In a recent speech, Second Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes argued that law schools should get “back to basics” with more bread-and-butter courses and fewer “law and” courses, in addition to other changes: To get back on track, law schools should shift their curricula back to core courses and away from the interdisciplinary classes that have […]
Archive | Legal Profession
Lawtalk: Volokh Abets Observations on “Aid and Abet”
By James E. Clapp, guest-blogging on December 21, 2011 8:50 am in History, Language, Legal Profession
In addition to the scores of specific words and phrases dissected in Lawtalk: The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions, we also discuss more generally what may be the most ridiculed characteristic of legal language — its predilection for redundancy: “aid and abet,” “over and above,” “goods and chattels,” “ordered, adjudged, and decreed,” and so […]
The New York Times on ABA Accreditation of Law Schools
David Segal’s recent New York Times article on ABA accreditation of law schools makes the important point that the ABA uses the accreditation process to reduce competition for its members by artificially reducing the number of law schools, and thereby eliminating potential competitors for its members. This interacts with laws that require consumers to rely […]
Of Time and Lawtalk
By Prof. Elizabeth Thornburg, guest-blogging on December 19, 2011 8:41 am in History, Language, Legal Profession
Thanks so much to Eugene Volokh for the invitation to guest blog about Lawtalk: Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions this week. Working on the book was tons of fun (and a dramatic lesson in the amount of historical material now available online), and my co-authors and I are enjoying the opportunity to share what […]
Is a Serial Fabulist Fit to Practice Law?
Stephen Glass, the disgraced writer for The New Republic who penned stories that were too good to be true (and whose exploits inspired the movie “Shattered Glass”) wants to be a lawyer. But is a journalist exposed as a serial fabricator fit to practice law? The New York Bar said no. Now, The Recorder reports, […]
What the NYT Article on Law Schools Gets Right
While there’s a lot worth criticizing in David Segal’s NYT article about law professors and law schools — Matt Bodie covers a lot of good ground in this post at Prawfs — there’s an underlying point that I think is both important and correct: Law professors, at especially the “top” law schools, are becoming less […]
What Should Law Schools Teach? (What Should the NYT Learn?)
By Jonathan H. Adler on November 20, 2011 1:42 pm in Academia, Law Schools, Legal Profession, Legal Scholarship
Today’s NYT has a lengthy front-page article on legal education suggesting that a major problem with legal education is the failure to teach law students how to practice law. There is something to this complaint — some schools and some legal academics do relatively little to prepare their students for practice and there is much […]
The Ethics of Law Professor Amicus Briefs
Co-blogger Orin Kerr links to Richard Fallon’s interesting article on the ethics of law professor amicus briefs. Fallon argues that lawprofs are far too quick to sign amicus briefs that fit their ideological proclivities even if they aren’t really expert in the underlying legal issues and sometimes even if they don’t agree with the particular […]
Clifford Winston’s Case for Abolishing the Requirement that Lawyers Must get Law School Degrees and Pass the Bar Exam
Brookings Institution scholar Clifford Winston recently published a good column advocating the abolition of legal requirements mandating that all lawyers must graduate from law schools and pass bar exams: For decades the legal industry has operated as a monopoly, which has been made possible by its self-imposed rules and state licensing restrictions — namely, the […]
Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About the Job Market for Lawyers
St. Louis University law professor Aaron Taylor recently published a good column challenging the conventional wisdom that holds that the job market for lawyers is rapidly collapsing: It’s open season on legal education — falling applications, lawsuits by former students and dooms day warnings about the legal job market. The rampant bad publicity has taken […]
Is It Time to Deregulate the Law?
In today’s WSJ, Clifford Winston and Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution argue that now is the time for the legal profession to deregulate. The reality is that many more people could offer various forms of legal services today at far lower prices if the American Bar Association (ABA) did not artificially restrict the number of […]
Did Clement and K&S Just Have a Big Misunderstanding?
The BLT Blog notes a story in The Daily Report (for subscribers only) that suggests the flap over King & Spalding’s on-and-off representation of the House of Representatives in DOMA litigation was due to a misunderstanding about the firm’s internal vetting process. The story quotes a statement from K&S partner J. Sedwick “Wick” Sellers, who […]
Jonathan Rauch (a Leading Proponent of Same-Sex Marriage Rights) on the Paul Clement Matter
The post is at Independent Gay Forum’s CultureWatch. The conclusion: Just guessing, but I don’t think Paul Clement’s having been pushed to a smaller firm is going to change the Supreme Court’s judgment on DOMA. I don’t think it’s going to deter the other side from going to court. I don’t even think it will […]
Did Coke Pressure King & Spalding?
According to some accounts, King & Spalding was persuaded to drop its representation of the House of Representatives in litigation over the Defense of Marriage Act due to pressure from one of the Atlanta-based firm’s largest clients: Coca-Cola. If this is true, it raises some interesting legal ethics questions that the good folks at the […]
Attorney General Eric Holder on Paul Clement
BLT (The Blog of the Legal Times) reports: “Paul Clement is a great lawyer,” [Attorney General Eric] Holder said today, addressing reporters at the Justice Department. “He has done a lot of really great things for this nation. In taking on representing Congress in connection with [the Defense of Marriage Act], I think he was […]