Influence-peddling at the University of Illinois with state politicians including now-disgraced Gov. Blagojevich, per a Chicago Tribune investigation:
What does it cost to get an unqualified student into the University of Illinois law school?
Five jobs for graduating law students, suggest internal e-mails released Thursday.
Paul Campos:
The only surprising thing about this stuff is that none of these bigwigs (including a law school dean — apparently she never learned to think like a lawyer) can ever seem to remember that government emails are subject to FOIA requests.
Also in Illinois, a furor has broken out over DePaul’s firing of its law dean, Glen Weissenberger (per Paul Caron) “for reporting truthful information to the ABA in connection with its reaccreditation site visit”. John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum:
For some time now, I’ve been arguing on this blog that the most powerful form of ethics teaching that occurs in law schools is the open and widespread gaming of numbers and statistics for rankings purposes. Students are taught that gaming the numbers and then concealing it, fibbing about it, or rationalizing it, is what grown-ups do for a living in the real world.
More: Above the Law (with emails from U. of I.); Prof. Bainbridge (recalling his days on U of I Law’s admissions committee); and see comments below on this post for views of the DePaul episode differing from those linked above.
Further: The U of I dean at the time says her email remarks were facetious and are being misinterpreted [David Hyman, Volokh]. And Brian Leiter (via Glenn Reynolds): “Attacking university officials over this scandal is like attacking the victim of a robbery for handing over his money…. And, by the way, the same story is waiting to be written about admissions at every state university in the country.”
Filed under: Illinois, law schools