The Marble and the Sculptor Keith Lee American Bar Association, November 2013, 180 pages, $24.95 I don’t like self-help books. They usually contain a single insight, repeated fifteen different ways, and padded out with anecdotes to fill a couple hundred pages. What might have made an excellent magazine article...
A lot of the law is extremely formulaic. True, human intelligence is required to spot issues, devise strategies, and (most importantly) persuade decisionmakers. But in its actual application, the law is often little more than a series of IF-THEN decisions. A computer could be programmed to do it. This is...
The other day, the Charleston School of Law was kind enough to invite me to speak to its student body as part of its Professionalism lecture series. My theme was, of course, professionalism in the law. But in the context of why we practice law. If you’re interested, have a...
Google analytics is a great tool. Among other things, it shows the search engine queries people use to find this blog. Which is a good way of figuring out who its audience is, and what they need to know. The queries aren’t as entertaining as they are over at Popehat,...
Yale Law School has announced that it will now offer a PhD in Law — apparently the first time a doctoral program in law has been offered in the United States. One can only ask “what for?” Ostensibly, the purpose of a PhD is to advance human knowledge. You get that...
Hey. Gen-X lawyer here. Could those of you whining about your law schools and sucky job market please shut up? Thanks. There’s something about the gripes of new and rising JDs that’s not unlike the same bleats we’re hearing from many “Occupy Wall Street” types: It’s the complaint that...
On the New York Times op-ed page today, Clifford Winston asks the question “Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?” The writer, an economist with the left-ish Brookings Institution think tank, answers with a resounding “no.” They only increase the cost of entry into the profession — and thus the...
Courthouse News reports that “a $200 million class action claims the New York Law School misrepresents post-graduate opportunities for lawyers and subjects ‘the overwhelming majority’ of its graduates to ‘years of indentured servitude’ after ‘saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt that will take literally decades...
Okay, see that XKCD cartoon up there? That’s not how law-school academia works. Law school academia is more like this: It’s not exactly news that law review articles don’t carry the same weight in their relevant field as, say, scientific papers published in a peer-reviewed journal. Ask any practicing lawyer...
Real nice, Google. Because we were bored out of our skull this afternoon, we checked this blog’s stats on Google Analytics. Browsing through the various keywords people have used to find this blog over the past year, all we can say is “The hell is wrong with you people?” Leaving...
The New York Times had an interesting data crunch yesterday called “The Lawyer Surplus, State by State.” Economic consultants EMSI estimated how many new jobs for lawyers there are going to be each year, in the near future, in each state. Then they used the actual number of bar...
The law is an amazing profession, but it’s not for everyone. In fact, it’s not for the vast majority of people. And when it’s not a good fit, the downside is awful. Mismatched lawyers are miserable. Their lives can really suck. They may be very good at what they...
In today’s environment, where law schools are churning out way more lawyers than the market really wants, plenty of law students and recent grads are wondering if it’s really worth it. We’re asked this question, in various forms, all the time. And we see it asked every day on various...
For a while there, it seemed like not a day went by without us reading of some firm or other laying off a mess of lawyers. Things have changed. Now, it seems as if not a day goes by without us reading of some law student getting upset at the...
Note to incoming first-year law students: The law itself is not terribly difficult. We lecture to schoolkids from time to time, and they seem to get the concept pretty easily when we explain that the law is nothing more than the rulebook for how to play the game of...
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