Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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Kyle Graham kicked off the meme with examples that include “Guido Calabresi” = “Discourage Bail,” “Elizabeth Warren” = “Brazen Wealthier” and “Cass Sunstein” = “Insanest Cuss.” My contributions include “Randy Barnett” = “Nab Red Tyrant” and “Dale Carpenter” = “Parade Lectern.” If you’re wondering about rearrangements of my own name, by the way, the best one seems to be “Wastrel Loon.”
P.S. “Stephen Breyer” = “Hereby Repents” and more Supreme Court Justice anagram names.
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As noted earlier, last week U.N. Human Rights Council rapporteur James Anaya (who also happens to be a lawprof at the University of Arizona) declared the U.S. to be trampling the aboriginal land rights of Indian tribes. I have a new Daily Caller piece pointing out (as I detail at more length in Schools for Misrule) that the U.N.’s involvement with American law school projects is nothing new: “Now the plaintiff’s counsel [in the Western Shoshone claim] of a few years back re-surfaces as the official instrument of a U.N. body, a revolving-door arrangement that is actually quite typical of the international human rights establishment, where a rather small band of crusading law professors, ‘civil society’ activists and Guardian readers around the world seem to take turns investigating each others’, or as the case may be their own, countries for putative human rights violations.” (& Julian Ku, Opinio Juris)
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George Leef wonders whether economic necessity will drive them to radical, even Olsonian, lengths. [NRO "Phi Beta Cons"]
P.S. Ann Althouse wonders why, quizzed about the Elizabeth Warren brouhaha, law school administrators don’t have the courage of their oft-expressed convictions on minority recruitment. And see thoughts from John Rosenberg and Hans Bader at Minding the Campus.
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You might want to check out this Online Law Scholars Conference [via Reinsch, LLL] with talks by David Bernstein, Ilya Somin and Lee Otis.
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Walter Russell Mead weighs in ["First, Let’s Indenture All The Lawyers," The American Interest] Federal student loan program serves as enabler of insane law student debt burdens [Brian Tamanaha, "The Quickly Exploding Law Student Debt Disaster," Balkinization via Caron] Related: “Judge Tosses Lawsuit against Law School over Employment Stats” [WSJ Law Blog, WLF "Legal Pulse", earlier] “Remedies for Unreasonably Defective Law Schools” [Frances Zacher, Abnormal Use, more] And: A. Benjamin Spencer (Washington & Lee), “The Law School Critique in Historical Perspective” [SSRN via Caron]
Also, another review of Schools for Misrule is out, this one from Bradley Watson in the Claremont Review.
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More grist for a revised/expanded edition of Schools for Misrule:
“At Howard, they tell us as soon as we get there, ‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society.’ … that’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer, and that’s what my parents always were trying to be,” he said.
Kevin Cunningham, quoted on MSNBC (& Hans Bader).
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According to the Harvard Law School online catalog, the SRP is “a newly established clinical program” that “will provide students with the opportunity to obtain hands-on experience with shareholder rights work by assisting public pension funds in improving governance arrangements at publicly traded firms.”
Marty Lipton and others at Wachtell, Lipton don’t like the idea and criticize it here. More at NYT DealBook (via Bainbridge).
Reader J.B. emails to say:
Whatever one thinks of Wachtell’s substantive critique of the attack on classified/staggered boards, it’s kind of interesting for a law school to be promoting a “clinical program” in which the kids get to work for institutional investors with bajillions of dollars in assets (and, you know, the wherewithal to retain sophisticated counsel at market rates) rather than the sort of boring old indigent individuals that are the traditional law school clinic client base.
A different view: Max Kennerly.
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Legal academia, and the sector of legal journalism most closely aligned with its views, is too remote from practice, too wrapped in theory and too far left to have a good feel for how the current Supreme Court approaches legal issues. Thus argues Jonathan Adler, who notes that “In some corners, it’s more important to reconcile one’s claims with the writings of John Rawls than the opinions of John Roberts.” More: Mike Rappaport (noting that the right too has been influenced by legal academia’s “preference for broad overarching theories,” as on originalism), Peter Suderman, David Bernstein.
Updated twice: According to college paper Nota Bene, the student bar association Senate at George Washington University is asking the law school to consider a proposed policy which would attach substantial new restrictions to student decisions to invite speakers from “hate groups” to campus. (More: GW Patriot; a list of the asked-for restrictions, which include hiring security personnel at the expense of the inviting group and making “this is a hate group speaker” pre-announcements to audiences, is here; Nota Bene reports that the demand will not be considered this semester, and other sources say NB coverage has overstated how far the proposal managed to get). Making matters especially problematic, the blacklist would consist of groups designated as “hate groups” by Morris Dees’s Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] or the Anti-Defamation League.
Dees, long a deeply controversial public figure and polemicist, has been roundly criticized in recent years for expanding his list of “hate” and “extremist” groups, sent to law enforcement groups across the country, far beyond violent and criminal groups to include organizations and websites that advocate various (typically conservative) causes in a vehement and unpleasant manner, and thus offend liberal SPLC donors (and typically offend me as well). This year SPLC came in for widespread derision when it added a new category in its hate group report for “pickup artist” blogs, a target of feminist ire.
The demands for a policy change at GW were apparently triggered by an appearance on campus by the anti-gay Family Research Council, a spinoff of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family group. I have about as low an opinion of the FRC as it’s possible to have, but it’s not exactly to be confused with the Aryan Nations — major Republican politicians are willing to appear at its events, for example — and if you’re a student at a law school, it’s probably not a bad idea to be made aware that there are people out there with a wide range of views on the controversies of the day.
When I speak to audiences about the ideological law school atmosphere described in Schools for Misrule, I’m sometimes asked whether the pressures for conformity and silence are getting worse. Usually I argue the reverse, that law schools have tended to become more open in recent years to a broad spectrum of debate. If the advocates pushing the GWU initiative manage to get their proposal taken seriously by the law faculty, I may need to revise my thinking. [Updated 3/28 to reflect subsequent NotaBene report and questioning of its coverage; h/t Peter Bonilla, FIRE]
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Stephen Richer has some thoughts about why it was so easy for many law professors to miss the mood of the Supreme Court and of the country. Also some very kind words on Schools for Misrule [Forbes] And: don’t miss Jonathan Adler’s take.
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Many links that tend to harmonize with arguments made in Schools for Misrule, along with a few others:
Making the rounds:
A student organization at Penn Law created a poster for a fashion-law event playing off the well-known design of luggage-and-handbag purveyor Louis Vuitton. Lawyers for the luxury firm fired off a cease-and-desist letter, but the Penn law department declined to comply, a stance that Eugene Volokh finds persuasive: ” I think the use of the marks can’t qualify as dilution, is unlikely to confuse, and is likely to be a fair use in any event.” Another view: Ron Coleman (dilution a possibility).
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“A law student in Tennessee with $80,000 in education debt claims in a suit filed this week that her school should not have admitted her.” [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]
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Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.
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