That advice is generalizable. Try replacing "computer science" with "law" or "education" or whatever your passion is. "What you know about law other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to a successful legal system is only in your hands."

Professor Nesson often proposes iphacktivism (though that's not what he calls it) as a reaction to the current music IP mess or Professor Fisher's plan, but when I got the chance to moderate a panel of Berkman luminaries in July, I tried to force him to propose it as a positive platform, to which Professor Fisher and Professor Zittrain could then react. The results are now up in a transcript at HLSNet.

Update: Copyfighter Derek Slater writes: Raise Your Hand If You Think DoS Attacks Are Good.

[via MyShingle]

One practice that is key to perpetuating the snobbery in law firm hiring is the lock-step pay at most law firms. Lock-step pay makes many things simple. In choosing between law firm A and law firm B there will be very little (if any) pay difference between them. More importantly, when a law firm is choosing between candidate A and candidate B, there is no difference as to the cost of the candidate to the firm. Lack of difference in pay greatly favors superstars at the expense of good performers. Imagine if baseball teams paid each player an identical amount. Say $1Million a year. Now Barry Bonds is cheap but risky kids and merely good players are expensive. Every team would compete feverishly for Bonds and might have a drastically reduced roster. There would be no place for a player who would take $100K his first season in order to get a chance to show how good he is. But in law firms it is even worse. Not only do firms under-employ, but because law firms have relatively little information about candidates when they must make their choices about who is a superstar, they will often make the choice based on signals such as law school ranking. Because lock-step pay means that law school ranking makes such a big difference in whether firms will employ graduates, law school rankings are stubbornly self-perpetuating.

Further compounding the problem is the high price of law school education at many of the top-ranked schools. These students have a tough time accepting lower wages because of huge debt. Law firm salaries are aimed at these candidates. Others who went to less expensive schools (which are often, but not always lower in rank) have much smaller debt and could afford a less lucrative wage. If there was a market within each firm for salary, these students could compete with the expensive school students very effectively. If a firm could choose to hire two low-ranked-school educated students for the price of one top-ranked school student (knowing nothing else about the students) what firm would be so quick to dismiss the low-ranked-school students? [n.b. of course I don't think any first year is worth twice as much as any other, but ask all the unemployed first years out there if they would take a $75K/year job.] Put differently, <rampant cynicism>if a firm could choose to hire two 2100hr billers or one for the same price, what firm would flinch?</rampant cynicism> And, once hired, law school matters a lot less. I was never asked what law school I went to when a harried partner wanted a brief written. Nor was my work product ever criticized because it did not come from a Yalie.

But law school rankings are solidified and perpetuated because lawyers don't get to sample a broad range of law school graduates. When you pay the same for a Stanford ($31,230 x 3 = $93,690) grad as a George Mason ($9,123 x 3 = $27,369) grad and you know next to nothing else about the applicant, what should law firms do?

Of course, any real answer to law firm hiring snobbery would have to include a more comprehensive hiring processes but unlocking the pay scale might be a step on that path as law firms would have to ask "how much is this applicant worth to us" rather than simply "is this applicant better - based on our limited knowledge - than that one."

Update:Civil Procedure responds: "The annual performance review would have to include some kind of salary levelling function, I would suggest." Yes. Might be hard to dock the poorly performing high pedigree-er (maybe easier to show that person the door?) but certainly you would want to rapidly reward the lawyer who is worth more to your firm. Scheherazade also asks whether I am male or female. Am a guy.