Law school stuff

(1) Arizona Summit is biting the dust, which means that two of the three Infilaw scam outfits have now joined the choir invisible of ex-law schools.  That brings the total number of ABA-accredited schools who have gone or are going out of business to six.

This is an especially cruel fate for Infilaw’s for-profit GRADPLUS-fueled racket, given that Amway heiress Betsy DeVos has just decided that for-profit colleges and universities shouldn’t be subject to any regulation.  (Off topic, sort of, but how are outfits like Amway and Herbal Life legal? They look like straight-up pyramid schemes to me, but I don’t know the laws in this area).

(2) Law school applications are actually up a bit for the first time since 2010, rising 8% from last year’s low, which was the smallest total recorded since at least 1983 (I don’t have stats going back further than that).  Some are attributing this to idealistic young people wanting to fight the rise of fascism in America, aka a “Trump bump.”  My advice on this score remains what it’s been ever since I started studying this, which is if you want to go into politics, go into politics.  If you want to draft strip mall leases, go to law school.  Obviously backup plans are necessary in both instances.

(3) Columbia Law School annual tuition has hit the $70,000 mark (ok it’s $84 short but close enough).

Columbia’s tuition first reached $20,000 in 1993.  It hit $30,000 in 2000, $40,000 in 2006, $50,000 in 2010, and $60,000 in 2014.

I’m not picking on Columbia in particular — hate the game not the player etc. — but as a wise man once said, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

(4) Speaking of Columbia, I learned recently that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the first woman hired to its tenure-track faculty, in 1972.  I was even more surprised to learn that my own Torts professor, who was a young woman when I took the class in 1987, was the first woman hired to the tenure-track faculty at Michigan’s law school, in 1976.

When RBG first got a job as a legal academic, 1963, she was the 19th woman to have ever been hired onto an ABA law school’s tenure-track faculty.  Harvard and Stanford didn’t achieve this milestone until 1972.  This means a non-trivial percentage of the faculty teaching at American law schools today went to law schools that had literally no women on the faculty at the time they attended them.

Just a little reminder of what Make America Great Again actually means.