Kennedy goes to China
October 22, 2008
A gibe at “self-important” law professors. A comparison of stare decisis to the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson (“Life is learned looking backwards. Life is lived going forwards”). A discussion of Eastern philosophy and a traveler’s moral versus legal responsibilities to a child about to fall into a well.
No, you haven’t fallen into a time tunnel and surfaced in the best coffeehouse of your law school days. Those themes were among the ones that Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy planned to weave into today’s keynote address at the dedication of mainland China’s first-ever “American-style” law school, the Peking University School of Transnational Law.
The school actually opened last month, with a “three-year, English-language J.D. curriculum” on the Shenzhen campus. Jeffrey S. Lehman, once the president of Cornell University and a former dean of the University of Michigan Law School, is its founding dean. About 55 students are enrolled.
According to a copy of his prepared remarks — which he addressed to “My fellow citizens of a world which must seek to become ever more peaceful and just through the Rule of Law” — Kennedy spoke about the roles of lawyers, judges, students and most especially the law itself.
Invoking the memory of Hitler and Stalin (but not, apparently, of events at Tiananmen Square, some 1,200 miles to the north), Kennedy cautioned against those “who think of the law simply in terms of raw power, who were willing to suppress, even to murder, those who asked for nothing more than simple justice.” He also warned about distortion and other, more subtle attacks.
“Your duty, your careers must be based on the idea that the Rule of Law is more than order,” Kennedy concluded. “It is justice. It is dignity. It is freedom and compassion for all of human kind.”
BARBARA GRZINCIC, Managing Editor/Law
Sphere: Related ContentIn Memoriam: Charlie Whitebread
September 19, 2008
Charles Whitebread, a man famous for his bow ties and sense of humor, died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif.
Those who had him as a law professor at U.Va. or U.S.C. will tell you about his signature phrases, like his raspy challenge to students: “Who’s in here?” Or (impersonating the parents of a juvenile delinquent) “We tried: God knows, we tried.”
Around these parts, though, more of us will remember him as the man who got us through a very, very dark time with his humorous BAR/BRI Criminal Law lectures.
The elements of kidnapping, he told those studying for the bar, was a) being a kid and b) napping. Getting a laugh out of that crowd was no easy task, but Charlie Whitebread could do it.
We will remember him fondly.
Hat tip: Abovethelaw.com
CHRISTINA DORAN, Assistant Legal Editor
Sphere: Related ContentUnmasking the trolls
August 1, 2008
Wired magazine reports a new wrinkle in the AutoAdmit case.
(A quick primer: AutoAdmit is a discussion board frequented by law students and pre-law college students. As on many sites where anonymity rules the day, some of the posts get pretty vitriolic. There’s much racially-, religiously- and gender-based nastiness. Two women sued (PDF) several of the anonymous commenters last year, alleging they completely trashed the women’s reputations by making comments on their appearance, propagating salacious stories about them, and suggesting that they should be raped. One woman spoke to The Washington Post and said she felt her job prospects had been damaged because potential employers turned up this material when they Googled her name.)
Now, lawyers for the women say they have identified some of the people behind the comments, “potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls’ budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial,” Wired writes.
The article says:
A federal judge ruled in January that the attorneys could serve subpoenas on ISPs and webmail providers. Using that power, the lawyers have unmasked some — though not all — of the AutoAdmit posters.
Now they’re asking the judge to give them additional time to try and determine the identities of the remaining defendants, who are currently being sued under their AutoAdmit handles: among others, PaulieWalnuts, Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey, The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah, Patrick Bateman and HitlerHitlerHitler.
What do you make of all this? Should these guys (people?) be unmasked? What does this case say about free speech, defamation and the Internet?
CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer
Sphere: Related ContentProfessor Obama
July 30, 2008
The New York Times has a story today about what Obama was like during his time teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. On the one hand, he was apparently an engaging professor, if a touch overly pleased with himself:
As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)
On the other hand, he sometimes got so wrapped up in the intellectual arguments surrounding an issue that he didn’t do anything about it:
While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.
What, if anything, do you think this all says about what kind of president Obama would be? A broader question: do academic types make good political leaders? Are there similarities between the skill set required to be a law professor and the one needed to be president? Or are we talking about two very different personality types here?
CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer
Sphere: Related ContentMultimedia: The laptop effect
July 29, 2008
As Danny Jacobs wrote in Tuesday’s paper, wireless access has been banned during the bar exam at the Baltimore Convention Center. That means 650 people who used their laptops on the essay portion of the exam had to upload their answers elsewhere by midnight.
I was on the scene this afternoon as hundreds of fatigued participants walked by. Even though they were in a rush, several laptop users were willing to talk about where they were planning to go for wireless access.
Check out the video and hear what some of them had to say.
RICHARD SIMON, Multimedia Reporter
Law schools now number 200
June 17, 2008
Last week, the United States became the first country to have 200 accredited law schools when the ABA gave provisional approval to two more in North Carolina.
According to this AP article:
For universities, a new law school is a lot more attractive financially than, say, spending money to make sure more undergraduates complete their degree within six years (national average: 57 percent). Law schools have big classes, and don’t need to provide much financial aid, because students are expected to borrow the money they need.
Borrowing to attend a private law school surged 25 percent in five years, to almost $88,000 in 2007, ABA figures show. For public law schools, the average was $57,170. And, while BigLaw salaries can hit $145,000 to $160,000, the median salary for new lawyers is less than half of that, at $62,000, the article says.
RICHARD SIMON, Multimedia Reporter
Sphere: Related ContentUMB Law School grads/politicians present at groundbreaking
April 1, 2008
At Monday’s opening/groundbreaking ceremony for Buildings II and III at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, BioPark in West Baltimore, three of the politicians on stage were UMB Law School graduates.
Governor Martin O’Malley (’88), Congressman Elijah Cummings (’76), and Senator Ben Cardin (’67) are all big supporters of UMB’s West Side development.
We found this interesting because it shows a sort of institutional loyalty to the University of Maryland, Baltimore, that many graduate students don’t have. Sure, you stay true to your law school, but does that mean you give back to the geeks in the labs over at the biophysics building? What about the med students or the social scientists? Are they all bound together by Terrapin Pride?
We caught up with Sen. Cardin briefly after the ceremony and the symbolic first shovelful of dirt, to ask him about this phenomenon.
“I owe a lot to [the University of Maryland], and my law school days were formative in giving me the tools to be analytical and persuasive,” he said. “It was life changing for me. It was there more than anywhere that everyone talked about and intended to solve the problems of the world.”
The Senator said that in his day, med students and law students would get together and talk idealistically about how to get things done.
“The medical students used our library, and we used theirs,” he said. “But we also had a bit of competition over who had the better campus coffee place.”
And in the end, are you wondering who won?
The Senator shrugged.
“Neither of us,” he said. “Lexington Market had the best coffee.”
ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer
Sphere: Related ContentU.S. News’ law school rankings
March 26, 2008
Wondering how your alma mater will fare in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report law school rankings? Well, wonder no longer, as the first page of the rankings has leaked.
Check it out. And thanks to AbovetheLaw.com for the info.
JOE BACCHUS, Web Specialist
Sphere: Related ContentTurning doubt into dough
March 25, 2008
Access Group, a non-profit student loan company, is running a contest to see which law student can produce the best video depicting worries during law school. The prize: A $10,000 scholarship.
The “One Less Worry Contest” plays off the company’s mission of “helping law students like you achieve your hopes and dreams with no worries.”
In my experience, this help usually comes at a 9.5% interest rate.
Whatever keeps you up at night, be it your class rank, anxiety over oral arguments or just the knowledge that you will soon be toiling even longer hours at a firm to pay back your Access Group loans, make a video about it for your chance to win some much-needed green.
The video, which should be no longer than four minutes, can be uploaded to this link on YouTube. (Don’t forget to read the contest rules and fine print — as every good lawyer should).
Entries will be received until June 15, and after Access Group picks 10 finalists, voting will begin July 1. The winner will be announced Aug. 1. One tip: make sure you make your movie after you finish your Admin Law outline.
Hat tip to Legal Blog Watch.
CHRISTINA DORAN, Assistant Legal Editor
Sphere: Related ContentPreparing for the legal profession
March 11, 2008
One of the most common complaints among young lawyers is not the high cost of obtaining a J.D. (though for some, including this writer, it ranks #1), but rather that they were not adequately prepared to actually practice law. In other words, law school teaches you how to think like a lawyer, but doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer.
One (relatively local) law school is trying to change that. US Newswire has reported that the Washington and Lee University School of Law is revamping its third-year curriculum. The Lexington, Va. school announced Tuesday that third year will be devoted to transitioning students from academia to the practice of law.
Dean Rodney A. Smolla calls the new third-year program a “creative blend of intellectually rigorous study of legal theory and doctrine—the traditional focus of law schools in the United States—with the development of professional identity, ethical sensibilities, problem-solving, and the exercise of judgment in action.”
In other words, through simulated and real-life experiences, law students will actually learn what it’s like to be a lawyer—both practically and professionally.
What do you think of Washington and Lee’s new curriculum?
Are they on to something, or is experience the best teacher?
CHRISTINA DORAN, Assistant Legal Editor
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