superfluous words. Of course, this makes life more difficult for readers, but he goes one step further: bad writing conceals the subtleties of the subject matter to the writer, who is then limited in their* observation and analysis of the topic.

Anyways. This was prompted by a letter that arrived from a UCLA professor, whose prose made me dizzy and disoriented.

I am pleased to introduce myself as the Executive Director of the Entertainment and Media Law and Policy Program, a curricular specialization which has become one of the most comprehensive, advanced and innovative programs dedicated to the study of entertainment and media law in the country. The intention of the faculty is that students who fulfill the Program’s requirements will have a solid grounding in the law, custom, theory and policy attendant to the practice of law in the motion picture, television, music and other industries involved in creative and artistic matters....

We have fashioned a required curriculum that includes electives from three tiers of courses in the Law School, a research paper, and the opportunity to choose from a variety of appropriate and approved interdisciplinary courses from outside the Law School. We anticipate expanding the possibilities of practical experience in an internship setting attendant to either an appropriate seminar or course of independent study...

So that all upper-division students will have adequate notice to commence the selection of courses with a view toward completing the Program by graduation, we thought it best to provide the course tier structure as they make decisions with respect to registration for Fall 2006.

* He endorses the use of the third-person plural singular as a means of curing the gender-neutrality problem. Sorry, haters.

25 Jul 06 ::: Comments closed

There seems to be a greater than usual number of classes this semester that require an application to get in.

Law 364 - Motion Picture Distribution - Prof. Ken Ziffren
Law 402 - Deposition Skills (Clinical) - Prof. Stefano Moscato
Law 407 - Mediation - Prof. Forrest Mosten
Law 426 - Appellate Advocacy - Prof. Patrick Goodman
Law 428 - Indian Law Legislation - Prof. Pat Sekaquaptewa (rolling admission)
Law 438 - Public Policy Clinic - Dean Mike Schill and Prof. Jonathan Zasloff
Law 548 - Legal Education - Prof. Gerald Lopez
Law 553. Seminar—Intersectionality - Prof. Kimberlé Crenshaw
Law 569 - Academic Writing Seminar - Prof. Eugene Volokh

I've never figured out why this is necessary. If you're paying full fare, shouldn't you be able to take the classes you're interested in? You already survived the filtering process of the admissions office, isn't that proof you're a reasonably competent indvidual?

The only remaining purpose is to indulge a professor's wish to hand-pick students. I guess the argument is that most of these are small classes and the quality of the class depends on the willingness of students to participate. But if that's what the prof wants, then the prof should just announce that class participation will be a large part of the grade. That should filter out all the wallflowers.

So beyond that, I can only surmise that it's a quest for "qualified" students, ie. people whom the prof thinks will not be especially disruptive, difficult or contrary. If true, that's a bad reason.

26 Jul 06 ::: Comments closed

George Mason law professor William Lash died in July.

Here's what the GMU law website had to say about it:

Here's what the campus paper, The Mason Gazette, said:

The faculty, staff and students of George Mason University mourn the death of law professor William Lash III, and extend deepest sympathies to his family, which has suffered a tragic and heartbreaking loss.

And finally, the Washington Post cleared away the haze:

William Henry Lash III, 45, a law professor at George Mason University and former assistant secretary of Commerce, died July 14 at his home in McLean. Mr. Lash committed suicide by gunshot after killing his 12-year-old son.

06 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

People ask me this frequently. To be honest, every so often, I get a little pang: maybe my whole indie-law schtick is going to be DOA. Maybe I should consider a firm job.

The one firm I've occasionally been curious about is Quinn Emanuel. They only do litigation, they do a lot of trials, they don't wear suits to work, they're a relatively new firm (i.e. the named partners are still alive & working there). They sound kind of cool. But then I read something like this:

As Quinn Emanuel grows -- it now has 200 associates -- it's become harder to find the smaller cases that the firm takes at reduced rates to give to young lawyers. Even a highly regarded young partner like [38-year-old Shon] Morgan hasn't taken a case to trial ... B. Dylan Proctor, a sixth-year associate, says he's argued roughly 15 motions in court and was the third chair at a two-month federal trial.

"The trial issue [for associates] is one we're keenly aware of, and it's a problem," [founding partner] Quinn says. "We want to do the complex matters, but, by definition, the associates won't have much of a speaking role."

Let's be clear here. The firm specializes in trials. There is a 38-yr-old 'partner' (= probably non-equity) who has never been to trial. What are his chances of moving up at the firm? Um, pretty small.

How about the other guy? He's been working six years and he's argued an average of 1 motion every 5 months. And third chair at a trial = nothing. Where is QE going to get its next generation of trial attorneys? Not from its associate pool, clearly.

QE's problem illustrates the fatal flaw of the hourly firm. When you're billing by the hour, the incentive is to move every task in the firm to the highest-billing attorney who can plausibly be assigned to it. There's no reason to put a $250/hr associate on a trial when you can put a $550/hr partner on it. Trouble is, there's never a situation when it will make sense, and the associate will never do a trial.

Compare this to a contingency firm, who only gets paid when they win. Every case is a risk, so the incentive is to take as many cases as possible (to diversify the case portfolio) and in the interests of conserving capital, push every task down to the lowest-paid attorney who can plausibly be assigned to it. The associates at that firm may be paid less initially, but they're going to get better experience.

06 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

What common legal term has two opposite meanings?

(Answer under the link)

11 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

I had a job interview today with a partner at a litigation firm.

One of the first things she said to me was: "It's so unusual that I see a resume without any typos."

I said "Are you serious?"

She said "Yes, probably 90% of the resumes I get have typos. And that includes the ones we get from USC and UCLA."

"Have you notified the Office of Career Services?"

"What are they supposed to do?"

Good point. So as a public service, I'll say it: DUDES! Sloppy typographic errors in your resume LOOK REALLY BAD! I may be taking YOUR JOB merely because I am a better speller!

Thank you that is all.

11 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

I took the MPRE a couple weeks ago. Despite passing several practice exams by a wide margin, the actual exam felt like less than a total cakewalk. In any case, I can feel good that about 90% of people pass on the first try. The statistics are on my side.

In California, you only need to get about half the questions right to get a passing score. So there are 50 graded questions on the exam, with four choices each. If you just randomly filled in circles, your expected score would be 12.5.

Some criticize California for having one of the lower pass thresholds (79). But, considering that California bar rules differ from the Model Rules in many important ways, maybe that's only appropriate.

Today, while on the phone with the Maryland bar examiner's office, I discovered that it's one of three states that doesn't use the MPRE. Instead, law graduates attend a one-day "ethics seminar" run by the state bar association that apparently teaches them everything they need to know. I like their style.

14 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

The best three days of your law school career:

1. The day of your last final exam 1L year. This is super sweet for obvious reasons.

2. The first day of your 2L year. This is unexpectedly sweet, as you arrive on campus, look around and realize "I am not a 1L." Damn it feels good.

3. The first day of your 1L year. Because after all the pain & suffering of the admissions process, it's fun to actually show up and enjoy your new status. A short-lived pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.

The worst day of your law school career:

1. The first day of 3L. Which was today. 3L is reputed to be a drag. Is that a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or is it really, actually, substantively, intrinsically a drag?

I expect it'll get better. But it gave me the same feeling I have when I go to a sequel of a movie and realize in the first few minutes it's just going to be a rehash of the first one. Which, depending on the movie, may or may not be a good thing.

21 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

This summer, Dean Michael Schill sent an email reminding students of UCLA's commitment to a non-discrimination policy, despite the Supreme Court's decision in Rumsfeld v. FAIR that the Solomon Amendment can legitimately require schools to allow military recruiters on campus as a condition of receiving federal funding. Schill noted that:

UCLA School of Law is committed to a policy against discrimination in employment based on color, race, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, disability and veteran status.

Got that? Meanwhile The Docket, our schoolwide events blog, is promoting something called the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which:

... provide[] opportunities for continuing generations of able and accomplished New Americans to achieve leadership in their chosen fields. The Program is established in recognition of the contributions New Americans have made to American life and in gratitude for the opportunities the United States has afforded the donors and their family.

When I saw the name 'Soros' I thought of that liberal billionaire who gives away a lot of money, but that's George Soros. This is his older brother, and brother's wife.

So what is a 'New American'? Glad you asked:

A New American is an individual who (1) is a resident alien; i.e., holds a Green Card, or, (2) has been naturalized as a U.S. citizen, or (3) is the child of two parents who are both naturalized citizens.

In other words, a current or former foreigner, or a child of foreigners. Hey, I love foreigners as much as you do. But this fellowship excludes a category of applicants based on "national origin". Which, if the government did it, would be invidious discrimination.

The Soros Foundation is not a state actor. It can give its money to whomever it wants, for whatever reason. And the UCLA non-discrimination policy notionally applies to discrimination "in employment", not fellowships, though it's hard to imagine the school would oppose discrimination in that context but endorse it elsewhere.

But if the Soros Foundation were offering fellowships that excluded women, or blacks, or gays from the applicant pool they would catch holy hell, and would surely not appear in The Docket. How is this any better?

21 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

Wow, there are a lot of new students at UCLA this year. New lockers in the library, new student mailboxes, crowded classrooms ... it's like being at the DMV!

But, as a professor explained to me, the big story is not the uptick in JDs. We admitted about 20-30 more 1Ls than normal this year, despite the large drop in applications last year. Did we increase our admission rate? Unclear, I'll have to wait for next year's US News rankings.

The problem with JDs is that 1) many of them are on financial aid 2) many of them get discounted state resident tuition 3) much of the tuition collected has to be kicked back to the UC system for general costs.

No, the big story is LLMs. We apparently tripled our LLM enrollment from about 15 last year to about 50 this year. LLMs have none of the above-mentioned problems of JDs: they pay full fare, and the law school keeps all the money. So that's a hefty profit margin, baby.

Why are LLMs willing to pay for the privilege? My understanding is that if someone with a foreign law degree wants to sit for the California bar, one way to do it is get a local LLM first. Some LLMs seem to get what's going on; others, I'm less sure about. But either way, law schools are in a position to exact a tax from them as a prerequisite to practicing law here.

(Little known LLM benefit: all LLMs get an extra 15 minutes per hour of exam time. This is designed to make it easier for those whose grasp of English is not so hot, but even LLMs who speak English beautifully get the bonus time.)

I'm not complaining, mind you &mdash after that Kashmiri unpleasantness, the law school has a bit of a budget deficit to close up. If taxing foreigners is the answer, rather than raising my fees, so be it. Whoops, is that more discrimination by national origin? Well, I guess I can let it slide.

24 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

What is the only state bar that uses neither the MPRE nor the MBE?

26 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

I noticed that my RSS feed to The Docket, our interal school-events blog, has gone dark. When I went to the submissions page I learned:

The Docket is currently unavailable. Sorry for the inconvenience and please remember to check back again.

Thank you
UCLA School of Law

What's this all about? Come back, Docket, we love you. Occasional promotion of invidious discrimination notwithstanding.

30 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

Hey you kids who are headed to the big firms to make the big bucks! This was too good not to share. The Journal reported today on the eruption of a bill-padding imbroglio at Holland & Knight in Chicago:

31 Aug 06 ::: Comments closed

I passed with a score of 119. That means I overprepared by 40 points. Boy, I'm an idiot. Remind me to be less fastidious when it's time for the bar exam. That's valuable time I might've used for more important pursuits, like ... you know ... stuff.

05 Sep 06 ::: Comments closed

Things have been improving since the first day. Somewhat.

I almost made the terrible mistake of taking Business Bankruptcy. It's not every day you get to take a course from Ken Klee, UCLA's resident energy healer. But I thought it would be fun, like federal income tax was fun. Instead it was fun, like bad-sushi food poisoning is fun.

I swapped Bankruptcy for Evidence and Advanced Legal Research. Evidence involves watching a lot of TV and movie clips, which I'm grateful for, since I don't get out much.

ALR is sort of the summer-camp version of a law school course. It's taught by the law librarians, not professors. So, they still live with some vague idea that their job performance matters to their continued employment. I'm going to bet $1 it ends up being one of the two most useful courses I take in law school.

OCIP is in full swing. I can't really chronicle all the fashion disasters. Quick tip for women: tall ladies shouldn't wear giant heels. And nobody should wear open toed shoes. Quick tip for guys: if you can fit your whole hand in between your shirt collar and your neck, it may be too large.

I overheard one 2L in the JD/MBA program explaining to a mere JD candidate that he expects his joint degree to fetch an extra $10K over the usual $135K offered to JDs. Dude, on behalf of everyone else in the law school, please shut the hell up.

All of you who are trooping to interviews, I don't want to rain on your parade, but do pause to ask yourself something. Why do big firms recruit on campus? Answer: because they have a lot of seats to fill. Why do they have a lot of seats to fill? There's two possibilities. Either they're growing at a really astonishing rate, or – how do I put this delicately – they have a lot of attrition.

While growth may explain some of it, law firms don't grow by adding associates, because new associates don't have any clients, and hence any revenue. That's why big firms grow through mergers: when you add partners, you add their clients.

That leaves attrition as the only logical option. And why is there so much attrition? You know these jobs pay a lot of money. So associates aren't quitting because of that. Why, then? Any ideas?

Anyone?

Last weekend I was in Las Vegas for the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA) convention. I went because I'm interested in practicing in plaintiff-side consumer law.

I was one of the very few UCLA people there. And this is true in general: if you ever investigate plaintiff litigation firms, you will very rarely see UCLA or USC lawyers there. That industry is dominated by Loyola grads, with Southwestern and Pepperdine close behind. This has always puzzled me. Why do UCLA grads go out for public interest jobs in droves (we gotta protect the little guy, after all) but not plaintiff work (which often involves protecting the little guy)? I can guarantee you it pays better.

The LuValle store has added Chick-O-Sticks. These are only 15 cents, and offer an incredibly delicious combination of toasted coconut and peanut butter. Like a Zagnut. Or a coconut-ified Butterfinger. Did I mention it's 15 cents? What can you get at law school that's only 15 cents? Please, buy as many as you can, so they'll continue to stock them. They're on the candy shelves near the register, in the lower right corner. Yesterday, I'd never heard of the Chick-O-Stick. Now, I want to marry it.

11 Sep 06 ::: Comments closed

Dear UCLA Law Faculty:

I've had four classes at law school that have been really boring. I don't mean occasionally dull, I mean memorably, continually, numbingly boring.

And I've had three classes at law school that featured daily Powerpoint presentations.

100% of these classes appear on the most boring list.

Boring isn't a synonym for bad – the worst classes I've had at law school were not boring. They were evil in other ways.

Based on the best available data, I'm prepared to theorize that Powerpoint-based classes are always boring. As a public service, I call on you all to stop with the freakin' Powerpoint already.

I can see the appeal of Powerpoint. It helps you organize your lectures, it saves you from having to draw on the board, it lets you make snazzy infographics like the one above.

But let me give you an audience member's perspective. As a threshold matter, has anyone really ever sat through a Powerpoint presentation they enjoyed? Have you? If you're at a faculty meeting and someone flips on the projector, do you think "oh, goody"? No, of course you don't. You probably wish you could slink away unnoticed and write some footnotes.

Now, think how it is for us. Every damn day we come to class, we have to endure another Powerpoint. It has an accretive soul-destroying effect, for which the only reasonable antidote is Spider Solitaire. Can you blame us?

Some of the specific problems with Powerpoint:

1. It's overly rigid. The best law classes have a give & take between the students & the prof. But when you use Powerpoint, it dictates the form, sequence and substance of the class. You can't really go out on a tangent from slide 7 because you'd screw up slides 8, 9, and 10.

2. It's much more helpful to you than us. I feel like these Powerpoints are mostly organizational tools for the prof. Maybe you should put it on YOUR laptop so only YOU can see it during the lecture.

3. It's stretched beyond its useful limits. Sure, sometimes it helps to have a visual aid, or put up a segment of a statute, and for that Powerpoint can be useful. But 90% of Powerpoint slides don't really need to be up there. They just act as connective tissue between the 10% that are useful.

4. It's fatiguing to look at & distracting. You are the star of the show. You have the skills and experience to engage the audience purely through speaking. Why do you need a software program that's well-known as the favored sanctuary for uncharismatic morons? Powerpoint in class is like TV in bars – regardless of how interesting the conversation is, your eyes keep moving to the screen, and you zone out.

I had one prof who not only used Powerpoint for the whole lecture, he actually stood in the projector beam. This made him look physically pale and 2-dimensional against the screen, as if the slide were absorbing him. It was creepy.

5. Your slides are not exactly miracles of effective information design. Nuff said.

6. It makes you look boring too. In all three of my Powerpoint experiences, the prof was plenty smart and interesting. But the Powerpoint was so bad that it infected them, and made them seem much duller than they were. If Powerpoint enhanced you, I'd say go for it. But it never does. You are smarter, funnier and better looking than Powerpoint. When you hang out together, it just brings you down.

7. It's not really what I'm paying for. If I got tickets to see Barbra Streisand and she sang off a teleprompter the whole evening, I'd feel like I was deprived of some of the performance that I bought. Similarly, to see excellent profs hobble themselves with Powerpoint makes me feel like I'm getting a slightly inferior product compared to the old-school undiluted version.

In sum: you don't need it. We don't want it. Let's dump the chump and move on.

14 Sep 06 ::: Comments closed

The great thing about my fall schedule is that I can tune in to Dr. Laura every day on the way into school. (12-3pm, M-F, KFI 640 AM)

I didn't listen to Dr. Laura until I had to spend a lot of time in my car every day commuting. The longer I'm in law school, the more I like her.

That's because Dr. Laura's act has two levels. One one level, she's dispensing common-sense, usually socially conservative advice on family, children, dating, etc. Some of her advice is good – e.g. women who want to marry their boyfriends shouldn't get pregnant and live together. Some is impractical – e.g. single parents shouldn't date until their children are out of the house.

But almost all her advice is based on the concept of incentives. Law school changes your brain to make you more appreciative of incentive-based rules and more skeptical of ideologically-based ones. The problem is, many of our cherished social / moral / political beliefs have no basis in incentives.

Dr. Laura exposes this gap. This is the first reason many people dislike her. "What do you mean women shouldn't live with their boyfriends and get pregnant if they want to?" We hang on to "personal choice" as this social ideal. But let's face it, if those women want to get married, they're not creating any incentives for their boyfriends to get their shit together. Dr. Laura's show is really about The Science of Getting What You Want Out of People Through Incentives. Or, if you prefer, Law and Economics.

The other level of the show is the adjudicatory theatre. Dr. Laura is a one-woman ex parte court of social justice. To do this, she employs the same basic formula as other great jurists: 1) Simplify the case to its determinative facts & issues. 2) Use a consistent set of rules. 3) Apply the rules dispassionately and rigorously to the facts.

Dr. Laura is like audio IRAC. She's not interested in talking to callers about their "thoughts" and "feelings". She just wants the facts. Once extracted, she clearly states the rule that applies. Then she announces the verdict.

She is hard on her callers. This is the second reason many dislike her. That's when you have to remember that the show is not for the benefit of the callers, it's for the benefit of the listeners. Like an appellate court selecting cases that create opportunities to extend the law, Dr. Laura chooses callers to make an example out of them.

Part of her message is the consequences of bad choices. But the other part is the importance of picking rules, sticking to them, and not getting distracted by the surrounding noise. How, she asks, can we make principled decisions about anything without being rigorous and consistent?

Though substantively I prefer Dan Savage, procedurally he's got a long way to go to catch up to Dr. Laura.

22 Sep 06 ::: Comments closed

Or so declares the headline of a recent email from the Office of Career Services that reads suspiciously like "we're from the government and we're here to help." Since UCLA is a state school, perhaps that's not far off the mark.

OCS holds itself out as the nexus between students and the job market. In practice, its reach is quite a bit more limited.

There is on-campus interviewing (OCI) in the fall and spring, where big law firms come onto campus and try to stanch the hemorrhage of 3rd and 4th year associates by refilling the seats with clueless 2Ls. Some students are hired, but it only soaks up a minority of those interviewing.

The public interest job fair is much-hyped but jobs are, by common consent, even rarer, since there are fewer slots to fill and even those are hotly contested. Arguably, it's harder to get a job at the ACLU than at Gibson Dunn.

The rest of the legal market – which is to say, the 92% not represented at these two job events & a smattering of others – exists outside the OCS range of vision. So if you want a job in a entertainment litigation boutique with 10 or fewer partners in Santa Monica or West LA – best of luck to you.

Why is this a problem? Look, I know OCS tries hard, and for a few people, they're probably very useful. But overall, OCS contributes to the myopia that many law grads have about their careers starting in their 2L year.

The bottom line is that most of the jobs you can get on-campus suck eggs. These giant law firms and public interest groups are here because they have enough turnover that they need fresh meat. They come on campus, and students think "hm, so this is what the legal job market looks like".

But many who get one of these jobs follow a similar trajectory: they work like dogs, they hate it, sooner or later they quit, and then they become one of those bitter 29-year-old ex-lawyers who blame the legal profession at large for their misery.

But there are plenty of good legal jobs where you can work with nice people, get good training and avoid a 2200 billable hour requirement. However, it takes effort to find them, because the firms are smaller and more specialized, and they aren't spending wildly to recruit.

Of course, OCS can't be held responsible for students who are too uninspired to look for work outside the traditional channels. But OCS has the advantage of experience and perspective. They would do students a favor to present a more balanced picture of the legal job market, and being less of a co-conspirator in the project of tossing fresh recruits into the maw of ginormous law firms.

01 Oct 06 ::: Comments closed

Sensitivity training at the University of Texas law school is really paying off:

A group of first-year law students at the University of Texas at Austin has been chided by the dean for participating in a “Ghetto Fabulous”-themed costume party and posting pictures from it online ...

Partygoers carried 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and wore Afro wigs, necklaces with large medallions and name tags bearing traditionally black and Hispanic names ...

A first-year student who attended the party in September and posted pictures on his Web site said “We had no intention by any measure to choose a group or class of people and make fun of them".

Um, okay.

15 Oct 06 ::: Comments closed

UPDATE: I've been promised a copy tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Does anyone have a copy of the offensive remarks referenced by Dean Schill in his email last night of "Peace, Love, and Grooviness"? If so, please post them in the comments. Perhaps we're running closer to UT than I previously thought.

And lord knows I didn't sign up for moot court this semester – sadly, my resume is already stuffed to the gills with meaningless padding and there just wasn't any room for it.

In the past week, we have experienced one such incident when the Moot Court Board created an exercise that included racial stereotypes and then compounded the problem by using a jocular tone. Understandably, many students were deeply offended that a formal law school academic activity would include undeniably offensive stereotypes.

17 Oct 06 ::: Comments closed

Various panties are currently in a twist about language in the moot court problem that was released a few weeks ago. Dean Schill's email on Monday night suggested that I "take a moment to reflect on this incident and learn something". So in that spirit:

Here is a copy of the controversial problem. One observes:

a) the defendant is a Mexican citizen named El Guapo,
b) all the judges and officials in the brief are named after liquors (eg. Beam, Walker, Perignon, Martini, Courvoisier), and
c) El Guapo enjoys anal sodomy with children.

I imagine if I had been a moot court competitor getting this on October 1, I would've taken no note of (a) or (c) and considered (b) a feeble attempt at humor.

The facts of the problem combine two current cases scheduled to be argued in the Supreme Court this term. Cunningham v. California concerns a non-Mexican child molester, and United States v. Resendiz-Ponce concerns a Mexican citizen who attempts to re-enter the US after being deported.

Moot court problems usually simulate real Supreme Court cases as closely as possible for two reasons. One is to give the participants a sense of verisimilitude. The other, I assume, is that because the cases have been briefed by excellent lawyers, there is a standard to measure student briefs by.

To that end, we can't fault moot court for using facts from the actual cases. Part of what makes criminal cases challenging on appeal is the facts are often not very savory. A skillful brief writer needs to overcome the shock of the facts and get a judge to focus on the law. If the Cunningham facts had been sanitized – instead of anal rape, maybe he was convicted of vandalizing a puppy store – it wouldn't be the same problem. Cunningham is guilty of a foul crime, but he still deserves his constitutional rights.

Similarly, illegal immigration from Mexico is a hot political and social issue. How would you do it without making the defendant Mexican? It would be like trying to simulate Hamdan with an Irish defendant. Should we make the defendant Canadian? Or maybe invent a fictitious country, Freedonia, that shares a border with the U.S.?

It wouldn't be the same. Removing the racial element might improve the cosmetics but it would dilute the substance. Race is a real issue in this case. To take away race is to deny that the arguments unfold within a larger social and political context. The attorneys and the justices have to reconcile the law with that context.

So I don't think we should bust the moot court board for using the facts as they found them. OK, maybe they could've foreseen that the natural result of combining these cases would be a defendant who's a Mexican sodomist. Maybe there were two other cases that might've joined more harmoniously. But it's not like they went out of their way to apply certain characteristics to a person of a certain ethnicity. Given the cases they chose to simulate, to change either the Mexican-ness or the sodomizer-ness of the defendant would've compromised the problem.

However. While it's true that there is some history of humorous names in fact patterns (anyone who's used Bergman's Evidence casebook knows what I mean) there are two conditions on their use: 1) the more serious the issue is, the less appropriate the humor is, and 2) the names actually have to be funny.

Moot court came up short on both counts. A fact pattern about child rape doesn't really benefit from the light-hearted touch. And liquor names are just not especially clever. Does it make the authors evil? No. It just makes them moot court dorks. Someone probably came up with it at 1am during the rush to finish and it stuck. (Judging from the number of spelling errors in the problem, there seems to have been a broader failure of the editing / proofreading process.) Not really something worth getting bent out of shape about.

Next: The Response.

18 Oct 06 ::: Comments closed

After the moot court problem was released, La Raza wrote a letter of complaint co-signed by the chairs of BLSA and APILSA:

La Raza, for those of you playing at home, is a campus group that advocates on behalf of Latino students and topics.

The issue is not whether La Raza was objectively reasonable to infer that the moot court problem was "disrespectful", or that it "further[ed] the stereotype of Latinos ... as lazy drunks who commit criminal acts".

What matters is that subjectively, they found it offensive. So they were entitled to say something about it, and moot court was right to take it seriously. A heterogeneous campus imposes a duty of mutual civility and respect on its members. It is not a symptom of political correctness gone wild. It is just another way we avoid the tyranny of the majority. As a defense, the idea that "I didn't find it offensive, so neither should you" is both pointless and hopelessly dated.

However, the duty of civility runs in both directions. Moot court made an error, so they should be held accountable for that error. But the La Raza letter goes farther than that. It compounds the problem with two errors of its own:

Failure to recognize mitigating factors. It took me all of 10 minutes to figure out the real Supreme Court cases this problem is based on and find the briefs describing the facts. Before accusing the moot court board, La Raza would've done well to compare the problem facts with the real facts and consider why the problem was written as it was.

Why is this important? Calling someone "blatantly racist" is a serious charge. It's appropriate if – and only if – it's justified by the facts. That duty of civility required La Raza (and their co-signors) to do some research and make sure they weren't shooting from the hip. Perhaps this research was done, but the letter gives no indication this was so.

You may say: why should that matter? If the language of the problem was offensive, isn't that enough? Well, no, actually. As we remember from con law: when it comes to discrimination, intent is what counts the most. To call moot court "racist" is to describe an intent. So where's the evidence? La Raza could've fairly accused the moot court board of carelessness or insensitivity. But La Raza overreached to accuse moot court of racism.

Lack of proportionality. In the letter, La Raza explains how individual elements of the moot court problem, which might otherwise seem benign, have negative connotations when taken as a whole. Fair enough.

But then, they attempt to connect this infraction to much broader issues, namely a) poor incorporation of racial issues into the curriculum, b) low enrollment of minority students, and c) the generally "hostile, exclusionary, educational environment" of UCLA law. According to La Raza, the moot court problem

further criminalizes and demonizes Latino/a immigrants, and perpetuates the isolating and negatively charged environment in which students are attempting to academically survive within.

I agree with La Raza on their general complaints. The state of minority enrollment and support on campus is dreadful. And I've studied minority bar results, so I know the long-term picture is equally problematic.

But I find it difficult to swallow that moot court is an agent of this broader conspiracy. Yes, moot court should be held accountable for their own actions. But bringing in these other issues muddies the picture. Is it really necessary to make a mountain out of a molehill? Is it civil and respectful?

Here's what I find most confusing. Among others, the letter was sent to Deans Schill, Cheadle and Carbado, presumably to enlist their support against moot court. But who's accountable for the incorporation of racial issues into the curriculum? Moot court? No, Schill, Cheadle and Carbado. Who's accountable for minority enrollment? Schill, Cheadle and Carbado. Who's accountable for the campus educational environment? Schill, Cheadle and Carbado.

I'd call that barking up the wrong tree.

Next: Dean Schill addresses the school.

20 Oct 06 ::: Comments closed

Last Monday, Dean Michael Schill stepped into the fray with the following email entitled "Diversity, Tolerance and Understanding", which first I'll reproduce in full:

One of the great strengths of our school is our diversity. Within our extraordinary student body and faculty are men and women from a variety of races, ethnicities, nationalities, income groups, religions, sexual orientations and ideological perspectives. One of the principal benefits of diversity is the opportunity for us to learn from each other. Part of this education is learning to see the world through another's eyes. This understanding of different viewpoints and perspectives is important for one to become an excellent lawyer; it is also important to become a good person.

Given our diversity, it is an unfortunate reality that from time to time members of our community will say or do things that will unintentionally offend or hurt one another. In the past week, we have experienced one such incident when the Moot Court Board created an exercise that included racial stereotypes and then compounded the problem by using a jocular tone. Understandably, many students were deeply offended that a formal law school academic activity would include undeniably offensive stereotypes.

Based upon our conversations with members of the Moot Court Board, I am convinced that there was no intent on the part of the Board to offend or belittle our students of Mexican heritage. I also believe that members of the Moot Court Board now understand and feel deeply sorry about the hurt that they have caused to their classmates. Indeed, to avoid this sort of situation from recurring, the Moot Court Board has suggested and I have agreed that future exercises will be read by a faculty advisor.

Before we move on from here, I would like each of us to take a moment to reflect on this incident and learn something. Each of us is part of a community here at UCLA. As an intellectual community, it is incumbent upon us to defend the right of each member to express his or her views honestly and forthrightly. At the same time, because we are a community we should also encourage each other to consider the impact of what we say and do-- intentionally and unintentionally-- on our fellow students and faculty members and to hold each other accountable when we fail in that regard.

The dean rarely addresses the whole school on substantive issues, so when he chooses to send something like this to all 1000+ students, it lends gravity to the message. When I get a message like this, I assume, as I imagine others do, that what he's saying is important. I also assume, as I imagine others do, that the facts are fairly and accurately depicted.

So now let's look at each paragraph in turn.

One of the great strengths of our school is our diversity. Within our extraordinary student body and faculty are men and women from a variety of races, ethnicities, nationalities, income groups, religions ...

I think we get the idea. Next —

Given our diversity, it is an unfortunate reality that from time to time members of our community will say or do things that will unintentionally offend or hurt one another. In the past week, we have experienced one such incident when the Moot Court Board created an exercise that included racial stereotypes and then compounded the problem by using a jocular tone. Understandably, many students were deeply offended that a formal law school academic activity would include undeniably offensive stereotypes.

Schill at least recognizes that moot court acted unintentionally. That in itself should defuse any claim of racism. Whether it's an unfortunate reality is debatable. I would call it an inevitable side effect of enjoying free speech on campus, like carbon dioxide emissions (or perhaps, more aptly, car accidents) are an unfortunate reality of driving a car. It's a cost we accept, because we enjoy the benefits.

Now things take a turn, as Schill seems to adopt La Raza's viewpoint exclusively. Yes, moot court used a jocular tone, poorly. But whether the problem really included racial stereotypes is an open question. I can appreciate that to La Raza readers, those racial stereotypes were obvious. To others, me included, they were not nearly so obvious. So to call them undeniably offensive &ndash as if it's an objective reality – rather overstates the case.

Based upon our conversations with members of the Moot Court Board, I am convinced that there was no intent on the part of the Board to offend or belittle our students of Mexican heritage. I also believe that members of the Moot Court Board now understand and feel deeply sorry about the hurt that they have caused to their classmates. Indeed, to avoid this sort of situation from recurring, the Moot Court Board has suggested and I have agreed that future exercises will be read by a faculty advisor.

Who is the "our" is in "our conversations"? I can only assume Schill means "La Raza and I" had the conversations with moot court. This confuses me. Is Schill acting as an advocate for La Raza against the moot court board? If so, isn't that a little weird?

He affirms that moot court had no intent to offend anyone, but leaves out the exaggerated claims La Raza made in its letter. Does it not merit a mention that La Raza called moot court "blatantly racist" without adequate proof? Should we conclude that such accusations are consistent with Schill's notion of "tolerance and understanding"?

Bad enough that Schill should insert himself into a dispute between two sets of adults. It suggests that he thought moot court and La Raza were incapable of resolving the issue on their own. (I know there are rumors that 3rd parties encouraged Schill to get involved. I don't have the facts so I'll leave such speculations to the reader.)

But it's even worse that moot court should have to submit future problems to a faculty advisor. Moot court fixed their error, and hopefully learned from it. That's all that can fairly be asked. To make them submit to a pre-emptive editing scheme for the foreseeable future – to presume, without proof, that they will make the same mistake again – seems both unfair and unnecessary. It has the unpleasant odor of a prior restraint on speech. It certainly does not fit my idea of "tolerance and understanding".

Before we move on from here, I would like each of us to take a moment to reflect on this incident and learn something. Each of us is part of a community here at UCLA. As an intellectual community, it is incumbent upon us to defend the right of each member to express his or her views honestly and forthrightly. At the same time, because we are a community we should also encourage each other to consider the impact of what we say and do-- intentionally and unintentionally-- on our fellow students and faculty members and to hold each other accountable when we fail in that regard.

With due respect to the Dean, I'm not ready to move on based on this somewhat glib explanation. Accepting his invitation to hold each other accountable, I encourage him to consider the impact of how he's handled this situation, and how he's packaged it for the UCLA community.

But first, let's go back to January, when Schill sent out an email called "Free Expression and Civility":

A law school, perhaps more than any other type of academic institution, should celebrate and protect free expression. It is only through robust discussion and debate, inside and outside the classroom, that we will gain an understanding about how the law affects society and how we can change it to further common goals and objectives. As dean of the Law School, I defend the "right" ... of the anonymous author of "Teh Scrivener" to satirize me as well as others.

But having a right to do something does not necessarily imply that what the person has done is right ... With respect to Teh Scrivener, my overriding reaction was that the articles were not terribly funny and, even worse, that some references could personally offend some members of our community ...

My reason for writing is to emphasize both the importance of free expression, but also the importance of tolerance and respect. One of the things I love most about this school is that these virtues are in abundance ... Overwhelmingly, we believe in and practice spirited debate; but we do not demonize each other or treat each other in an uncivil or disrespectful manner even when we feel very deeply about the point at issue. This is what it means to be part of an intellectual community ...

Civility, tolerance and respect – I agree with Schill that these are core virtues of an intellectual community. But they do not run in only one direction. In January, Schill was bothered that an anonymous satirical leaflet contained language that could personally offend someone.

How is this a conceptually coherent position? You can't support free expression without supporting the risk that people might get pissed off someday. There is a big difference between holding people accountable for the real effects of things they've actually said, vs. filtering statements for their potential effects.

The only way to prevent offensive speech before it happens is to prevent speech. And that is antithetical to civility, tolerance and respect.

Move forward to April, when Dean Cheadle sent out this message about the "May 1 National Day of Action" on behalf of Schill:

Over the weekend several students requested that they be allowed to reschedule their Monday final examinations to enable them to participate in the May 1 National Day of Action on immigration rights. After consulting with the faculty who are giving exams that day, Dean Schill has decided to permit any student who wants to participate in the National Day of Action events to reschedule his or her examination to Tuesday ...

I already weighed in on that one. Suffice it to say that Schill's accommodation of the Mexican immigration rally was extremely unusual. The law school is typically strict about exam schedules, because it preserves the fairness and integrity of the exam process. What justified the exception?

Then in August, we got the "Letter Regarding Military Recruiting and Non-Discrimination Policy":

We feel a responsibility to protect and foster the worth of each individual in the law school community. The non-discrimination principle holds true, we think, for society at large, but it has a special force in the setting of a university law school, which is particularly concerned about issues of justice and equality ... The non-discrimination policy evolved during the 1970s to include race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, and veteran status.

I mentioned this previously, when UCLA's official publication, The Docket (RIP) was simultaneously promoting scholarships which discriminated on the basis of nationality (in favor of foreign citizens and recently naturalized U.S. citizens).

Add up these data points any way you want. In my view, a tyranny of the minority is no less odious than a tyranny of the majority. The goal is equality: a tyranny of no one.

Schill said in January "we do not demonize each other" but moot court has been demonized three times in this transaction: once by La Raza et al. (in their letter) and twice by the Dean himself (in his email, and by endorsing a faculty advisor).

Also, Schill's email address to the students last week seemed to rely on the fact that most students wouldn't ever see the source documents. The documents reveal the partiality of his position. This could've become a useful teaching moment — e.g. show the documents, explain the nuances, suggest how both moot court and La Raza might've best handled the situation, show support for what both groups are trying to accomplish. Instead the moment was used to beat on one student group for the benefit of "students of Mexican heritage" under the cover of "tolerance and understanding".

It certainly doesn't fit my idea of tolerance, understanding, civility or respect. Somebody owes the moot court board an apology.

20 Oct 06 ::: Comments closed

I was amused to see my work described on the ACS blog as "a bit conservative". I guess I can live with that. After all, my favorite supreme court justice is David Souter.

I was reminded of my 1L post on law school leftism today. (If you read it now, the rest of this will make more sense.)

When I arrived at school this morning, a group of mostly minority students were congregating in the courtyard, preparing to start a protest about the lack of racial diversity on campus. The idea, I gather, was to enter classrooms to give students a sense of what UCLA was like before Prop 209 ended racial preferences, and cut down the number of minority students admitted.

As I've stated elsewhere on the blog, I'm opposed to Prop 209 in education. Schools should be able to admit whomever they want, for whatever reason. (I have no opinion on Prop 209 outside of education.)

But I had a difficult time understanding why students would protest on the UCLA law campus about diversity and Prop 209. Isn't that a textbook example of preaching to the choir? What's the point? Possibilities I discarded:

To raise awareness about the lack of diversity at UCLA? Any competently perceptive law student can see the homogeneity of our student body. Just about all of us went to colleges outside the UC system which were much more racially diverse.

To persuade people who are opposed to racial diversity? This is a null set. Who is opposed to diversity? Not even Nino Scalia.

To persuade the administration to consider race in admissions? That would be illegal. You may not like the law, but if UCLA law broke it – and they're probably at least bending it already – they'd open themselves to liability. How is liability a positive thing?

I had to conclude that the point of the protest was personal expression and not, in the words of Gene Sharp, "something that can win". One group of people wanted another group of people to know how they felt about an issue, even though the 2nd group already agreed.

If people really dislike Prop 209, why aren't they focusing their energies on "something that can win"? Like, oh I don't know, starting a campaign to repeal Prop 209? Collecting signatures? I'm not trying to be snide. I'm genuinely perplexed why, in a state where anyone with enough time & patience can get a measure on a public ballot, people would not want to put their efforts toward a solution. In 2+ yrs on the UCLA campus, no one has ever asked me to sign on behalf of an anti-Prop 209 ballot measure. I would be happy to do so.

Dean Schill update! Did the Dean sit idly by when word of this protest reached his desk? No. I have it on good authority that Wednesday night, he called at least one prof whose class was targeted and suggested he stay home today.

Now, everyone pause to think about that. At first glance you might think the Dean was capitulating to the protesters by taking a prof out of the way. But if Schill had removed the prof, his class would've been canceled and part of the protest would've been neutralized before it began.

As far as I know, everyone showed up, classes went on, and no fistfights broke out (perhaps someone who was in one of the protested classes can comment – I wasn't there.) But Dean Schill once again showed his preference to manage potentially offensive speech by preventing it altogether.

My reason for writing is to emphasize both the importance of free expression, but also the importance of tolerance and respect. One of the things I love most about this school is that these virtues are in abundance ... Overwhelmingly, we believe in and practice spirited debate; but we do not demonize each other or treat each other in an uncivil or disrespectful manner even when we feel very deeply about the point at issue. This is what it means to be part of an intellectual community ...

Our dean, the champion of free expression! Huzzah!

03 Nov 06 ::: Comments closed

From: Share JD
To: UCLA law school students
Date: 13 Nov 06, 3:26am

Two weeks ago, students of color from the UCLA School of Law and from the community organized a walk-in to UCLA Law classes, in recognition of the 10th anniversary of California's Proposition 209. Passed in 1996, Proposition 209 represented an alarming reversal of many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement via affirmative action, and created a more hostile social and economic climate for people of color and women in work and education.

Many political analysts continually note that as one of the largest states in the Union, California often sets a legislative tone for the nation. This proved true last week, as voters in Michigan passed Proposition 2, which similarly revokes affirmative action protections in Michigan. The President of the University of Michigan, Mary Sue Coleman, has since made a powerful public statement to UM students, to the state, and to the nation, by announcing that the University of Michigan will not comply with Proposition 2, because it promises to systematically shut students of color, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, out of higher education.

For many of the students at UCLA Law, Proposition 209 was passed before we had the necessary information or even were of the legal age to vote. But as people who now have an extraordinary degree of access to legal education, we have the opportunity to apply our ethics, sense of justice, and energy to help guide the University of California towards a more equitable relationship to education. We also have the chance to demonstrate our solidarity and commitment to the students of color who are or should be at UCLA Law, and to each other as students who believe that education should be a tool to remedy inequality, oppression, and social problems.

What you can do: This Wednesday, the UC Board of Regents will meet at UCLA. Undergraduate student organizations have already been organizing extensively to plan for a march and rally to coincide with that meeting. Law students will be convening at 10:45am in the Law School Courtyard, to join the student rally at 11am at Covel Commons. Join us!

We are in a position to demand that the UC Board of Regents follow the example set by University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman, in refusing to comply any longer, with misguided, racist, and reactionary attacks on civil rights in California education!

From: MB
To: Share JD
Date: 13 Nov 06, 7:14am

I support your objectives but I disagree with this protest.

1) Mary Sue Coleman did NOT say she "will not comply" with Prop 2. While she said she would explore "every legal option" to "overcome the handcuffs", she also said "Of course the University of Michigan will comply with the laws of the state."

You erode your credibility when you misquote someone in order to bolster your own case. (Especially as law students, who are supposed to know the value of diligent citation.) The error is worse since it's unlikely most of the recipients of this email will bother to check the source, and will take your misquote as the truth.

2) The protest is apparently premised on "follow[ing] the example of ... Mary Sue Coleman, in refusing to comply". Since Coleman has NOT refused to comply, it's incorrect to invoke her name here.

Of course, maybe it would be productive to do what Coleman is REALLY doing – exploring the legal options available to lessen the impact of the anti-diversity law.

But asking the Regents to violate the law is just not a pragmatic position. I can suggest two productive activities for members of the law school who are concerned about Prop 209:

+ start collecting signatures for a new ballot initiative to repeal Prop 209.

+ demand that the law school disclose its bar passage rates by minority group, and expose the inequality in education that still exists.

13 Nov 06 ::: Comments closed

Some version of this image has been running on the UCLA home page since January 2006. It touts an 89% bar passage rate, a data point included on the UCLA website in the section for prospective students.

This figure comes from the California Bar Association's statistical report for the July 2005 bar exam (see page 4). 235 out of 265 passed = 89%.

However, this figure only includes first-time takers. UCLA's pass rate for repeaters is a less impressive 3 out of 20 = 15%. Compare this to the repeater pass rate for Stanford (40%), Berkeley (46%), Loyola (27%), Southwestern (20%), or Pepperdine (17%). Fortunately we're tied with USC (15%) and still ahead of Whittier (11%). Woohoo!

If you go to page 2 of the report, you can see bar passage rates broken out by race. The top row shows results for first-time takers who graduated from California ABA-accredited law schools, including UCLA. The white pass rate is 75%. The black pass rate is 46.1%, and Hispanic is 57.5%.

Of course, since the California bar doesn't break out rates by school, we can't tell what the gap is at UCLA in particular. What would you guess? The black / white gap across all ABA schools is nearly 30 points. Is the gap at UCLA smaller or larger?

The results for the July 2006 bar exam came out last Friday. The statistical analysis for that exam isn't posted yet. As an unscientific experiment, I went through last year's facebook and noted the students in the class of 2006 who, in my estimation, were likely African-American. There were 18. Then I ran these names through the bar results search engine. 8 names came up. 10 did not.

If we assume that all the graduates took the bar, that's 8 out of 18 = 44% pass rate. Granted, that's an aggressive assumption, since a couple may be in joint degree programs, or taking another bar out of state, etc. I have no easy way of verifying this.

But let's assume 6 did not take the California bar, for whatever reason. That still leaves a bar passage rate of 8 out of 12 = 67%. If we assume that the bar passage rate for white students at UCLA is still 89% (it's likely somewhat higher, since the 89% figure includes all students, not just white), that would mean a black / white bar passage gap in the range of 22 to 45 percentage points. (This is an estimate, and I welcome any information that would allow me to improve the estimate.)

If Prop 209 were repealed tomorrow, it would only address half of the problem: achieving diversity in the admissions process. It would do nothing to address the other half of the problem: large gaps in bar passage rates.

A UCLA law student's chance of becoming a lawyer varies widely depending on the student's race. To deliberately include an African-American student in a photo touting a 89% bar pass rate strikes me as crass, a victory of marketing over substance. The day every UCLA grad has an 89% chance of passing the bar is the day they should put it on the home page.

RELATED: A story in Monday's NY Times about the racial gap in standardized test scores in grade school.

19 Nov 06 ::: Comments closed

Progress in the quest for better information: a UCLA professor advises me that about 85% of UCLA grads overall take the California bar exam. So out of 18 African-American students, we'd expect 15 to sit for the Calif bar.

However, he also pointed out that at least a few students listed in the class of 2006 may still have one semester to go (because they took time off) and are not eligible to take the bar until February. So that may cut into the 18.

So today, I'll extend my unscientific sampling technique to white students listed in the class of 2006. While this number won't mean much in absolute terms, it will have been derived the same way as the African-American pass rate, making it more of an apples-to-apples comparison.

I started at the beginning of the facebook listings and took the first 30 students who were likely to be white. Since there's no correlation between the alphabet and academic performance, the first 30 would be as random as any 30. As before, I ran the names through the bar passage search engine.

23 out of 30 of the white students came up on the pass list = 76% pass rate. This number was derived the same way as the 44% number in the African-American sample: by taking the names on the pass list and dividing it by total names in the sample.

If we assume the overall UCLA pass rate is still around 89%, we can make a couple further inferences. Since 23 of the white students passed, probably 26 students in the sample sat for the exam, because 23 out of 26 = 88% pass rate. That would leave 4 who didn't take the exam for whatever reason. 4 out of 30 = 13%, which corresponds pretty well to the professor's estimate of how many UCLA grads take the Calif bar (85% do, which means 15% don't).

So going back to the African-American sample, let's use the same baseline and assume 85% took the bar, and 15% didn't. That means of the 18 students, 15 took the bar and 3 didn't. 8 out of 15 = 53% pass rate. (That's a more reliable baseline estimate than the previous 44%.)

Let's also have a more conservative hypothesis where, for whatever reason, only 70% of the African-American students took the bar. That would mean 12 out of 18 took it and 6 didn't. 8 passed out of 12 = 67% pass rate.

So, after this extra facebook experimenting, we can narrow the predicted bar pass range for African-American students to 53-67%. Compared to the white pass rate of 89%, there's still a gap of 22-36 percentage points. So it looks like UCLA tracks the statewide racial gap of 30 points pretty closely.

21 Nov 06 ::: Comments closed

A commenter with access to apparently better information than I have passes this along:

I believe the actual CA bar passage rate among blacks who graduated from UCLA Law last year is likely about 73%.

I came up with this figure based on an e-mail list to which I have access. According to this list there were 17 black students who graduated last year. However, based on my own personal knowledge I was able remove three students who took the bar in another state and three others who did not sit for the exam.

Of the 11 remaining students, 8 of them passed, making the passage rate 72.7%.

I appreciate the clarification. If true, that puts the UCLA black / white bar passage gap at about 17 points. Better than 22 to 36 points. But not as good as zero. African-American students pay for a UCLA education but only get Loyola-level pass rates.

26 Nov 06 ::: Comments closed

Answers to a few questions I've gotten regarding this 'investigative' series.

Why do you care about this? Not to get too soap-boxy, but I think anyone who cares about equalizing access to legal education and the diversity of the legal profession should care about this issue.

Why is it significant that one racial group has a lower bar passage rate? Won't any group you pick have a bar passage rate that's either above or below the average? Sure, law review editors as a group might have a higher pass rate. People who watch professional wrestling 5 hrs a day might have a lower pass rate.

The difference is that neither of these groups historically receives admissions preferences. While admissions preferences have benefits, they also have costs. To date, schools – law schools especially – have not been particularly curious about understanding these costs and making adjustments.

Much has changed in 30 years, but admissions preferences basically still work the same way. If students receiving preferences aren't passing the bar as often, isn't that a problem worth fixing? I share Bill Clinton's view: mend it, don't end it.

Are you saying that there is some conspiracy at UCLA to harm minority students? No, not at all. Fundamentally this isn't a race issue. It's an issue about people who received admissions preferences (for any reason) vs. people who didn't. A law school like UCLA is not intentionally stacking the deck against any group of students.

But I also think they shouldn't be promoting a bar passage rate that doesn't apply equally to everyone. Aside from the ethical issues, I'm quite convinced that some law schools are breaking consumer protection laws by inadequately informing students. Maybe not UCLA, because preferences are (in theory) already illegal, but somewhere like USC (who definitely uses preferences) or Southwestern (who flunks out 1/3 of their law class each year, which disproportionately hurts minority enrollment)

Why do you only care about black vs. white comparisons? It's a proxy for prefs vs. no prefs, but not a perfect one. There are black students who didn't receive admissions preferences; there are white students who did. Also, a lot of the existing data is broken out by race, not by other attributes, so it's a matter of data availability. If I could make other comparisons reliably, I would.

A student getting an admissions preference knows what their numbers are like going in. Aren't they aware they're at greater risk of failing the bar? Perhaps they should know, but I can assure you they don't. This semester, I've been working on a project interviewing minority students who failed the bar at least once. (I plan to post a summary of that project in January.)

For now, I can tell you that none of the people I've talked to really considered the meaning of the bar passage rates until it was time to take the bar. Maybe they'd heard things here & there but they never really connected it to themselves. But after they failed, they sure knew.

27 Nov 06 ::: Comments closed

Closed book exams and multiple choice exams are underrated.

If you walk out thinking you did great, you'll get a B.
If you walk out thinking you wiped out, you'll get a B.

A thick outline indicates a thin understanding of the material.

Word limits are harder to obey than you think.

The older the professor, the shorter the exam.

Earplugs help.

04 Dec 06 ::: Comments closed

See you in January.

15 Dec 06 ::: Comments closed

Second semester, 3L year. This is the time when a lot of law students get crabby. And with good reason.

I'm going to do my best to counteract this trend by focusing on the cheering aspects of being in the last semester of law school. After all, we've made it this far, we should be happy, right?

10 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

Unlimited free Westlaw and Lexis access. William Rehnquist was apparently stoned on Placidyl during his first ten years on the Supreme Court. As graduation approaches, I think I know how the man felt.

I'm not hardcore enough to have paid for my last semester with Lexis Rewards points. But my Westlaw/Lexis monthly use must have a street value of several thousand dollars.

I took UCLA's Advanced Legal Research course last semester, and now I know all the magical things Westlaw & Lexis can do. (Best: property searches on your professors.) While the class was supposed to make my searching more economical, instead it's only increased my minimum daily dosage.

While I like to think I don't have a problem, I found myself thinking of ways I could notionally continue working for a professor after graduation just to keep my Westlaw & Lexis turned on. That's a little sad. Well actually, a lot sad.

Advanced Legal Research. As mentioned above. This is a UCLA law class offered by the library staff. (2Ls & 3Ls: you may still be able to get in this semester.) Pound for pound, this is probably the most useful course I took at UCLA. Note: not most interesting. Not most fun class sessions. Not most taxing. But most useful.

See, here's the thing. Apparently, doing legal work professionally requires a lot of, you know, legal research. If you think you learned that in your 1L lawyering skills class, think again. With full disrespect to the lawyering skills program, they don't teach you shit about research. (Whoops! A little negativity snuck in there)

If you'd asked me four months ago why you'd choose to research in Witkin vs. CalJur, or ALR vs. Wright & Miller, I'd say "what the hell are you talking about". I now recognize that former version of me as an ignorant slob. Thanks to the library staff, I have mad research skillz that are already helping me pull down some major coin.

Internet access during class. All UCLA classrooms have internet ports. During 1L year, the internet was turned on unless professors asked for it to be turned off. During 2L year, the policy was converted to opt-in (internet turned off unless professors asked for it to be on).

This year, Big Brother has given up — all the internet ports are on, all the time. Even professors who say "Internet is forbidden in class!" leave the ports on. I don't know if this is due to some failure of technological infrastructure or deliberate policy choice by the school (to what end?) In any case, a rare victory for student life. I actually don't plug in that often, but when I do, I feel like it's implicitly condoned. And that's a good feeling.

My incredibly slack schedule. I don't mind having a lot to do but I prefer to be able to do my work during whatever part of the day I feel like it. Regimentation is dreary. I remember having to show up five days a week for 14 class sessions 1L year. And it sucked.

As an upperclassman, you don't have to go to class Fridays, and last year I even got down to a 3-day schedule. But this semester, I have class only two days a week (Tues and Thurs) and only in the afternoon. If you're wondering how that feels: incredibly goddamn good is how it feels. It's a good thing I'll never have to get re-acclimated to going to school on consecutive days. I'm not sure I could.

Seminar / workshop classes. When I find out people have not taken seminars, I want to say "dude! Are you on Placidyl or something?" One meeting a week. Three credits. No exam. No grading curve. What's not to like?

My seminar last semester only met like six times, and the prof brought cookies every week. This semester, my workshop class apparently has a catered appetizer buffet every two weeks. Do you get this in Crim Pro? Do you get this in Real Estate Finance? No and no.

But, I really should thank those of you who shun the seminars & workshops, because without your help, I wouldn't have been able to grab two this semester, which was a critical step in the whole 2-day plan. Did I mention my workshop includes a free dinner at A.O.C.? That's in addition to the buffets.

11 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

Cheap health insurance. UCLA requires all students to carry health insurance, but they let you buy into a lightly subsidized Blue Shield plan. This is pretty much the only thing on campus where they don't charge the professional students double. I have a feeling my costs will go up considerably when I leave. (Of course, that's offset by the not-inconsiderable cost savings of not having to pay tuition.) Since many of you have never and will never pay for your own health insurance, I know this one's difficult to relate.

The Daily Bruin. Last semester I was never on campus for lunch, so I didn't read our undergraduate campus paper. I felt its loss. Now I'm making a point of picking it up again. Remember, the only page worth reading is "Viewpoint", aka op-ed, where undergrads make priceless discoveries about the existence of poverty, war, animal cruelty, etc. Here's a great one from last week. Here's how it came about: "Hm, what should I write about this week? I'm stuck for ideas. Maybe something will come to me while I'm waiting in line for my chai latte."

The UCLA law library & law librarians. It wasn't until very recently that I understood that random civilians are calling our law librarians all the time with legal research questions, and what's more, the librarians help them. I actually thought the law librarians only were available to students and professors. But I guess that would leave them severely underemployed, so sometimes they work the phones too. So as I look toward life as a practicing lawyer, I mourn the loss of unlimited Westlaw & Lexis access a little less, knowing that I can harness this immense intellectual power.

The UCLA computer store. You probably don't spend much time there, but they have a lot of cheap student editions of high-priced software. I have to remember to load up with the latest versions the week before I graduate.

Yoga discounts. The whole student discount thing off-campus has been kind of a bust. LA is not overrun with students the way, say, Boston is, and consequently local merchants don't care so much about catering to that market with bargains and whatnot. Very few movie theaters have student tickets. But for some reason, the two yoga studios I frequent offer 20% off. Again, another thing to load up on before I graduate.

17 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

"Law school changes the way you think." Of the many clichéd predictions and bits of advice given to me before law school, I must grudgingly admit this one has turned out to be true.

One of the curiosities of law school is that it's like the Mall of America for intellectuals. Within its walls, it houses dozens of scholarly interests, some of which are what I'd call intrinsically legal topics (e.g. civil procedure, evidence) but most are not. For instance, we have classes on sports, network television, animal rights, the Internet, education, poverty, quantitative research methods, stem cell research, sexual orientation, real estate finance, international taxation, economics, feminism, history, film criticism, etc.

The heterogeneity of law school is both an asset and a liability. You can see why law has become the preferred finishing school for liberal arts nerds who have $100K to spare: you have the pleasure of getting a practical, professional credential, but meanwhile, you don't actually have to settle in and focus on any one thing in particular. Animal rights on Tuesday, real estate finance on Wednesday, sports on Thursday.

However, it's an open question whether law scholars really work up to the same standards as scholars in parallel fields, in terms of conceptual and methodological rigor. Maybe that's an argument to have more law review articles jointly authored with folks outside the legal academy, though that rarely seems to happen. But the result is — any professor who teaches a class on a specialized legal topic is regarded as a de facto expert, which may not be a valid interpolation.

Or is it? "You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone." If nothing else, law is leverage. Arguably, someone who's in a position to control legal regulation of stem cell research is potentially in a far more influential position than the best stem cell scientist, even though the regulator knows much less about the nuts and bolts. If you wanted to achieve the greatest effect on the direction of stem cell science with the comparatively lowest effort, you'd probably be better off at law school than med school.

Maybe that's what makes government as magical (and scary) as it is. One professor I know has described law school as teaching you the architecture of society — how everything fits together. I don't agree that law has that much explanatory power. Many times, law is running (well, more like walking) to catch up to social and economic changes. If you want to know how everything fits together, you'll need to crane your neck farther.

Most areas of the law follow a predictable pattern: At first, there are no rules. At some point, big guys develop an incentive to pick on little guys. Then, lawyers start filing complaints. At first they lose, but eventually, they start winning as courts recognize the rights of the little guys. After that, legislatures also recognize the little guys by memorializing those rights in changes to the law.

But sometime after that, the process reverses. The big guys re-assert their rights using economic and political leverage. Eventually, there's some combination of legislative and judicial limiting of the little guy's rights. The little guys end up better off than where they started, but never as good as the peak.

But I digress.

18 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

So, "law school changes the way you think." True or false? Maybe for some, it's difficult to see how law school changed their thinking because they came more or less directly from college and didn't really have time to put their college-level mental skills to use out in the world.

But I did. Here are the three questions that I now routinely ask myself in almost every situation. And I credit law school. None of them are new ideas, but I do think law school a) makes you understand why they're valuable and b) turns them into habit.

What are the determinative facts? In any problem, there are facts that matter and facts that don't. Signal and noise, if you prefer. Learning how to separate them out is useful. It simplifies the problem (by removing extraneous information). And it helps show you what kind of problem it is. Kind of like when you clean out dirt from the top of a screw to find out whether you need a regular screwdriver, a Philips head, or a hex wrench.

What is the principle behind the outcome? You're better off devising a principle that implies the outcome rather than just deciding the outcome. Because when a similar situation comes up, you'll be able to solve it more quickly (you won't reinvent the wheel) and more consistently (you're protected against random and arbitrary results).

What are the incentives that affect the participants? I was almost going to say law school makes you look at things more fairly or even-handedly, but I don't think that's quite true. Law school teaches you that you can manipulate situations using incentives. Whether you use that power for good or ill is up to you.

Laws exist to modify behavior. And they do that by modifying incentives. A potential $300 fine is your incentive to not park in a handicapped space. A mortgage-interest tax deduction is your incentive to own a home with borrowed money. And so on.

Again, this isn't a new concept. When we were babies, we screamed until we got fed. The potential for silence was the incentive for our parents to comply.

Law school helps you see that not much has changed. Most situations are sets of interdependent incentives, like a chess game. You want to think a few moves into the future so you get the outcome you want without causing unintended side effects.

Here's an example. Recently my fiancée was looking forward to dinner with a girlfriend. Girlfriend insisted on bringing her boyfriend. Fiancée thus insisted I attend, to occupy boyfriend so she could talk to girlfriend.

That would've been the obvious solution. But having been to law school, I pointed out that if we announced that I was attending, we'd be giving boyfriend a positive incentive to show up. If we announced that I was not attending, then boyfriend would see that he would be miserably bored and stay home. Which was really the desired outcome.

It worked.

21 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

Now if you have a good answer why, year after year, law professors demand papers be double-spaced, I'm all ears. You may say it's to impose uniformity, as in "the paper should be at least 20 pages, double-spaced". Again, this is a typewriter view of the world. For the last 20 years, students have been carefully manipulating margin sizes and font sizes to make the 20-page requirement using only 16 pages of text. Obviously, it would be much more sensible to say "the paper should be at least 10,000 words – use the word counter in your text editor".

If you want to make your seminars paper look nice, here's some simple guidlines: make the font size 10-11 points. (12 point is overlarge. Again, have you ever seen a newspaper, magazine, etc.) Use 115% line spacing (or in Microsoft Word lingo, "Multiple 1.15"). Set the margins BIG so that there's 11-15 words per line and 28-32 lines per page. Never ever use justified text — only left-aligned.

And for god's sake, one space between sentences.

23 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

Exhibit #4352: the great salary war of 2007. Recall that it was only a year or so ago that big New York firms pushed their first-year starting salaries from $125K to $145K. Now many are going up again, this time to $160K. This, in turn, will eventually pressure big firms in other cities to nudge up their starting salaries also.

As before, we might wonder how much of this is marketing hype as opposed to a real increase in associate pay. We also can't know whether billable hour requirements are also being yanked up (possible, though at many places they're already at the outer edge of human capacity.)

The precipitating factor for this round of salary increases seems to be the continuing trend of comical levels of attrition among associates at big law firms. If we pay them more, the reasoning seems to go, then they'll stick around.

Here's what makes it dumb. For many years, law students have taken the view that big firms were tolerable as a first job because the high salary made it easy to pay off law school debt. Once the debt was paid off, other career opportunities could be considered. Sure, some folks were committed to making partner, but clearly the big law firm model is not built around promoting as many people as possible. It's built on promoting as few as possible. But everyone knew this was the deal, and everyone was happy.

So you're a law firm. Assume you're not totally naive, and you understand the incentives that are in play. What will happen when you raise starting salaries?

Think about it for a second.

Which would be three times longer than any of these firms thought about it.

You're not making your big firm more attractive than other types of jobs (small firms, government, public interest) because you're already paying way more than any of them.

But you are helping the first-year associate pay down their law school debt faster. Since salaries are going up much faster than the cost of living, most of those increases can flow directly to the associate's bottom line.

So what you've done is shorten the timeline for the associate to pay back their debt and arrive at the point where they feel free to consider other career options.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

The result of salary hikes is not better associate retention. Instead, it's far more likely to reduce associate retention. By paying associates more, the big firm dilutes the economic leverage that's been key to keeping young associates under their thumb (a traditional ingredient of indentured labor).

And once you observe that, you might wonder: did the 2006 salary hike really reduce attrition? No, it went up after that. How about the 2005 salary hike? Nope, it went up after that one too. I think it's quite plausible that these rapid salary increases have been accelerating attrition, not reducing it.

This is great news for law students, for sure. But, let's keep the secret to ourselves, okay?

29 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

... but some of their questions might be. Our prison law class today visited the LA Men's Central Jail, described by one of the deputies there as "the largest jail in the free world." (Note to civilians: in the industry, a jail and a prison are different. A jail is a county facility for inmates who are defendants in a current trial, or who have sentences less than one year. A prison is a state or federal facility where you go for a longer sentence, e.g. 25 to life.)

The deputies who worked at the jail were unusually friendly and chipper. Chipper in a way I wouldn't expect if part of my job entailed the daily risk of being stabbed with a homemade knife that had been dipped in human shit infected with god knows what. But the first deputy I met cheerily recounted his stabbing under these exact circumstances, and the year of blood tests that followed.

Sending law students on a jail tour is a good news / bad news deal. The good news is that you're getting off campus to see some real crime & punishment. I'm in favor of field trips, and they are curiously absent from the law school curriculum, considering how many courts, jails, prisons, etc. are happy to have visitors.

The bad news is that the blithe liberalism that plays well on a law campus doesn't really translate to jail. When you meet deputies, you get a different perspective on political conservatism: here are guys (it's all guys) who definitely want their facility to be unpleasant for prisoners.

However, for them it's not about some vague concept of being "tough on crime" in the sense of social agenda; it's about the concrete concept of not wanting to be killed on the job tomorrow. The jail conditions are directly connected to safety. If they're voting for republicans, it's because republicans are more likely to reduce their likelihood of death, and make sure the deputies are paid adequately well for the risk that remains.

Another deputy was explaining to me that there are times when the best response to an aggressive prisoner is to beat him with a maglite. If I had read that in the paper, I'd think "oh, the terrible violations of civil rights." But at the end of a jail tour, I was thinking "This is a really shitty, dangerous job. And I don't want to do it. And I wouldn't want anyone I know to do it. But we need someone to do it. And this guy is willing to do it. Who the hell am I to judge whether he needs to use the maglite or not?"

In a weird way, I trusted this guy to administer an occasional maglite beating responsibly and fairly, but also recognized that letting this guy do it meant letting all the deputies do it, and maybe they're not all going to have the same idea of what offenses are maglite-worthy.

Anyway, here are some of the best questions asked by our class about the inmate population:

Can they call 800 numbers from their phones in their cells?

Why don't you let them have pornography?

Can they get kosher meals?

Where are the women? [It's the Men's Central Jail.]

Do you have juveniles here? [It's the Men's Central Jail.]

How do inmates figure out that someone's a child molester?

Why do you segregate out the homosexual inmates? Isn't that discrimination?

Why do you forbid sex between inmates if there's condoms available?

To those of you planning a visit to LA, I recommend it. It'll make a nice counterpoint to Disneyland and the Warner Bros. studio tour.

31 Jan 07 ::: Comments closed

I won't mention the name of the professor who used this phrase last week to mean "divide an item in half". Horrors. If anyone should know better, law scholars should. (And law journalists.)

The origin of "split the baby", as many people know, is the Old Testament story where two women came to King Solomon with a baby, each claiming to be its mother. Solomon proposed to split the baby. When one woman begged him not to and give the baby away instead, he knew she was the mother.

But if you know the story, you should be able to figure out that "split the baby" means the opposite of "divide an item in half". It refers to a split that cannot be made, a futile attempt to apportion an indivisible object.

06 Feb 07 ::: Comments closed

The U.S. News law school rankings are a lot like big law firms: the higher you get, the less room you have for advancement.

This is probably the trickiest problem for law school deans, who have to determine how much effort they should put into making improvements that their school needs vs. improvements that might improve the ranking. Much the same way porn sites try to game their way up the Google rankings in the search results pages. (Aside: what do you get if you search for "law school porn"? P.S. don't get your hopes up)

Google keeps its ranking system a secret to deter gamesmanship. U.S. News describes its ranking system, but not completely. One problem for deans is that U.S. News relies a lot (40%) on external impressions of the school, which can't be manipulated directly.

Schools often talk about improving rankings like it's an achievable goal. For schools outside the top 20, it may be — these rankings tend to be more fluid year to year, and there's more "room" to move in the lower tiers.

That's not true in the top 20. Since 1990, there has been extremely little movement among the schools. Look at these two charts:

Rankings 1987-99
Rankings 2000-06

As the notes to the second chart point out, the top 14 schools have been the same since 1993. The same!

UCLA has spent those years ranked in the 15-17 range. For us to move up, somebody has to move down — it's a zero-sum game. Recently, we've moved up to #15, sending U.Texas down to #16.

But where do we go from here? While I imagine our dean dreams of a top 14 ranking, in between visions of gumdrops and teddy bears, it's hard to see how that's likely, given that there hasn't been an opening in 14 years.

06 Feb 07 ::: Comments closed

I have a professor this semester who really likes groupwork. He frequently devotes 5-8 minutes of class time (it seems much longer) to discuss one issue or another with classmates nearby. Later in the semester, we all have to form groups of 2-3 to give joint oral presentations to the rest of class.

But I don't like groupwork. I like working alone. For a lot of reasons. Partly because obviously, I'm a megalomaniacal autocrat, but mainly because a) I can control the quality of the output and b) I can work faster.

That's part of what appealed to me about the law: even in big firms, even if you're part of a larger project, much of the work you're doing day-to-day is just you. It's less about groupwork than a bunch of solo workers flying in formation.

When my prof announces "let's talk about this in groups", he might as well be saying "let's all dissect this sheep's brain I brought in today". Dude, that's not what I came to law school for.

But aside from this personal bias, I blame groupwork for many of America's problems. And in particular, I blame America's business schools, which I think have done the most to unleash this destructive trend on our culture.

I haven't been to business school, but my sources tell me that many classes are built around group projects, on the premise that building consensus and distributing tasks are important skills for future executives. Ugh.

I consider groupwork to be a method of mollifying a generation of grad students who never got anything lower than an A- in their lives. Their self-esteem is fragile and must be preserved. By putting them in groups, everyone can congratulate each other on how smart they are.

But that also gives rise to the main problem with groups, which is that they dilute accountability. When everyone makes a decision together, nobody has to stand behind it. Consequently, any success has many parents (as everyone jockeys to take credit) but any failure is an orphan (and a perfect time to use the passive voice — "Decisions were made that did not translate into timely delivery of strategic objectives...")

So when I see this technique being imported to law school, I get anxious. Groups are an engine of mediocrity. Low achievers can coast by, letting everyone else do the work. High achievers have no incentive to perform at their peak level — since it's so far beyond what anyone else is willing to do — so they dumb down their work to match the median skill level.

15 Feb 07 ::: Comments closed

Here's one that probably won't make the UCLA law home page: professor Grant Nelson is leaving to take a position at Pepperdine. Not just any position either: he will become the William H. Rehnquist Professor of Law, an appointment "applauded by the late Chief Justice Rehnquist's family".

Why go to Pepperdine? According to an item in the LA Daily Journal, Grant claims "it's very close" to first-tier status. That may be a bit optimistic: Pepperdine is ranked 87th on US News.

But Pepperdine, like George Mason, is one of a few law schools that's trying to move up the rankings with a Fox News strategy of targeting the conservatives. And that's probably the real reason for Grant's departure: yep, he's a conservative.

UCLA, like most top-tier law schools I'd imagine, has a few conservative professors (and students) but they're greatly outnumbered by liberal profs. But, I think their conservatism is only tolerated, not taken seriously — a kind of academic "don't ask, don't tell".

Professors like Grant Nelson can't be open about their position on social & political issues the way liberal professors can. Which is unfortunate, because conservatism is a legitimate and vital part of legal thinking in the US. And if you want to practice law with a liberal viewpoint, it's important to be able to respond to conservative counterarguments.

Too often, what seems to happen is that the conservative view is dismissed out of hand. It's conservative; therefore it's wrong. Case closed. What ends up happening is that law school liberalism is a special kind of soft, unchallenged liberalism, where people get comfortable being surrounded by folks who share their views, and don't develop the ability to answer hard questions.

When I had Grant Nelson for Property, I remember a number of times where he made a point of refraining from comment on an issue with potential ideological undertones, steering the conversation back to neutral topics (e.g. incorporeal hereditaments). Probably because he'd learned the hard way that outing yourself as a conservative at UCLA is the fast track to trouble. I remember him as an excellent professor. It's too bad we're running him out of town.

18 Feb 07 ::: Comments closed

A classmate mentioned yesterday that there's a video clip floating around the internets of our very own Dean Schill (when he was Prof. Schill of NYU) being "interviewed" on the Daily Show by Steve Carell. Oh please, let it be true. Any leads are appreciated. Send to matthewb.com@gmail.com.

28 Feb 07 ::: Comments closed

Every now and then dreams come true. Michael Schill was indeed interviewed on the Daily Show. Here's the full video clip at Comedy Central. Schill's segment starts at the 2:30 mark.

But here's some "fair use" for those of you currently in class. Schill's appearance is brief, but those of us familiar with his oeuvre would probably agree that it's nevertheless quintessentially Schill-o-rific.*

Rob Corddry: ... to learn more, I spoke with real estate law expert Mike "The Shill" Schill.

RC: While we're here could I get some legal advice?

Michael Schill: Sure.

RC: How many Guatemalans can I have living in my apartment legally?

MS: I don't know. It would be the same as any other type of person.

RC: It's a tiny apartment. But Guatemalans are tiny people.

MS: I think people would find that offensive.

RC: What if they're not sewing as quickly as I want them to. How do I get them out?

MS: I think maybe we should end this.

RC: [voiceover] He was too scared to talk.

* Narrowly chosen over "Schill-tastic" and "Schill-icious".

(Many thanks to Mr. P for locating the clip.)

28 Feb 07 ::: Comments closed

My favorite breakfast restaurant in Beachwood Canyon raised its prices recently. At first I was bummed, but then I thought about who really pays for the price increase. My usual breakfast was $7.85. I would usually leave $10, for a tip of $2.15. Now my bill comes to $8.25. But I still leave $10.

So I'm paying the same $10 before and after the increase. But the waitstaff is getting 40 cents less as a tip. On balance, the price increase isn't a transfer from my pocket to the restaurant — it's a transfer from the waitstaff to the restaurant.

I wonder if something similar goes on with tuition increases. Right now the Regents are contemplating raising UC fees another 10% or so. According to a recent email from the UCLA Graduate Students Association, "Since 2001, fees have increased 79% for undergrads, 84% for grads, and up to 131% for professional students." I'm too lazy to check that assertion, but sounds roughly right. (UPDATE: Current fees and past fees.) (UPDATE 2: This week, they did approve a 10% fee increase for the professional schools for next year.)

Meanwhile, Dean Christopher Edley of Boalt is advocating for even bigger tuition hikes. Why does he want the money? To give Boalt the capital to move up in the U.S. News rankings, of course. According to Ben Allen, a Boalt student quoted in the article, "law students are very prestige-conscious, and when the dean talks about spending the money to put Boalt back in the top five, that resonates". Of course, that particular student also is a member of the Regents, so maybe his view is a wee less than representative. (And we won't tell him the bad news.)

Wait, there's more. All of this happens against a backdrop of declining alumni participation in school fundraising. According to the Wall St Journal, fewer alumni are giving, and school fundraising has flatlined. Their chart:

Since U.S. News factors alumni participation into its rankings, this has led to schools (naturally) engaging in shenanigans to boost their apparent participation rates. For example: taking a student's $25 donation in one year and treating it as 5 annual donations of $5. In a stroke of Enron-worthy accounting cleverness, this lets them count the student as five donations rather than one.

It all sort of makes me wonder whether tuition increases aren't starting to be a little like the restaurant price increases — rather than raise revenue, they just move revenue from the future (alumni donations) to the present (student tuition). If tuition increases dampen the enthusiasm of students to give after graduation, how is that worth it?

The UC system is in a different position than, say, Harvard. The UC is part of the state government and is accountable to an annual budget. So short-term results are the priority. Whereas Harvard, deriving giant returns from its huge endowment, can afford to weather fluctuations in its year-to-year revenue and focus on maximizing alumni contributions in the long term (which it does with near-intravenous efficiency).

I had lunch with a UCLA professor & alumnus last semester who repeatedly asserted how important it was to give money after graduation. Throughout my college education, Harvard banged it into us how our tuition didn't cover the true costs of our education and that we were expected to make it up down the line in the form of donations. (I'm pretty sure I haven't, but the point was made.)

But something different seems to be going on these days. The UCs are a special case, but it seems like a lot of colleges and universities have used the mostly-good economy of the last 15 years as a basis to raise tuition faster than inflation. (Again, too lazy to give you a footnote.)

This has not gone unnoticed by students. I used to justify my donations to Harvard by saying "sure they have a lot of money, but they also make about 20% a year investing it. So they use it wisely." But when they crossed the $1 zillion mark a couple years ago, I did start to wonder "gee, is my petty little donation going to make a difference? Maybe I should send it somewhere where it matters more."

When I think about donating to UCLA, I'm ambivalent. Some part of me still clings to the same belief that the professor did — alumni donation is part of the ethical contract a student makes with an institution.

Another part of me feels like shit, Regents, you weren't shy about bringing my tuition up a huge amount to cover your short-term deficits. You weren't shy about sticking me with the bill from the Kashmiri case. Can you really say I got that much of a bargain?

So the ethical appeal for alumni fundraising — you got more than what you paid for — is less compelling than it used to be.

We move on to the altruistic appeal — give money to UCLA because it's the best use of your charitable dollar. But if anything, the shenanigans of the last three years show that the UC system is no model of financial management.

For argument's sake, I'll accept that alumni have an ethical duty to support their schools with donations. But if that's true, then schools also have an ethical duty to protect their students' pocketbooks while they're in school. I got a good legal education at UCLA. But the UC system didn't quite hold up its end of the deal.

12 Mar 07 ::: Comments closed

I only got one piece of advice before law school that ended up being worth a damn.

"Find the best professors ... and take their classes."

Credit to Ben Wizner of the ACLU. Ben & I lived in the same dorm in college and I randomly ran into him at a party in LA shortly before going to UCLA. That was his advice. He was right.

(Confidential to everyone but Ben: your advice sucked.)

The reason this advice works is simple. First, a great professor will make you love their topic. Even if you thought you hated it before. Second, it doesn't matter what classes you take in law school. So you might as well take the best ones.

The corollary to Ben's advice is that you need to bypass the bar courses that you might be taking out of a sense of obligation. That is a terrible use of your time & your tuition dollar, unless the course happens to be taught by one of the A-list professors. You need to save your credits for the good shit. Leave the rest for Bar/Bri.

How do you find the best professors? That's trickier than you think. I've investigated our teaching evaluations pretty thoroughly. Even professors I know to be miserable bastards get pretty decent reviews. Which shows that a) personal taste varies or b) a lot of people didn't show up to class except for evaluation day.

What you're looking for is two things. One is consistency. If everyone likes a prof, chances are you will too. If opinion is divided, that's a risky proposition. Two is raves. Not just good reviews. You want insane reactions, e.g. people scrawling on their eval sheets in two-inch letters "BEST COURSE AT UCLA!!!" over and over again. I saw that a couple times. I took those courses.

Be careful though: great profs are not necessarily great in every class they teach. Make sure you are taking their "crown jewel", the course they're known for, not some random seminar that they concocted during a Robitussin-induced daydream.

Oh, and take Evidence. No, really. You need it.

16 Mar 07 ::: Comments closed

To the 1Ls who are planning to do the law review write-on next week during spring break: if I reach just one of you with my message, it will all have been worthwhile.

Here are some reasons to drop out of the write-on. And it's not too late. It's never too late.

1) The odds are against you. Only a fraction of people doing the write-on can make it.

2) It's horribly grueling and a waste of a perfectly good spring break. You deserve a spring break. Law review wants to take it away.

3) Despite the meritocratic spin ("with a write-on, everyone has a chance to shine!") it's still a crapshoot. There's a bunch of 2Ls scoring these papers. Do you think there will be anything close to the grading consistency you get when one professor grades 80 exams? No way.

4) The odds are even more against you, since a certain number of slots are reserved for Double Secret Grade-On 1Ls, whose GPAs are so absurdly high that the school considers it morally abhorrent that they would be excluded by a write-on. So they're in. You're out.

5) No, I wasn't on law review (though I did make it through the write-on). But some of my dearest friends in law school were. Not a single one has described it as enjoyable. And it's hard to quit once you're on.

6) Nor has any of those dear friends considered it to be a boost to their resume. Good grades are a boost. Having a personality is a boost. Not drooling at the interview is a boost. But law review is not a boost.

7) The odds are really against you with this new "Additional Essay", where they're looking for "diverse experiences" or whatever the hell it is. I'll leave it to you to speculate who they're hoping to assist with this Additional Essay. But chances are it's not you.

8) But your lawyer mom said law review was prestigious and you must do it! The operative word here is "was". The internet is killing law reviews, just as surely as it's killing the music business. Don't believe me? Read how "Judges Are Ignoring Law Review Articles". Also consider this.

The gist is this: law review articles had a more useful purpose in life when they served as digests of caselaw on a particular topic. But now that everyone has Westlaw or Lexis, this isn't much of a value proposition. Plus, the never-ending struggle between clueless acting professors and clueless student editors inexorably leads to longer, duller, dumber articles. Never have so few said so much about so little. Though many professors still pooh-pooh legal blogs, at least those have a readership.

9) I know you're scared that if you don't do law review, [insert name of fearsome authority figure] will smite you, because you've gotten an A in every class since 7th grade and you got a 178 LSAT and blah blah blah. But I can assure you that [fearsome authority figure] doesn't care.

10) You think I'm lying about the longness and the dumbness, right. But have you ever read the UCLA L. Rev.? Any of it? I have.

11) Your time would be better spent figuring out how to make some money with your legal education. This school's not getting any cheaper.

12) Most of the smartest people I've met at law school didn't make law review. And they're headed to the same $145K jobs as the people who did make law review.

13) Did I mention the odds are against you?

22 Mar 07 ::: Comments closed

It occurred to me recently that this is not just the end of law school for me, but in all likelihood the end of school, period.

That's really fine with me. I've always been pretty good at school but I can't say I've ever really liked it that much. The 12 years I spent out in the world after college were much more enjoyable than either college or law school. Not because I've had bad school experiences — I just find the format a bit repetitive & limiting.

That's not true of everyone. I know there are people who pursue much lengthier graduate degrees than I have. I have friends who are avowed school-lovers and claim they would become professional students if they could.

It's sort of amazing to me that in 39 days, I will be an ex-law student.

02 Apr 07 ::: Comments closed

A professor pointed out today that one of our readings was an article cowritten by a law professor and a third-year law student. That was the first time I'd ever seen a professor / student collaboration.

This made me wonder: why is it that almost all legal scholarship is the product of solo authors? Collaborations between professors are rare; collaborations between professors and students are almost nonexistent.

Intuitively it seems that there are strong incentives to collaborate: co-authors can fill gaps in each other's knowledge and skills. A co-author will be your best editor.

Co-authors get their names on more articles with less work. I won't assume that co-authoring an article is half the work of writing it solo — divisions of labor are never that efficient — but it must represent some time savings. More articles means more ... of whatever satisfaction people get from publishing, I don't really know what that is.

Well, maybe I can guess. Legal scholarship can be separated into three types: 1) the kind that professors write when they're first looking to achieve tenure; 2) the kind they write when they have tenure but they're looking to be poached by a better law school; 3) the kind they write when they have tenure and they're just interested in the topic enough to write about it.

Category (3) is the smallest. Some professors have a steady law review publishing career after they get tenure. Others move on to writing casebooks or other legal texts (though arguably, that may pay a few bucks, but it's not scholarship in the sense of exploring new academic terrirtory).

But most tenured professors' publishing habits become, shall we say, sporadic as their career wears on. I'm too lazy to do an empirical analysis. It seems true.

Category (3) also looks like it might be the best opportunity for collaborations. Wouldn't a non-tenured professor or student benefit by co-writing something with a professor established in the field? But we still have the problem of what incentive the tenured professor has to participate. Very little. That professor can exploit student labor without having to grant a co-writing credit.

As for working with another professor, one problem is that profs tend to focus on very narrow areas of legal thought. You can build a whole career around something like "the death of the irreparable injury rule". How many other people are likely to share your interest? Very few. So the realm of potential collaborators may be, in practice, quite small.

Category (1) might be an inappropriate place for collaborations. On the one hand, profs do want to get published. Frequently if possible. I know tenure committees say they value quality over quantity, but the more you write, the more you have a chance of publishing something that gets noticed.

But a non-tenured prof's main goal in publishing is to prove that they have the smarts, skills, diligence, etc. to merit tenure. So there's more value to solo articles, because everything in that article (for better or worse) is attributable to you. If you went before a tenure committee with several great but co-written articles, you'd have to explain what your contribution was.

And that assumes that the result of the collaboration is good. When you're co-writing, you still have the risk that you'll spend six months on an article and it will suck. If that happens, you would've been better off on your own.

There's probably also some cultural heredity at work — solo writing has been the model for a long time. The profs reviewing your tenure application all had to suffer through writing their own articles. They probably think that you should get to suffer too.

That leaves category (2). Which perhaps is indistinguishable from category (1).

Apparently I've answered my own question. Go back to whatever you were doing.

03 Apr 07 ::: Comments closed

And it feels good. Just wanted to share that.

09 Apr 07 ::: Comments closed

I was wondering how the law school can give you a diploma on May 11 when the term ends on May 10. The answer is: they don't.

Apparently everyone at commencement gets to enjoy the rare pleasure of sitting in the sun in a black wool robe for 2+ hours, and then walking to the podium to collect — a blank piece of rolled-up paper.

It seems like if anyone could solve this problem, it's a law school. Why don't they just give you your real diploma with a disclaimer? The fine print at the bottom could read:

11 Apr 07 ::: Comments closed

...you try to persuade a person to do something by saying "come on, be a rational actor." Which is worse: that I said it, or that it worked?

Meanwhile, I'm busy tying up loose ends. I just stopped by Diddy Riese in Westwood for a $1.25 ice cream / cookie sandwich, which I'd never had. The end is near, my friends.

16 Apr 07 ::: Comments closed

Multiple choice quiz: according to the most recently available ABA figures (2000, but don't cheat), 48% of lawyers in private practice work where?

a) in solo practice
b) in firms with up to 100 lawyers
c) in firms with more than 100 lawyers

The answer is (a) in solo practice. 38% work in firms with up to 100 lawyers, and only 14% in the big firms with more than 100 lawyers. Did you get it right?

You might wonder if this has changed since 2000. Probably not. Sure, there have been lots of mergers, but those turn big firms into really really big firms — not solo practices into big firms. In 1980, the largest law firm in the survey was 51 (!) lawyers. But there were 49% solo practitioners. So in 20 years, despite the arrival of the megafirm, roughly half of lawyers are still in solo practice.

If you go to UCLA or a similarly posh school, I'm guessing you got this question wrong. Because while UCLA grads go into private practice at about the same rate as lawyers at large (75% of all grads), about 60% of these go to firms of 100 or more lawyers and the other 40% to firms up to 100 lawyers. Pretty much none go solo. (This is according to a Powerpoint slide provided by a professor from last year. I can't link it. You'll just have to trust me.)

You could reasonably argue that the two pictures aren't incommensurable: it's more common for a lawyer to start in a big firm and open their own practice later on. So we'd expect to see recent grads go to big firms, and the balance shifting toward small firms and solo practices as time goes on.

Sure, but still. The view from a top-tier school is distorted. At UCLA, it seems like everyone goes to a big firm. But the farther down the US News rankings you go, the more selective the recruiting becomes. (I tried to get some figures from NALP for you but shit, it's the last week of classes.)

So if these law school grads don't go to big firms, where do they go? Well, many of them go to smaller no-name firms, and another group, lacking any better options, go solo.

Now this is funny, isn't it? The idea of going solo out of law school chills a UCLA or USC graduate to the bone. But these folks are likely in much better position to succeed in a solo practice than a person from a 4th-tier school who's pushed into it out of economic necessity more than preference.

Let me break the trend: yes, dear readers, after I pass the bar, I'll be setting up a solo practice. (But don't tell UCLA Career Services — I plan to keep reporting on their surveys as long as possible that I'm "unemployed").

Now, this isn't as momentous a decision as it might be for other law grads — I was self-employed for most of the time between college and law school, so the thought of having to generate my own client base and not having a steady paycheck doesn't faze me. I'm used to that.

If anything, the idea of going to a firm and helping some fat partner upgrade his Mercedes is what fills me with loathing. (Not that there's anything wrong with working in a big firm. Just be honest with yourself about what you will & won't get out of it.)

I've been reading Jay Foonberg's book on setting up a solo practice. If anyone has an inclination toward working solo in the next 5 years, I recommend getting this book now. (Sweet $40 discount if you're an ABA student member and you buy it through their site.)

The book has two main purposes: to convince you that you can have a solo practice, and then to show you how to do it. The best point Foonberg makes is that having your own firm is a combination of three skills: practicing law, handling clients, and running an office. If you're willing to develop those skills, you can be a solo attorney. Not rocket science, I know. But Foonberg is also good at making these tasks seem less intimidating, for those who are intimidated by them.

I'm not. Maybe I should be. Ah, so what? Can 48% of American lawyers be wrong? It's not brain surgery. It's just law. Have you ever tried designing a font? Now that's hard.

18 Apr 07 ::: Comments closed

Today is the last day of school. I'm writing this before class, because afterwards, I'm going to park myself in front of the strongest margarita I can find. I'll be there for a while. Like a month or so.

I sort of miss yearbooks. The kind where you'd get your copy and then you'd try to get all your friends to sign it. And then years later, you could look back and see that your friends only said two things: "what a long, strange trip it's been" and "your a good kid, don't ever change" [sic].

Don't ever change. What a curious sentiment for one 14-year-old to convey to another. I'll try to do better for you, dear readers.

At the end of your 3L year, it's hard to say whether law school is really easier than it was first semester, or if your head is just numb from the repeated blows. I feel smarter than I did when I got here. I know more about how parts of the world work. My politics have shifted slightly. I have some new marketable skills.

Some of you may have mistakenly inferred that I'm a bitter law student. Not so. Overall, I'm glad I went to law school, and I'm glad I went to UCLA. I made many friends here that I hope to stay in touch with. I had classes with a few great professors. I also met my future wife. That's right, soon there's going to be a Mrs. MB. Crazy!

Thank you, readers, for your steady patronage in the last 32 months or so. I started this blog mostly for myself, so that when I was 89 I could read stupid stories about my school days. Then it became a way of communicating with friends and family back home so I didn't have to send 25 separate emails. Then it became America's most popular web site. Well, pretty close, anyway.

This won't be the absolute last posting here — I'll come back in a few months to tell you how the bar exam was, and then how my solo practice plans pan out — but this is the last time you'll hear from me as a law student. That's a good feeling.

Over and out,

Matthew B.

24 Apr 07 ::: Comments closed

Next week is the bar exam.

I remember reading that during the good old days at West Point, new cadets would be hazed by having to do a "white tornado": an upperclassman would take all the condiments on the mess hall table — salt, sugar, pepper, tabasco, ketchup, etc. — and mix them in a bowl. Then the cadet would have to eat it. All of it.

The whole bar exam process is a white tornado. At the beginning, you stare down and wonder how you'll be able to consume all the material. Then you start plugging away, and though progress seems slow, little by little you make your way through the pile. Toward the end, you feel disgusting and ill, but you realize that getting through it is more about willpower and persistence than intellect or talent.

Much like law school, preparing for the bar exam is not hard so much as it's long and tedious. After nine weeks of studying, I am utterly, totally, sick of it. I'm sick of being stuck in the house, watching the beautiful summer days pass outside my window, as I hit "play" on yet another Barbri lecture (I listened to the lectures at home, an option I recommend if you're someone who can work at home without habitually ending up watching the Game Show Network). I'm sick of eating takeout. I'm sick of having to say "I'd love to go, but I have to study for the bar exam".

I hit the wall this past Wednesday — I just didn't feel like I could cram one more item into my brain. So for the last few days, I've just been taking it easy and goofing off. Next week, as I sit in air-conditioned discomfort in the Sacramento convention center, I will remember these days fondly.

To be fair, the study process is not totally without value. I've learned some useful things that I bypassed in law school. I also have a better sense of how different areas of the law fit together. I can't say whether I'll retain anything 10 days from now, but today, I'm competent to give legal advice.

A lawyer I know who took the California bar after moving from New York said "What's the big deal? If you study, you pass." I think he's pretty much right. The bar examiners make a deal with you: The bad news is that the exam covers a ridiculously broad range of topics — more than anyone could hope to retain. So if you think you have to learn all the material to pass, you're nuts. Because you can't, and you'll go crazy trying.

The good news is that they write the exam so it hits the same topics over and over, the same way. So studying the law is important, but studying the past exams is what helps you narrow your focus to a feasible territory.

On that point, I must give credit to the Barbri lecturers, who do a good job separating out the "must know" material from the "learn it if you can" material. The first amendment? Must know. The federal postal monopoly? Only if you have time.

I can't imagine anyone ever feels totally prepared for the bar. The best you can do is feel prepared enough. And that's fine, because as a pass / fail exam, there's no profit in overpreparation. Many of the bar takers I know, including myself, are lifelong academic overachievers (i.e. dorks) so it's required a bit of adjustment to turn off the part of our brains that wants to get an 'A'. Because there is no 'A' to get.

(Though I hear that if you do really well on the California bar exam, they solicit you to be an essay grader — if I find out that anyone I know accepts that offer, I will drive to their house and give them a massive wedgie.)

The last straw for me was a few days ago, when I emailed a friend to ask a question about free speech regulation. He told me he had had the exact same question, and had emailed Erwin Chemerinsky, who is a national constutitional law scholar and handles the Barbri con law lecture. Chemerinsky implied that it had no answer.

At that point, I knew it was time to put down my pencil and go outside.

Best of luck to everyone taking the exam next week.

JULY 26 UPDATE: Bar exam complete. Pretty much exactly what I expected. I think we can say that what's true of law school is also true of the bar exam: if you can get past the whining and griping, it's not that big a deal. The two months of bar exam preparation is far worse than the exam itself, that's for sure. Now if you'll excuse me ... I have to start the goofing-off part of my summer in earnest.

21 Jul 07 ::: Comments closed

I passed the California bar exam.

It was almost exactly four years ago that I literally woke up and had the idea to go to law school. And next week, I will take my oath and become an attorney.

Over time, I've found that a funny thing happens when you set long-term goals and reach them: by the time you get there, you've already started focusing on the next goal so it's hard to pause and appreciate the ground you've already covered.

Four years ago, the idea of going back to school after 12 yrs and becoming a California attorney seemed almost preposterously far-fetched. But here it is. So I should be pausing for a moment of self-congratulation.

But it doesn't feel right. And that's because I know quite a number of people from UCLA who didn't pass the bar exam. We stormed the beach together, struggled across the dunes, and reached the top of the hill, and just as we were about to complete the mission, they got picked off by a sniper.

It sucks. It sucks for them. And for me, it makes passing the bar exam seem less like an achievement and more like another instance of the unpredictable grading standards at work throughout law school. These are people who were plenty smart to pass. Everyone expected them to pass. But they didn't. And meanwhile, people who were not, shall we say, high achievers in law school did manage to pass.

Am I saying that people with low grades don't deserve to pass the bar? No. The bar exam has rules. When you take the exam, you agree to play by those rules. And whether you passed or you failed, you earned your results fair & square. I'm just saying that I probably underestimated the ability of the bar exam to confound one's expectations — in both positive & negative directions. On a different day, it could've been me.

So, I'm not ready to celebrate. I'm glad I passed. I'm ready to start working as an attorney. But this achievement is incomplete. I'm not ready to congratulate myself until I can congratulate all my friends. The cork stays in the champagne bottle until everyone makes it over the finish line.

To those who didn't pass: if you're crying, or yelling, or lying face-down in a puddle of Jack Daniel's — who could blame you. It sucks. It sucks to have gotten this far and just miss. It sucks to have made such an emotionally exhausting commitment to the exam the first time and now be called upon to repeat that performance. I won't say I know how it feels because I don't. But if you told me I had to take the bar exam again, I would definitely cry. And then crawl off to eat a six-pack of Swiss Miss pudding.

And I salute you. Because most of you will be signing up to retake the exam in February. And it is no small feat to pick up from this setback and get ready to do it all again, in the meantime experiencing all the collateral annoyances from not being a licensed attorney (e.g. the bump-up in salary you were counting on to help pay your student loans). It sucks. But keep at it. I am cheering for you.