To Everything there is a Season

Obviously it has been a while since I have posted on this blog. Why is that? I suppose it is because I have accomplished much of what I wanted to with Law Career Blog as a solo blog. I felt I had important things to say on teaching and classroom etiquette; on law career decisions; on law firm practice; on mentoring, and more. And I have said many of them, so there you have it.

I am very pleased, though, that my posts continue to draw strong traffic month after month, year after year. What I have said here remains relevant, I think--but that does not mean I need to always rehash the same ground, all in the name of having new posts just for the sake of it.

So for now, my existing posts stand for what they are, and I am proud of them. Call me the Antiblogger, I suppose: I am blogging by not blogging.

In any event, the following is a list of posts that have generated the most interest from readers, some posts on subjects I think are particularly important, and some that are just fun. Enjoy!

Posts on Law School in General:

In a series of posts, I argued that if we want law schools to truly provide the academic and practical education that students (and employers) expect and demand, we should consider adding a fourth year to the law school curriculum. Not surprisingly, my proposal was universally condemned. Check out the comments.

See Is the Third Year of Law School a Waste of Time and Money? and Is Law School Itself a Waste of Time?

I think that too often, law students don't step back and think about law school and their future careers in a broader perspective. That's understandable given the workload in law school, but it's still unfortunate. My friend and colleague Gene Theroux visited Mississippi College School of Law once to speak to students about his storied career--he opened the first western law firm offices in China and the Soviet Union--and he had wonderful advice for them. Ostensibly the talk was about globalization, but the heart of his message was to follow your heart and practice law the right way and for the right reasons. Sometimes we need to put our cynicism aside and hear things like what he said that day.

See Theroux Part Deux

Posts on LL.M. Degrees:

This trilogy of posts is perhaps the most popular series of posts on this blog--which proves that good things really do come in threes. Lots of discussion in the comments. See The Pros and Cons of LL.M.s, LL.M. Redux and LL.M.s Part 3.

Posts on Law School Exams, Teaching, and Class Strategies

Bainbridge v. Bowman. I wrote a law review article entitled The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools--a piece I am quite proud of. In it, I use traditional neoclassical trade theory to analyze the advantages of junior and senior law faculty and make some recommendations regarding law school teaching. Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA saw it, and he absolutely hated it. This posts includes our dialogue.

How to Improve your Law School Exams Grades. This wasn't a terribly controversial post--or so I thought until I received scathing comments two years after I posted it. Some fun back and forth on that one. Maybe I should've retitled the post Bowman v. Someone Very Angry.

Law School Orientation Advice. Pretty self-explanatory. My own favorite piece of advice: Don't spill a plate of food on your law school dean at the welcome reception. I actually did that--but lucky for me, I still graduated.

Computer-Free Week and Computer-Free Week, Part 2. There is a good deal of concern in the legal academy about computer use in the classroom. Is it beneficial? Is it harmful or disruptive? So one time I asked students not to use computers for one week to see what would happen. The results were pretty interesting, and as a teacher I found the feedback via the comments very useful. Perhaps the most interesting result was that student comments revealed just how prevalent the consumer mentality is among students--namely, I paid my tuition, so I can do what I want in class.

The Dilbertic Method. I definitely like this post about parallels between Dilbert's boss and the Socratic method. If you want to see the Dilbert cartoon I am talking about, you have to click the link in the article and then enter in the cartoon's run date on the Dilbert site.

Posts on Law Firms:

Much of the attraction to, and frustration with, big law firms has to do with the money they pay their associates. So I wrote some pieces on that subject--something I have firsthand knowledge about.

See Of Law Firm Culture and Compensation Schemes, The Problem of Law Firm Salary Distributions, and Big Firm Economics 101.

In another post, I wrote about associate pay and stress levels. In light of the recent savage downturn in the employment market, this post is perhaps more relevant than ever. See Why Associates Have More Stress than Partners.

On Interview and Job Strategies and Techniques

Job Interview Do's and Don't's. The name of the post says it all.

What NOT to do as a Summer Associate. You'd be surprised what some people do. Don't be one of them.

Posts on Movies:

Finally, I have had some fun with movies on this blog, and for some reason they were always movies starring George Clooney. First, I blogged about Syriana--see Syriana Misrepresents International Lawyers.

Then I wrote a whole slew of posts on Michael Clayton--a movie that had a lot to say about what it is (and is not) like to be a lawyer. I was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune about the Michael Clayton series of posts. See the following (not too originally entitled) posts:

Clooney v. Clayton, which is my review of the movie

Clooney v. Clayton, Part 2, about hyperbole in legal dramas

Clooney v. Clayton, Part 3, on whether there is such a thing as a law firm "fixer"

Clooney v. Clayton, Part 4, on the perverse incentive/reward structure of law practice

Clooney v. Clayton, Part 5, on how law practice affects your family life

Clooney v. Clayton, Part 6, regarding legal ethics

Clooney v. Clayton--Again, regarding my Chicago Tribune Interview

* * * *

So for now, that is where things stand. I hope you enjoy reading these posts as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Greg

The Most Important Day of Class

Last week was my first week of classes for the 2008-2009 academic year, and I was all ready to write a post called "The Most Important Day of Class." The whole premise was that the first day of class is the most important day of class for the whole term. But I didn't write that post, because I decided I was wrong.

The first day of class is not the most important day of class. The second day is.

Here's what I mean. The first day is important, because on that day the prof is likely to explain what the course is intended to be like. You're also likely to be treated to a lecture on why the course is the most important course you will ever take in law school, and perhaps your whole life. I'm exaggerating, but not overly so. This is called selling the course--and it happens not only in electives, but also in mandatory courses. I certainly do it. I think it helps students see where the course fits in the grand scheme of things, and it gives them a sense of what I think of the subject and why I am teaching it. And I do hope it generates a little excitement to get us all through the drier parts of the course. (And if you are in law school, you know some of it is dry.)

But that first class is often an anomoly. It's on the second day that students are more likely to get their first glimpse of a more average class--no calling of the roll, no grand views of the law. Instead, it's on to theory, doctrine, and the briefing of cases.

So for those of you in law school, pay close attention in those early days. And mark your calendars for class #2.

The Benefits of Senior, Junior, and Adjunct Law Faculty

There was an interesting post on the Law Librarian Blog this week concerning the benefits of senior, junior, and adjunct faculty in the classroom. The post can be linked to here. This is a subject that interests me greatly, and readers will remember that I recently wrote a law review article (in the BYU Education and Law Journal) about junior faculty teaching. You can link to my full article here, and to my previous blog posts on the article here and here. The latter post includes an exchange with UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge.

The long and short of it is that this Law Librarian Blog post reviews some of the current scholarship on law faculty teaching by senior, junior, and adjunct professors and provides some interesting commentary on this scholarship. Most interesting, perhaps, is the blog's observation that there seems to be little academic literature on the benefits of senior faculty teaching. Personally, I think this is because the common wisdom in the legal academy is that senior faculty are better teachers all around, so why write about it? I disagree with this view, however--and if you are interested in seeing why, look at my BYU article.

Bainbridge v. Bowman

My law review article on junior law faculty, The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools, 2008 BYU Educ. & L.J. 171, was commented on recently by Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA School of Law. It's fair to say he did not like it--his post on the article can be linked to here and reads, in its entirety, as follows:

Via Paul Caron, I learned of Gregory Bowman’s article The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools, 2008 BYU Educ. & L.J. 171, in which Bowman argues:

In the ongoing debate about how to improve law school teaching, there is a general consensus that law schools should do more to train junior faculty members how to teach. While this may be the case, this consensus inadvertently leads to an implicit assumption that is not true—that in all facets of law teaching, junior faculty are at a disadvantage compared to senior faculty. In fact, there are aspects of law teaching for which junior faculty can be better suited than their senior colleagues. This Article reviews scholarship concerning law teaching and identifies three teaching factors that generally favor junior law faculty: generational proximity to the law school student body; recency of law practice experience as junior practitioners; and lower susceptibility to the problem of conceptual condensation - extreme depth of subject matter knowledge that makes it difficult to see subjects from the students’ perspective.

This Article employs the economic concepts of (a) economies of scale or productive efficiency and (b) absolute and comparative advantage to suggest how these junior faculty advantages could be harnessed to improve law school teaching. With respect to productive efficiency, it is suggested that greater intra-faculty dialogue can increase a law faculty’s output of effective teaching. Currently, senior faculty members often provide assistance or advice to junior faculty in areas of senior faculty expertise or advantage—such as depth of knowledge in a course’s subject matter—but this is largely a one-way flow of information. However, if junior faculty were also to provide insight and advice to senior faculty regarding areas of junior faculty advantage, the quality of law school teaching might be significantly enhanced. Junior-senior faculty dialogue might be promoted through a variety of means, including faculty workshops and even perhaps teaching reviews of senior faculty by junior faculty.

With respect to the concepts of absolute and comparative advantage, this Article suggests that law school teaching could be improved through the specialization of teaching functions. Instead of professors individually teaching separate courses, professors might coordinate their teaching (that is, team-teach) across a number of courses in the law school curriculum, as a means to more effectively harness the respective strengths (and minimize the respective weaknesses) of junior and senior faculty in the classroom. Through the leveraging of junior faculty advantages, overall law school teaching might be significantly improved. This Article concludes by discussing the implications of these recommendations for law school culture in general and for the legal profession as a whole.

The trouble is that I don’t buy any of the alleged advantages Bowman says junior teachers possess. As for “generational proximity to the law school student body,” it often translates into difficulty for the young teacher to gain respect from the students. Anyway, it seems more relevant to dating than teaching. As for “recency of law practice experience as junior practitioners,” most law professors (at elite schools, anyway) come into practice with only a few years of practice experience. Being bottom man on a deal or litigation team fora couple of years doesn’t translate into meaningful knowledge. At best, it gives you a few war stories. Personally, I’ve learned a lot more that I use in the classroom from consulting than I ever did in practice. Since sniors likely have more consulting opportunities than juniors, this is at best a wash. Finally, as for “lower susceptibility to the problem of conceptual condensation - extreme depth of subject matter knowledge that makes it difficult to see subjects from the students’ perspective,” I’d rather know too much then too little. When I was just starting out, I lived in dread of the student question for which I had no answer. Today, it almost never happens.

* * * *

Needless to say, I disagree with his critique, and I commented on his post as follows:

Thanks very much for the post about my BYU article. I appreciate your comments, and I have some thoughts in response.

First, with respect to generational proximity, you note that this “often translates into difficulty for the young teacher to gain respect from the students.” I agree with you. But this does not mean that understanding student mindsets better—due to generational proximity—is not an advantage. We accept the notion of generation gaps in our society, so why would this not have an effect in the classroom? As law professors, we are trying to reach an adult population of students who at times are disinclined to accept our views and the large workloads we impose in class. If junior professors understand student mindsets better, won’t that help counter that? I am not at all suggesting that more senior professors cannot do this just as well; rather, what I am saying is that as professors become more generationally distant from their students, it may take more active effort for them to stay closely tuned to student mindsets. And that is a comparative disadvantage—more input needed for the same output. In the article I discuss how this particular junior faculty advantage might be leveraged to improve law school teaching.

Your second criticism concerns the value of junior professors’ recent law practice experience. You point out, rightly, that “most law professors (at elite schools, anyway) come into [teaching] with only a few years of practice experience.” But I disagree with your judgment that that “being bottom man on a deal or litigation team doesn’t translate into meaningful knowledge.” For one thing, I learned a lot in my first two years as a corporate lawyer. For another, what will all of our students be when they get out of law school? Junior lawyers of one sort or another. So can’t junior practitioner experience help professors contextualize class material in a way that is relevant and accessible to students? And if a junior professor has done that very type of work within the past 5 years, rather than 20 or 30 years ago, won’t that resonate more with students? Again, this is not to ignore the many benefits of seniority or experience, and it is not to say that more senior faculty can’t work to keep their fingers on the pulse of modern junior associate practice. But they will have to work at it, and not come to it more naturally, as junior faculty often will do.

Third, regarding conceptual condensation, you simply note that you’d “rather know too much than too little.” I absolutely agree. Touting professorial ignorance as a virtue would be flat out dangerous, and I expressly disavow that in my article. But my point is not what we know as professors—the point is how effectively we convey that knowledge to our students. Knowing the answers to all student questions is a very different thing from being able to see issues from the level of student neophytes. I think many students have had professors in law school who were clearly brilliant but were hard to follow in class. And that was not because the students were all stupid. It was in many cases because professors were talking on a higher plane of knowledge than their students. Again, I am in no way saying that senior professors, with more depth of knowledge, cannot communicate effectively in the classroom. But I am saying that they are more likely than junior professors to take mental shortcuts that are clear to them but not to their students, and that they therefore will have to put more effort into guarding against that than junior faculty.

My article is, of necessity, dealing with generalities. But the one-way flow of information and feedback from senior faculty to junior faculty is a widespread characteristic of American law schools, and there is a casual dismissiveness of what junior faculty may have to offer in the classroom. If junior faculty as a whole bring particular teaching skills or strengths to the table—and I think they do—then we do ourselves and our students a grave disservice by ignoring this.

Thanks very much again for your post and your feedback.

* * * *

You be the judge--what do you, the reader, think?

More on the College Cost Reduction and Access Act

So after a very busy April and de facto blog holiday (blogiday?), I'm back to posting. Among other things, I will be taking a group of law students to Seoul, Korea to study this summer. That will be a lot of fun and the source of posts over the summer. But today's topic is something I have posted on in the past: law school debt and the College.

In September 2007 I blogged about the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (CCRA), which has been hailed in many quarters as "the single largest investment in higher education since the GI Bill." There's been a lot written about it; a good place to start, I suppose, is my September post, which gives a summary and links to some other very useful information online.

And then there's the recent post on the CCRA by nonprofit lawyer and blogger Fannie, who runs the blog Fannie's Room. Her comments on the CCRA are great (and more than a little frustrating. Anyone interested in the CCRA and student debt loads definitely needs to check it out.

More posts soon.

2009 U.S. News Law School Rankings--Peer Reputational Rankings

Yesterday I posted about the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings for law schools. Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog has posted a complete list of schools ranked only by their academic peer reputation. The results--located here--are extremely interesting, since rankings by peer reputation vary (sometimes significantly) from overall rankings. Remember that peer reputation is one of the most heavily weighted factors in the U.S. News rankings, so this particular variable matters a great deal.

In particular, check out the comments to Caron's post. A difference of one-tenth of a point can mean a huge move up or down with respect to ranking within this variable.

2009 U.S. News Law School Rankings

U.S. News & World Report has published its annual rankings of law schools, but the ABA Journal reports that bloggers (again) beat U.S. News to the punch with leaked rankings. The U.S. News rankings can be linked to here; an ABA Journal article on the rankings (and links to the leakers) is online here.

Much is made annually of the rankings. Many observers are critical, and some say they do not matter. But for better or worse, they do, since many current and potential students, current and potential faculty members, and current and potential donors pay attention to them.

My view is that the rankings can matter far less at the top than they do at the bottom. Harvard is not #1. Does that deter people from going to Harvard? No. NYU and Columbia traded places this year. So what? They are in the top of the top. A slip from the top 10 to the top 30 can be a crisis, but that happens not too often, I think. And as Theodore Seto has pointed out in his article Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings (available on SSRN here--I highly recommend it), much of what affects a law school's rankings is outside that school's control.

I also think that what matters more than year-to-year shifts are mid- or long-term trends. A school may misreport and fall from tier 2 to tier 3, or may have a temporary spike due to a new building, or some such thing that has a short-term impact for good or ill. But what really matters is a school's position over a period of years. It's like global warming in that sense. What matters is not the weather in any given year. What matters is climate change over a period of years. "Climate" can be defined as the "average of weather." Perhaps a law school's "real" ranking for U.S. News purposes can be defined as its average ranking over a period of years. So that in any given year, a school like George Mason's rise in the rankings might not mean much--but its climb in the rankings over the past decade and more is decidedly significant.

There's one other thing about these U.S. News rankings that is extremely interesting compared to years past: the online version can be used to rank schools in ALL tiers. In years past the 3rd and 4th tiers were listed alphabetically only. But now, schools in the lower tiers apparently can be ranked. And in my opinion that is where the rankings can really matter, and perhaps be the difference between life and death of a school, or good fundraising versus tuition-dependence, or strong recruiting versus weak recruiting (of both faculty and students). If you are #1, or #3, or #9, yes, that matters. But it matters much more, I think, whether your school is in the 3rd or 4th tier--and where in that tier. If you are in the 4th tier, you'd much, much prefer to be at the top than at the bottom. At the top, you can claim to be "on the cusp" of a move up. But at the bottom, or in the middle, that's a much harder argument to make.

Mississippi Secunda and the Lateral Market of Doom

My friend and soon-to-be ex-Mississippian Paul Secunda has written an excellent article on negotiating the vagaries (treacheries?) of the law school lateral hiring market. The article is available on SSRN here. I highly recommend it as general reading for pretty much anyone interested in how law schools work--students, professor wannabees, current profs, and so on.

As Paul points out in the article, there has been a good deal of commentary on the entry-level hiring market for law faculty, but there is a paucity of literature on the lateral hiring market (the market for law profs who move from one school to another). So Paul, who is in the process of moving from the University of Mississippi School of Law to Marquette University Law School, has bravely set out to rectify that.

Personally, I think the article is great for a number of reasons. First, as already stated, it is a great resource. Second, it is an easy and fun read--not a common characteristic of scholarly writing. Third, while the advice is focused specifically on the law school lateral hiring market, some of the advice translates well to any interviewing scenario. Especially helpful, I think, is Paul's point that many of the variables in the hiring process are beyond the interviewee's control. Understand that, accept it, and focus instead on the factors you can control. That likely will increase your chances of success, and it certainly will reduce your stress level a good bit.

And finally, the article is a perfect example of how blogging can directly promote scholarship: parts of the article appeared as a series of blog posts by Paul on Concurring Opinions (see his first of eleven posts here). After all, novels by Dickens first appeared in serialized form, so why not law review articles? Dickens might even have been a blogger were he alive today--although perhaps not a law prof.

Law is Cool

I've added a new student blog to my blog roll. Law is Cool features a whole slew of law students from law schools in Canada, and it has a nice, eclectic blend of posts. Check out the March 8, 2008 post called Virtual Genocide in the U.S. No, it's not a political screed--just funny.

Most interesting to me are the podcasts. Check out Podcast Episode #7. It features Law is Cool bloggers commiserating about their workload, stress, and general level of exhaustion. Which I find very heartening. If these folks were having an easier time of it in Canada, I think U.S. law schools might be in trouble--there might be a mass transfer of U.S. law students to Canadian schools. (Actually, I'll bet many Americans would like the U.S. to export thousands of future lawyers to Canada.) I know that when I was a law student, I would've been tempted by the lure of kinder, gentler law schools in the Great White North. But fortunately--I mean, alas--that is not the case.

Potpourri Part 2

As a follow-up to my last two posts (here and here), my latest law review article, The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty in the Classroom: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools, was recently used as a discussion piece at a junior faculty forum held at Stetson University College of Law. That forum essentially was a pan-Florida conference on the role of junior faculty in law schools. Professor Joe Morrissey of Stetson asked whether my law review article could be used as a discussion piece at the forum. I of course was highly honored and said yes.

Professor Morrissey is active in the Association of American Law Schools' (AALS) Section on New Law Professors, and he wrote about the Stetson forum and my article in the section's annual newsletter. I have posted the newsletter article online here, with the permission of Professor Morrissey and the section. You can can link to my full law review article here.

It perhaps smacks of blatant self-promotion (I generally prefer my self-promotion to be subtle), but I was really pleased that my article was used at the Stetson junior faculty forum. My friend and fellow blogger Professor Paul Secunda of the University of Mississippi School of Law (who is moving to Marquette University Law School in the fall) has said that a virtue of legal scholarship is that it often seeks to solve problems of practical and social relevance. I agree with him, and what I find gratifying about the use of my law review article at Stetson is that perhaps the article might make a difference for some teachers in the classroom--and thus for law schools in general, and their students, and their future clients. Idealistic and quixotic, I know, but no one ever makes a difference by dreaming small.

The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty

As I write this post I am sitting in my hotel room in New York, where I am attending the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) annual meeting. The theme of this year's meeting is "Reassessing Our Roles as Scholars and Educators in Light of Change." There certainly is a lot of change occurring at American law schools these days, and that topic is a key focus of this blog.

Because of my interest in this subject, I am speaking at the conference on a panel sponsored by the AALS Section on New Law Professors, entitled New Law Faculty as Catalysts for Change. The title of my piece is The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty in the Classroom: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools. The paper can be accessed online from my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page here.

This piece is actually a blend of two areas of interest to me: international trade theory, and law school teaching theory and practice. My piece, as the name indicates, applies the concepts of comparative and absolute advantage to the subject of law school teaching, to see what they might tell us about how junior faculty can be used to improve law school teaching and how we might rethink law school teaching overall. Here's an abstract of the article:

In the ongoing debate about how to improve law school teaching, there is a general consensus that law schools should do more to train junior faculty members how to teach. While this may be the case, this consensus inadvertently leads to an implicit assumption that is not true—that in all facets of law teaching, junior faculty are at a disadvantage compared to senior faculty. In fact, there are aspects of law teaching for which junior faculty can be better suited than their senior colleagues. This Article reviews scholarship concerning law teaching and identifies three teaching factors that generally favor junior law faculty: generational proximity to the law school student body; recency of law practice experience as junior practitioners; and lower susceptibility to the problem of “conceptual condensation”—extreme depth of subject matter knowledge that makes it difficult to see subjects from the students’ perspective.

This Article employs the economic concepts of (a) economies of scale or productive efficiency and (b) absolute and comparative advantage to suggest how these junior faculty advantages could be harnessed to improve law school teaching. With respect to productive efficiency, it is suggested that greater intra-faculty dialogue can increase a law faculty’s output of effective teaching. Currently, senior faculty members often provide assistance or advice to junior faculty in areas of senior faculty expertise or advantage—such as depth of knowledge in a course’s subject matter—but this is largely a one-way flow of information. However, if junior faculty were also to provide insight and advice to senior faculty regarding areas of junior faculty advantage, the quality of law school teaching might be significantly enhanced. Junior-senior faculty dialogue might be promoted through a variety of means, including faculty workshops and even perhaps teaching reviews of senior faculty by junior faculty.

With respect to the concepts of absolute and comparative advantage, this Article suggests that law school teaching could be improved through the specialization of teaching functions. Instead of professors individually teaching separate courses, professors might coordinate their teaching (that is, team-teach) across a number of courses in the law school curriculum, as a means to more effectively harness the respective strengths (and minimize the respective weaknesses) of junior and senior faculty in the classroom. Through the leveraging of junior faculty advantages, overall law school teaching might be significantly improved. This Article concludes by discussing the implications of these recommendations for law school culture in general and for the legal profession as a whole.

(Note: If you are not already a user of SSRN you will need to register to use SSRN, but the registration is easy, and it's free. For those unfamiliar with SSRN, it's an online network through which scholars distribute and share up-to-the-minute research. It's a great and free resource for scholarship in the social sciences.)

Also on the panel with me are Emily Hughes of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Geoff Rapp of The University of Toledo College of Law, and Ben Madison of Regent Law School. Moderating the panel is Michael Schwartz of Washburn University School of Law. Having him as moderator is excellent, since he is a leading scholar in the area of law school teaching and an all-around good guy.

I will post more about the panel after it occurs. In the meantime, I welcome any thoughts or input about the article.

Exam-Taking Advice

Amazing though it may seem, at law schools around the country it is final exam time. With that in mind, I thought I would post some exam-taking advice. The exercise is largely the same each year, however, so rather than re-inventing the wheel, here are links to some previous advice on the subject.

Perhaps the place to start is with my post entitled Reflections on Law School Exams. It includes general advice and links to some of my prior exam-related posts. Another useful post on this blog is on The Pros and Cons of Exam Typing. Students--and professors--sometimes assume that typing an exam is always better than writing one. I don't agree--even though typed exams are by definition more legible (something I of course appreciate).

There is a lot of exam advice in the blogosphere, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sometimes conflicting advice given. But two additional sources (not from this blog) that I strongly recommend are the following:

Law School Exam-Taking Tips. This excellent post on Concurring Opinions by Professor Daniel Solove at George Washington University Law School covers a lot of useful ground. 1Ls (and 2Ls and 3Ls, for that matter) should take his advice to heart.

Bad Answers, Good Answers, and Terrific Answers. This very useful post on the Volokh Conspiracy is by Professor Orin Kerr, who is also at George Washington University Law School.

Law School Exam Advice from Pitt's Jurist website. The University of Pittsburgh's excellent Jurist website lists excellent links to information on taking law school exams. There's a lot of useful information here.

Good luck studying, and good luck on exams!

The Dilbertic Method

The Socratic Method takes a lot of flak from law students and lawyers, many of whom regard it as some form of hazing/hiding the ball/rite of passage. Those are not entirely inaccurate criticisms--by which I mean to say that while I think the method has its place, I never much enjoyed it as a student. For that reason--and for the more important reason that mixing up teaching methods helps (I hope) keep class more interesting and is more conducive to learning--I do not rely on the Socratic Method all that heavily.

I am writing about the Socratic Method because of today's Dilbert comic strip. It was, yet again, about the pointy-haired boss. When I read today's strip (11/25/07, which is available in the Dilbert archives here), my first thought was, "Wow, I used to have a boss just like that." (And no, I am not telling you who it was.)

And then I started thinking about this Dilbert strip in the context of the law school classroom, and it got even better. And funnier. First you need to read the strip. And then you need to read on.

When Dilbert's boss says "I need you to do something, but I don't have time to explain it," that's akin to the feeling law students sometimes get when called on in class under the Socratic Method. That is, you read the cases, think you know where the material is going--and then you go to class, and BOOM, you have no idea what is going on. All kinds of ideas are being extrapolated from the text by the professor. And then you get called on socratically. You hear the words, but what do they mean? What's the answer? In fact, what's the question?

Then the professor asks some sort of leading question, which is intended to facilitate class discussion and critical thinking, but it smells and feels like a trap. Which is sort of like Dilbert's boss saying, "I'll give you just enough information to send you down the wrong path." Like I said, a trap.

Then the professor asks a follow-up question that reveals a potential flaw in your answer or argument. Like I said, a trap, and you have to think your way out of it, shooting from the hip all the while. Which is like Dilbert's boss then saying, "After you do it wrong I'll treat you like you're some sort of idiot . . . [and] then I'll put you through the embarrassment of undoing everything you did." You are faced with revising your answer, in front of the whole class. Not a lot of fun. It's a good skill, mind you--lawyers need to be able to think on their feet and argue their points (we are advocates, after all)--but it is often not fun.

And of course, the ultimate judgment on what students say and think is--grades. It is a common feeling for students to think that a course has been one big game of "hide the ball," and that final exams, especially in the first year, are a crapshoot. Only after you have taken them do you get the chance to figure out if you guessed right or not.

So, Dilbert is funny. Ha ha. But law school is serious business. A lot of what this strip suggests, in the Socratic context, is that law school classes would be better with less hiding of the ball, more engaging teaching, more frequent testing (whether actually for grades or mock exams,) and a lot of other changes. I've actually written an article about it, which I will be posting about soon. In the meantime, we can learn how to improve law schools from Dilbert.

Second (Life) Opinions

I'm in the midst of a series of posts on the movie Michael Clayton (here and here), but two news items from the ABA Journal warrant a detour.

Item #1: Professor Kibosh and the Evil Laptop. First, on the ever-popular (or not) subject of laptop bans in classrooms, there is an article in the ABA Journal concerning the increasing popularity of laptop bans in law school classrooms. I've blogged about the subject numerous times; look for my posts labeled by the "computer" category. And of course every time I suggest that a ban might be justified in some circumstances, I get angry reader comments.

I am undecided on the subject, and my current position on the matter is that if I can't decide whether a ban is desirable or not, then I should just leave matters be. Perhaps I should let students vote on the matter? I don't know. But this article points out yet more perils of laptop use: IM harassment in class and obscene videos.

Virtual Law Practice. This article really, really interests me. Apparently at least one law firm is setting up shop in the online 3D gaming world of "Second Life." As Craig Jones of the UK's Simpson Millar explains, "Many of our clients have injuries which can make it difficult for them to meet us at our offices. Others are too busy. Second Life is a way of 'seeing' your legal representative and receiving advice without coming to our office."

So in other words, this is real legal advice, provided in avatar-to-avatar format. How very fascinating, and it raises interesting questions. In a very large sense, this is no different, substantively, from communicating with clients by e-mail or phone. But what if avatars can one day be programmed to provide advice independently (provided, of course, that a fee is paid)? Is that different somehow than having general legal memos available for download for a fee? Is it different from the practice of having canned legal advice that is modified, around the edges, for a client, and then charging the client for it? Could a law firm establish a subsidiary company to provide general "legal" (and perhaps strategic) player advice pertaining solely within the Second Life world? Law firms set up subsidiaries quite often to provide business and personal services-related advice, so why not in this context?

Also, what if a law school set up shop in Second Life? Is this a viable means for long distance (or e-commuting) education? Would this run into trouble with the ABA? Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and Judge Richard Posner have in fact made appearances on Second Life, so the intersection of legal academia and the online world is not farfetched by any means. I don't play Second Life right now (but boy, it intrigues me), so for all I know there is already a law school in the game.

And perhaps most interestingly, what if an avatar-professor decided to prohibit her avatar-students from using simulated laptops in her Second Life classroom?

Makes my (non-simulated) brain hurt.


**Photo credit: Steve Garfield**

Of Globalism and Localism

This past week was an interesting one for me--a study in contrasts. In my 1L class we had a computer-free week, which was something different (and not necessarily popular--more on that in my next post). Outside the classroom, I participated in two very different events that struck deep chords in me, and they are the subjects of this post.

The first event took place the evening of Thursday, October 11, 2007, at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. I spoke there as part of a panel of international law and international trade practitioners and scholars. The panel addressed the subject of international law career options. Other members of the panel included Loyola NO alumns and other practitioners, including Tom Morante of Jones Walker in Miami, as well as Professor Günther Handl of Tulane University Law School and Professor Larry Catá Backer of Penn State's Dickinson School of Law (currently visiting at Tulane). (Check out Professor Catá Backer's excellent blog, Law at the End of the Day, and his "About Me" page.) This panel, entitled Jus Gentium ("the law of nations"), was hosted by Loyola NO's newly re-formed student International Law Society (the society fell by the wayside after Hurricane Katrina).

As I listened to questions posed by the very diverse and accomplished students in the audience, and to the answers and comments from other members of the panel, I was struck by how extraordinarily complex, nuanced and rich the field of international law practice is. I know this, of course, and yet I still find myself moved by it. The feeling flashed me back to occasions in my law practice when I would be struck unexpectedly--and quite hard--by how rarified the intellectual atmosphere was where I worked.

The second event took place the very next night in Jackson, Mississippi. It was the Mississippi Center for Justice's 2007 Champions of Justice Dinner, and I was in attendance as the faculty adviser for Mississippi College School of Law's student Public Interest Law Group. The dinner drew public interest attorneys and supporters from all over Mississippi, and indeed the nation; from public interest organizations involved in Mississippi (much of it being post-Katrina relief work); from law schools (including Mississippi College School of Law and the University of Mississippi School of Law); and from law firms. The dinner was in honor of two strong contributors to public interest and social justice in Mississippi:

• Professor Deborah H. Bell of the University of Mississippi School of Law, who runs that school's well-respected Civil Legal Clinic. The clinic has been particularly active since Hurricane Katrina, and Professor Bell was honored for her many contributions to public interest law in the state.
• Hon. Rueben V. Anderson, who was the first African-American to graduate from the University of Mississippi School of Law and was Mississippi's first African-American Supreme Court justice. The program for the dinner aptly noted that while Justice Anderson "has been called a witness to history, [ ] his true role has been as a maker of history."

The dinner also featured an excellent slide show on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the many legal and personal challenges faced by the storm's survivors on the coast and elsewhere.

I think the Champions of Justice Dinner was moving for everyone, but for me the contrast between the themes of this event and the Loyola NO forum could not have been starker. On Thursday, I was discussing the richness and complexity of international legal practice. On Friday I was talking about people who need help getting legal representation to obtain enough food stamps. Quite the contrast.

Obviously, the contrast between these two events is a good reminder of why it is so important for lawyers to do some public service work, no matter what they do in practice. It keeps us grounded, and it gives us better perspective on the law and our legal practices. But it also served to remind me, again, of the importance of doing things in your career that you believe in.

I believe in the richness and the potential of international law. Globalization has its perils, but it also has its enormous upsides, and we are in need of responsible, dedicated lawyers who believe in what they are doing, and why. It's global service, if you will, and if that sounds quixotic or overly idealistic, so be it.

I also believe in the importance of local service. There are many, many people who need our help as lawyers, and there are many ways to get involved. And even for overly busy people, it is quite possible that taking on even more obligations of this sort can be a way to soothe the soul, not aggravate it. A way to meaningfully give back of our talents.

So for me, the global and local activities I am involved in are the best of two very different worlds. They are a study in contrasts, but when juxtaposed as they were last week, they fit together quite well.

College Cost Reduction and Access Act, Part 3

On September 27, 2007, President Bush signed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act into law. I previously blogged about this very significant piece of legislation here and here. Several additional points come to mind about this legislation, so I am setting them out here.

First, the act does seem to address the problem of spiraling higher education costs in a fairly head-on manner. I should note that as Kiplinger's Personal Magazine reported in an article on 9/28/07, the act is being funded, at least in part, by reductions in federal subsidies to student loan companies. So that puts some of the bill sponsors' statements about this being "no-cost" legislation in better (and somewhat more accurate) perspective. (See my previous posts for more regarding that point.)

Second, while I think this act is a welcome development, it is worth pointing out that being in favor of education is sort of like being in favor of Mom and apple pie. People generally are not against education per se. So that explains much about the bill: popular subject + big problem = grand legislative solution. That's not a criticism; it's just an observation. Hopefully the impact of this new law will be positive and it will help many in need of student debt assistance. An Associated Press article that ran nationwide on 9/30/07 highlights the problem quite well.

Third, as astonishing as it may seem to people outside academia, tuition costs at most universities do not cover the cost of education. Does that help explain the rapidly rising cost of higher education in recent years? I think in large part it does. True, state colleges and universities receive state subsidies--but in many cases those subsidies have been reduced in recent years. Also, both private and public universities look to private donors for donations to build up their endowments, and those monies are used to fund school programs. And, of course, colleges and universities also obtain state and federal grant money for many of their programs.

But the fact remains that tuition increases are sometimes hard to resist. For example, what happens when a school has little endowment--or even rich endowments but still needs more capital? Neither situation is uncommon. If students are willing to pay more, and if the school is able to charge more (many states limit or cap public institution tuition rates by statute), then there is strong temptation for schools to raise tuition rates or tack on special fees. And it's a really tough choice, I think, because the students pay either way: either schools raise tuition, and students bear the brunt of it, or schools do not, and therefore cannot fund many much-needed educational programs. To give just one example, higher educational literature puts a great deal of focus on the importance of "active" learning (as opposed to passive lectures in big halls)--but active learning is often more expensive. So sometimes the choice might boil down to providing better and more costly education versus controlling costs at the expense of educational quality. Again, either way, it's the students who pay.

I fully realize, of course, that more money does not in all cases equal better education. Yet sometimes it does. And as schools offer more innovative programs like clinics and externships, focus on reducing faculty-student ratios, and invest in technology to make the classroom more interactive, someone has to foot the bill. The College Cost Reduction and Access Act hopefully means that students will foot less of it over time. But if it does not completely solve the problem--and I don't think it will--then we are back to the question of who pays. If rich donors come forth voluntarily, that's great, but there will be some institutions left out in the cold. If we decide to federally subsidize higher education that might be great too, but it also likely would be fraught with problems.

Like any good (bad?) law professor, I am doing a far better job of posing questions and framing issues than I am of offering answers. For me, at least right now, the answers are unclear. What is clear, however, is that in today's information economy, education is of paramount importance for the nation's economic well-being. Reducing the debt burden of students is an investment worth making.

PS: Education is a service, and I blogged about the rapidly rising cost of services last year in two posts on the subject of Baumol's Cost Disease (here and here). Those discussions are relevant to this topic too for those who are interested. The gist of Baumol's Cost Disease is that the cost of services often rises faster than the overall rate of inflation, because while we can automate many processes or make them more efficient--and thus hold the price (and rate of inflation) down--it's harder to automate certain services like teaching. Which from a purely self-interested point of view is not necessarily a bad thing.

Law Firm Salary Distributions, Part 2

The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog had a good post today entitled The Dark Side of the Legal Job Market. It concerns law firm salaries and the disparity between the top of the class and the rest of the class--and also between top schools and regional schools. The gist is that the top grads get great salaries, but the rest don't--and that when this is combined with mounting student debt loads, it's a structural tension that will have to be resolved in one way or another. In other words, the message is that things can't go on as they are now, and that changes may be substantial.

I blogged about law grad salary disparities in another recent post. As I discussed in that post, these figures have interesting implications for the future of law schools beyond mere graduate salary distributions.

When reading the WSJ Law Blog post above, bear in mind that it blends two points that are actually distinct:

1. Grads of top law schools tend to get more of the "Big Law" (read: Big Money) jobs.

2. Top grads at any law school tend to get more Big Law jobs than their classmates with lower class rank.

In other words, if you go to a national school, you have improved your odds of landing the big paycheck, but you have not guaranteed it. Conversely, if you go to a regional school, fewer people from your school will land these big jobs. But some will. These are obvious points, perhaps, but I think they are worth making, since the WSJ article jumps between the two without distinguishing them.

The Problem of Law Firm Salary Distributions

In a recent post I discussed concerns over the latest big law firm salary hikes and concurrent slowdowns in the legal job market. On the heels of this, the Empirical Legal Studies blog (elsblog) has a post about NALP salary data for first-year lawyers. The results are fascinating, and they comport with a lot of the comments received on this blog by readers--namely, that lower end legal salaries stay relatively static, while upper end salaries grow faster than inflation. So in a sense, the salary problem is two-fold: the upper end may grow fast and result in layoffs in a downturn, while the lower end suffers from a lack of growth that makes repayment of debt--and pursuit of careers at the lower paying end of the spectrum (including but not limited to many public interest and government jobs)--not very feasible.

The elsblog post, which is by Bill Henderson, is excellent. Make sure you read the reader comments. Henderson's comparison of the law school market to ordinary markets is quite insightful. He is right that institutional actors in the law school market--in which the economic utility pursued is often prestige--certainly will behave quite differently than institutional actors in a market in which monetary profit is the goal. In fact, I might add that the law school market can be broken down into several separate smaller markets--namely, (a) the nonprofit national schools, (b) regional nonprofit schools, and (c) proprietary schools. Each of these should have different business models. In fact, it is pretty clear to me, based on my anecdotal experiences talking with administrators from these different types of schools, that what they seek to maximize is indeed different, and that they thus behave very, very differently.

Henderson's post also is a good (if indirect) reminder that law schools are comprised of faculty who are rational actors, and that they will seek to maximize their utility--which is not always the same as maximizing societal utility. So the trick, then, is to design a system of incentives and rewards that result in law school actors' utility coinciding with a reasonable conception of public utility or welfare. That is admittedly difficult in any market, but perhaps especially so in a market in which many of the actors are well-entrenched (read: tenured).

Many of the comments in the past on this blog have bemoaned this very fact. The irony, perhaps, is that applying academic tools to the subject of law schools identifies these very same problems. Which is not to say that I doubted previous commenters. But it is to say that if law professors and other academicians pride themselves on using scholarship to identify problems and search for solutions (which is much of what legal scholarship tries to do), then it's entirely appropriate to turn these tools on ourselves.

Many scholars have already done that. A search on Google Scholar for "law school teaching," for example, turns up scads of law review articles on the subject. But it's interesting that a single set of data on law school salaries leads off in so many interesting directions.

Advice to 1Ls at the Start of the School Year

Well, after a busy summer and a few technical difficulties with this blog, I am back. And just in time for the beginning of the school year.

Today thousands of law students had their first classes today, including at my school. For the 1Ls, it is the start of a strange, three-year odyssey. With that in mind, I have decided to point students, and especially new 1Ls, to some of my previous advice about law school. The following are of course not all of my posts about law school--nowhere close--but they are some of the most directly relevant to new 1Ls.

POSTS WITH GENERAL ADVICE FOR 1Ls

Some Advice for Incoming Law Students. This post includes my favorite piece of my own advice--don't read Scott Turow's novel One L until after you have finished your first year of law school. Even though law schools today are kindler and gentler than the law schools of the 1970s about which Turow wrote, there's enough commonality to scare you. So don't read it as a 1L.

PS: I'd give a link to a website about the book, but the best links are to booksellers' sites--and I of course don't want to help 1Ls buy the book. So no link.

More (and Still More) Advice for New Law Students. Pretty self-explanatory.

Law School Orientation Advice. My biggest piece of advice? Don't spill food on your law school's dean at orientation (which I actually did). My law school has already had its 1L orientation this year, so I am a bit late re-posting this advice. But I am happy to report that to my knowledge, no students spilled food on any dean or faculty member.

POSTS REGARDING CLASS PREPARATION AND PARTICIPATION

Getting Called on in Class. This is pretty much every new student's nightmare--so it makes a great blogging topic.

Figuring Out Your Law Professor. It's important to never forget that you are not just taking a particular subject. You are taking a particular professor--and you should adjust your approach to a course accordingly.

How to Brief a Case. The title says it all.

More Thoughts on How to Brief a Case. Ditto.

OTHER ADVICE

What's to Like About Law School? This post actually provides not advice, but rather perspective about the law school experience. The point of the post is that a lot of us (me included) spend a good deal of time hashing over what law schools get wrong. But law schools also get many things right, as the reader comments to this post illustrate.

Reflections on Law School Exams. Final exams aren't until December, but since that's everyone's ultimate goal, it's worth reading this now--and then re-reading it later in November, when exams are upon us.

So enjoy these posts, thanks for reading, and good luck with the start of the academic year!

Swamped

Apologies for not posting more lately; the graphic says it all. April is always a busy, busy month at law schools, and not just for students preparing for exams. Having said that, I would rather grade them than take them.

I have a number of posts on the way, including exam-taking advice ('tis the season) and advice for 3Ls still searching for jobs (at the request of a student at a law school on the East Coast). But in the meantime, please check out a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education called "Don't Give it Your Best." It's not about law school, but it is about the travails of finding a higher education teaching job, and the balance to be struck between classroom teaching and research. And it's a bit depressing. There's an awful lot I could say about it--such as regarding the tensions between interests of students versus teachers versus schools, what schools reward financially (hint: not always teaching or student support), and what helps you land that teaching job--but I will save it for another time when the swamp has been at least partially drained. Until then, any comments or thoughts from readers about this article are much appreciated.