Overlawyered » law schools

Law students sue over bad grades

Walter Olson — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:32:17 +0000

The former Texas Southern students say their D on Contracts was arbitrary and capricious. [Houston Chronicle] Per @tedfrank, “Doesn’t it sort of prove you deserve the bad law-school grade when you bring a frivolous lawsuit over it?”

“Never let law profs near the Oval Office”

Walter Olson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:33:33 +0000

My Cato colleague Gene Healy points out that President Obama is the fourth chief executive who also taught constitutional law, joining William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton. “Taft did comparatively little damage, but the rest hardly inspire confidence that familiarity with constitutional scholarship encourages fidelity to the national charter.” [Washington Examiner] He lets me have a parting shot:

My Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson, author of “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America”, explains that “legal academia rewards cleverness in coming up with strained arguments for ideologically favored (or just expedient) positions; marginalizes as eccentric thinkers who favor original understanding as a guide” to the Constitution and often reduces law to “politics by other means.”

Unfortunately, that training has served Obama well.

Tags: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, constitutional law, law schools

Some heroes for our time

Walter Olson — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:53:06 +0000

My new post at Cato at Liberty is on Italian labor law professors Pietro Ichino and Carlo Dell’Aringa, who live under police protection because of their support for liberalization of the job market; two other professors, Massimo D’Antona and Mario Biagi, have been killed by Red Brigades gunmen. More: Coyote.

Tags: employment at will, Italy, law schools, terrorism

David Segal on law school economics

Walter Olson — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:39:30 +0000

The New York Times reporter whose series on law schools has set off a furor lately talks with Bloomberg’s Lee Pacchia about the schools’ high cost, the role of the ABA as accreditor, and the competition for prestige that shapes many of the schools’ actions.

Tags: law schools

Law schools roundup

Walter Olson — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 05:14:47 +0000

Second Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes, at AALS meeting, gives legal academics frank appraisal of where law school needs fixing, to the delight of many of us who’ve advanced a broadly similar critique [Caron, Above the Law, Sloan/NLJ]
“Let’s Regulate Harder. That’ll Provide More Jobs For Young Law Grads!” [my new Cato post, citing an official from the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT)]
ABA accreditation rules discourage reliance on less expensive (and often more practice-oriented) adjunct faculty [latest in David Segal series on law schools in New York Times; Catherine Dunn, Corporate Counsel] Plus: video of law school accreditation panel at Federalist Society national convention;
Law school without undergrad degree first? Many other advanced countries do it that way [McGinnis and Mangas, Northwestern dean Dan Rodriguez response, M&M rejoinder; ABA Journal on views of NYLS's Rick Matasar] Yet more on law school reform [Jim Chen via Caron, Caron, Mark Yzaguirre, Frum Forum]
Complete point-counterpoint at ELF last summer on Tulane law clinic fracas (I’m counterpoint) [ELF]
Why not rob the rich? Ask Prof. Leiter [Sullivan]
Does law and economics amount to “studies in social engineering”? [Kenneth Anderson]

Tags: bar associations, law schools, Second Circuit

At “Minding the Campus” on Iowa case

Walter Olson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:30:14 +0000

I’ve got a new piece up at Minding the Campus, the higher education reform site, with more to say about Teresa Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law charging ideological discrimination because of her conservative beliefs. Earlier here.

Tags: discrimination law, Iowa, law schools

Law schools roundup

Walter Olson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:13:04 +0000

New York Times sets off furor with article on role of ABA accreditation in driving up law school costs, a theme explored by several recent authors including me in Schools for Misrule [David Segal/NYT, Somin, Bader/Examiner, Above the Law, Gideon Kanner, Matt Leichter/AmLaw, Macchiarola/Minding the Campus, Brian Tamanaha (on ABA dispute with fledgling Duncan Law School)] ABA president claims high tuitions unrelated to accreditation rules [Reuters]
Related: “Data Show Feds Will Lend $54.3 Billion to U.S. Law Schools by 2020″ [Matt Leichter, AmLaw]
The politics of the AALS, which just held its annual meeting in Washington [Bainbridge repost]
Former North Dakota attorney general files spate of age bias suits after many schools turn him down for law professor position [TaxProf]
“Some Words of Advice for Law Students, from 1811” [Kyle Graham (Santa Clara), guestblogging at Concurring Opinions last month; among topics of Graham's other posts were the famous tort case of Summers v. Tice and suspect kinds of law review articles]
Prof. Lawrence Connell’s fight with Widener U. and its offended dean in “wild hypotheticals” case [Hans Bader/Minding The Campus, earlier here, here, etc.]

Tags: age discrimination, bar associations, colleges and universities, law schools

Eighth Circuit: Applicant for lawprof position can sue school over bias against conservatives

Walter Olson — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:18:36 +0000

Update: Adam Liptak covers this case today in the New York Times and generously quotes me:

Walter Olson, a fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian group, and the author of “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America,” said there was nothing unusual about the number of Republicans on Iowa’s law faculty.

“What would count as freakish would be to find two dozen registered Republicans on a big law faculty,” Mr. Olson said. “Law schools are always setting up committees and task forces to promote diversity on their faculty, which can serve to conceal an absence of diversity in how people actually think.”…

Mr. Olson said he had mixed feelings about the Eighth Circuit’s decision, saying it may have identified an instance of a real problem while allowing it to be aired in the wrong forum.

“I have serious misgivings about asking the courts to fix this through lawsuits,” Mr. Olson said. “It threatens to intrude on collegiality, empower some with sharp elbows to sue their way into faculty jobs, invite judges into making subjective calls of their own which may reflect their assumptions and biases, all while costing a lot of money and grief.”

“At the same time,” he added, “there’s a karma factor here. Law faculties at Iowa and elsewhere have been enthusiastic advocates of wider liability for other employers that get sued. They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?”

(& Althouse, Leef/Phi Beta Cons, Horwitz, Instapundit, State Bar of Michigan, Bainbridge, Elie Mystal/Above the Law, Kent Scheidegger/Crime and Consequences, Andrew Kloster/FIRE and earlier, Federalist Society blog, earlier)

[Original post:]

“A woman who alleges she was denied a job at the University of Iowa College of Law because of her conservative politics can proceed with a discrimination lawsuit against the school’s former dean, a federal appeals court ruled [last month].” [WSJ Law Blog, Ryan Koopmans/On Brief: Iowa Appellate Blog, Risch/PrawfsBlawg, Ilya Somin/Volokh (arguing "that ideological discrimination in faculty hiring by state universities doesn't violate the Constitution")] The court found it significant that of approximately fifty professors who vote on faculty hiring matters at the school, per the lawsuit’s allegations, “46 of them are registered as Democrats and only one, hired 20 years ago, is a Republican.” (Who was the one?)

In Schools for Misrule last year, I made the case that prominent law schools suffer from an egregious ideological imbalance, to the point where their own declared mission suffers in a number of ways. Beyond that, I agree that there is a particular logic in asking government-run institutions, such as the University of Iowa, to be open to a plurality of legitimate viewpoints. Even so — as readers who remember an earlier book of mine, The Excuse Factory, will have guessed — I have severe doubts that lawsuits by disappointed job applicants will really do much to improve fairness in the workplace and counteract arbitrariness in hiring decisions. Such lawsuits seem equally likely to provide a legal weapon to contentious applicants whether or not their talents are clearly superior, invite outside arbiters to apply subjective standards of their own, and take a great toll in collegiality, time, expense and emotional wear and tear, all while encouraging defensive employment practices that help no one. Still, this is not the view of law faculties at places like Iowa, which have tended to cheer on the expansion of employer liability year after year with great enthusiasm. So it may be rather hard for them to mount a convincing complaint when they are made to drink from the cup they have prepared for the rest of society.

Tags: Iowa, law schools, Schools for Misrule, The Excuse Factory, workplace

McDonald’s and the legal academy

Walter Olson — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:55:16 +0000

Another law professor finds the hot-coffee and obesity lawsuits admirable, and Ted Frank once more begs to differ.

Tags: hot coffee, law schools, McDonald's, obesity

Remembering Larry Ribstein

Walter Olson — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:54:58 +0000

Legal academia is in mourning for one of its most distinguished and multitalented figures, Larry Ribstein, a key scholar in corporate law and a provocative and rigorous exponent of law and economics thinking. Larry was an early blogger (at Ideoblog and more recently Truth on the Market), an influential critic of prosecutorial and regulatory excess, and a key voice in the debate on what law schools should do. He was also, I am grateful to say, an important friend of this site over many years. Like so many others, I had reason to appreciate his generous gifts of time and engagement, most recently in February when he helped arrange my U. of Illinois speech on Schools for Misrule, for which he served as the friendly counter-speaker, and led me around Champaign-Urbana, to which he was the perfect guide.

Some samplings of the outpouring around the blogosphere: Geoffrey Manne and Paul Caron (with tribute roundups), Steve Bainbridge, Tom Kirkendall (”a teacher who understood precisely what his life’s purpose was and pursued it with an endearing combination of intellectual curiosity, vitality, humanity and good humor,” Dave Hoffman (”a galvanic force… a great and unique voice”), Ted Frank, Henry Manne, Andy Morriss (”I suspect he’s already been named Associate Archangel for Research in heaven and doubled scholarly output there.”). A memorial service is planned at George Mason.

Tags: about the site, law schools

Overlawyered » law schools

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