Rules: At least three famous people must have the name, and bad (or tragically misunderstood) people with that name are balanced out by any good people with that name. Also, phonetics count, so Lenin is balanced by Lennon (John and Sisters), and Genghis is made up for by Madeline.
Potential candidate: Bundy
McGeorge: Started the Vietnam war.
Al: Started Married With Children
Ted: No comment necessary.
Cliven: See.
I apologize for the initially dyslexic spelling of Bruenig’s name.
(FWIW, my objection to his piece had nothing to do with his law school reform proposals, which might be worthwhile on grounds other than the ones he gave, since the ones he gave were based on empirical assertions about the employment prospects for law graduates that bear no relationship whatever to reality. How a brand new graduate of a sub-elite law school managed to miss this would be interesting to know).
Matt Bruenig’s auto-bio at his blog:
I write about politics, the economy, and political theory, primarily with a focus on the set of interlocking issues that affect poor and working people. My writing is informed by a leftist political perspective that draws upon a diverse set of historical and contemporary leftist intellectuals. In particular, the various theories of egalitarian distributive justice that began with John Rawls have had the most influence on me, with Amartya Sen’s capability approach to distributive justice being perhaps the most influential.
In addition to this blog, I’ve written for some other publications, including The Atlantic (I, II), The New Republic, The American Prospect, Salon (I, II), The Week, and at my home base of sorts: Demos’ Policy Shop.
Bruenig’s leftist political perspective in re the Lawyer Problem:
In 2012, the median income for lawyers in this country was around $113,000, more than triple the national median income for all occupations. Why such high pay? In significant part, it’s because we have made becoming a lawyer exceedingly difficult, which has the effect of driving up the prices lawyers can charge for their services. . .
The legal profession and everything that touches it is flush with silly amounts of cash. This is a direct result of America’s legal licensing regime. And this surplus of cash creates an upper class of legal industry professionals making way more money than they ought to.
The big scandal in all of this is not that law students are somehow getting a raw deal because of the debt they undertake in their arduous path through the credential gate. It’s that the whole system wastes a ton of money that could be spent on more useful things than lining the pockets of lawyers and law professors.
By making it easier to become a lawyer, we could undermine this malicious dynamic. Make law schools two years instead of three. Or better yet: Get rid of law schools altogether and make law an undergraduate degree. Eliminate the bar exam or, if you’d like, make passage of it the only requirement to practice law and get rid of all the rest of the qualifications. One way or another, we should do what it takes to flood the market with legal credentials and drag lawyers down into the pits [of] financial normality with the rest of the middle class.
This perspective sounds a whole lot like Fantasy Libertarian Economics 101 to me, but maybe I need to re-read A Theory of Justice.
In any case, arguing that law school graduates make too much money because the median income for “lawyers” in the US is $113,000 is akin to claiming that academics are overpaid because the average salary for “professors” right now is $119,000.
The fallacy at the core of such arguments is that they simply assume barriers to entry are as a matter of fact (as opposed to as a matter of overly simplistic economic theory) maintaining high incomes for people who are currently getting JDs and doctoral degrees. That hypothesis only seems plausible if your income statistics are limited to a misleading subset of the relevant social category. Thus law school graduates are magically transformed into people with established careers as lawyers, while the enormous group of people with advanced degrees who teach or try to teach at colleges and universities become tenured full professors.
The punch line here is that Breunig isn’t some charmingly naive anthropologist who believes that while “we have a very, very limited demand for brilliant poet-musicians . . .we have an infinite demand for corporate lawyers; anybody who can get a law degree will get a job.” No Breunig is — wait for it — a brand new graduate of Boston University’s law school!
Let’s glance for a moment at his classmates’ employment outcomes (these stats are for 2013 BU grads as of February 15, 2014):
Total graduates: 278
Total graduates with arguably real legal jobs nine months after graduation: 169 (Full-time non-temp bar passage required, minus school-funded “jobs” and one putative sole practitioner).
Total unemployed or severely underemployed graduates: (unemployed, employed in jobs that were both part-time and short term, or status unknown): 65
How exactly do these stats reflect a successful cartel whose barriers to entry have driven up wages for law graduates — excuse me, “lawyers” — to dizzying heights? And note that these are the graduates of a high-ranked law school! (BU is a top 25ish school, meaning it’s around the 87th percentile of ABA accredited institutions).
Again, let us leave the world of economic and political theory, and talk about practice:
Marin County District Attorney
3501 Civic Center Drive, Room 130
San Rafael, CA 94903
Deputy District Attorney (Uncompensated)
Salary:Uncompensated
Position Description:
The Marin County District Attorney’s Office is seeking applications from attorneys who are willing to accept unpaid, temporary positions that offer a valuable opportunity to gain courtroom experience including trying misdemeanor jury trials. Successful applicants will serve as sworn Deputy District Attorneys with responsibilities that include handling daily criminal calendars, handling various motions, trying misdemeanor jury trials, and conducting legal research. These are FULL TIME positions that require a minimum commitment of six months and may continue for up to one year. Due to budgetary constraints, the Marin County District Attorney’s Office is unable to hire successful applicants at the conclusion of their uncompensated term. Successful applicants may not engage in the practice of law outside of the office during their uncompensated term.
Position Requirement:Applicants must possess a J.D. degree from a law school approved by the American Bar Association and be a current, active member of the California State Bar. Successful candidates must pass a criminal background investigation including a fingerprint check.
Minimum Requirements:No experience is required but only applicants with outstanding academic records and superior oratory and writing skills will be considered. Applicants invited for an interview will be required to submit a writing sample.
Application Information:Please submit a cover letter, resume and copy of your law school transcript by e-mail or US Mail. No telephone calls please. We will contact you if we believe an interview is appropriate or if further information is required.
Barry Borden
Chief Deputy District Attorney
3501 Civic Center Drive, Room 130
San Rafael, CA 94903
bborden@marincounty.org
The current market-clearing salary for an entry-level DA job in Marin County, with its oh-so-reasonable cost of living, appears to be zero. So it looks as if “lawyers” are being “dragged down into the pits of financial normalcy with the rest of the middle class” quite effectively as it is.
One of the many awesome things about being rich in America c. 2014 is that you don’t have to pay for lots of things — which when you think about it is kind of ironic! Such as, for example, real estate ads.
It is definitely the most eclectically renovated house in Frenchtown, right up to the peak of its cupola, now crowned by a copper roof. The formal circular driveway that once dominated the front lawn has been replaced by a colorful meadow of wildflowers and berry bushes. In place of the attic, there is the 1,400-square-foot “Skybrary” (translation: library in the sky), a mystical aerie carved and customized for Ms. Gilbert by an imaginative carpenter, Michael Flood. In the basement, a terra-cotta honeycomb from Brazil holds 500 bottles of wine. Buddha statuary is a recurring theme in the garden.
Ms. Gilbert wrote her most recent best-seller, “The Signature of All Things” (Viking Adult, 2013), a historical/botanical romance, while ensconced at her 15-foot-long acacia slab desk in the “Skybrary.” A king-size “napping bed” is tucked in a corner, 11 windows resemble a ship’s portholes (hawks, not fish, go floating by outside), and the original ceiling beams are dangerously low. A flight of stairs leads to the intimate cupola, with its 360-degree views.
“I really believe that whoever buys the house will do it because they have an emotional attachment to this enchanted space up here,” she said of the attic.
Downstairs, the main hallway is flanked by an office/library and a country kitchen with a wood-burning stove, tin ceiling, plank floors and a marble-topped center island with a Bertazzoni six-burner range as its centerpiece. The kitchen, after the removal of a wall, flows into the living room, which faces west toward the river. The dining room across the hall from the living room has south and west exposures, and pocket doors that separate it from the library, or not. The powder room has an automated Japanese toilet/bidet and an exotic Balinese lava stone sink.
The Buddha statuary is an especially nice touch. You see this all the time in Boulder: somebody has a two million dollar house (built using exclusively sustainable eco-friendly materials naturally), and there’s a tastefully understated statute of the Buddha in the front yard, to remind passersby that they can escape suffering by ridding themselves of desire.
Three years ago this week I published a piece in the New Republic, outlining the various ways in which the graduate employment rates law schools advertised were deeply misleading. At that time, only a handful of mostly elite schools published meaningful employment data: by contrast, the standard practice was to report a nine-month employment rate that aggregated all employment, legal and non-legal, full-time and part-time, temporary and long-term, school-funded and real, into one impressive-sounding percentage. (Indeed until that very spring law schools were even allowed to get away with excluding graduates who they claimed were not seeking employment from their calculations).
On top of that, schools routinely published “average” salary numbers that didn’t reveal the percentage of graduates — often consisting of a tiny and completely unrepresentative sample — that these “average” numbers represented.
After pointing out how a closer look at the real numbers would alter radically the impression prospective law students would have on their potential six-figure investment, I argued what one would have thought was a non-controversial position:
All of this suggests the extent to which prospective law students need more and better information. Of course, such information will make law school look like a far worse investment than it does at present. Still, if we assume that the point of academic work is to reveal the truth, rather than to engage in the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else, then this work needs to be done.
There was in fact tremendous resistance from the law school establishment to requests for more and better public information (This was information which all law schools collected every year already, but again with a tiny handful of exceptions didn’t publish. That the information was already collected made arguments that it would be costly to supply it to the public frivolous on their face. This didn’t stop lots of schools from making that argument, however). Today, the reason for that resistance is even more obvious than it was in April of 2011: the hypothesis that more transparency would produce a big decline in law school applicants has now been tested, with unambiguous results.
This fall, around 37,000 to 38,000 people will enroll at ABA law schools. Taking the higher end of the estimate, this represents close to a 30% decline in what law school enrollments looked like before the law school reform movement successfully pressured the ABA Section of Legal Education and the Profession — which has tended to be controlled by deans and faculty from low-ranked schools, who had the most to lose from increased transparency — into forcing schools to disgorge something resembling realistic employment numbers (the ABA still refuses to mandate any publication of salary data however).
The decline in applicants has been even sharper — nearly 40% — as law schools have slashed their admission standards to keep enrollments from cratering further.
Meanwhile schools have been cutting prices: it’s quite likely that average effective per capita tuition — sticker tuition minus discounts — is actually going to be lower in constant dollars for this fall’s entering class than it was for students who matriculated three years ago. The combination of far smaller entering classes and lower real tuition has forced many schools into serious cost-cutting mode, after decades of largely unrestrained extravagance.
Faculty-student ratios actually fell in half between 1978 and 2011 despite much larger enrollments, while administrative positions proliferated far faster than faculty lines. Faculty salaries nearly doubled on average in real terms, while administrative compensation skyrocketed in ways that made faculty raises look modest by comparison. Many schools replaced perfectly adequate facilities with increasingly palatial physical plants, in a sort of perverse amenities-based arms race for tuition dollars.
Of course all this had to be paid for, and it was, mainly by tuition tripling at private law schools and increasing five times over for resident students at public law schools. This has produced a situation in which the average educational debt of law students graduating this spring — that is, members of the last entering class before the law school reform movement began to have an impact on the structure of legal education in this country — is around $150,000, while the median salary, including salaries of zero, for this group will likely be well under $50,000.
Now that the party is mostly over, we can see that the push for transparency has accomplished a great deal. If — and of course it is very much an if — the market for legal jobs remains at its present level (the percentage of GDP dedicated to legal services in America has declined by a third over the past quarter century), then it’s possible that around three quarters of people enrolling law school this fall will get jobs as lawyers, rather than slightly more than the one half of all graduates who have gotten such jobs, liberally defined, over the past few years. (This article lays out and discusses the facts supporting the assertions in the previous three paragraphs).
This is being celebrated in some quarters as the epitome of a “great time to go to law school,” which, I suppose, is a reflection of among other things the effect of drastically lowered standards (Imagine if a quarter of all medical school graduates weren’t getting jobs as doctors, and this was treated as an advertisement for what a great time it was to go to medical school!).
But it does — or rather it would, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves — represent a great improvement over the recent status quo. Huge problems, of course, would remain, even in a world in which “only” 25% of law graduates weren’t getting legal jobs, since among other things the vast majority of entry-level legal jobs don’t pay anywhere close to enough to service $150,000 of educational debt on the terms under which that debt is supposed to be repaid.
Still, it’s real progress. In a sense, one could say that we have reached the end of the law school scam — in the sense that young people who enroll in law school today have every opportunity to avoid being misled about the prospects that await them. Of course this is no excuse for continuing to engage in aggressive sales tactics that sound more like a condo time-share pitch than a disinterested scholarly evaluation of the evidence.
In other words, we’re moving toward a situation — we’re not there yet, mainly because of the cultural lag in recognizing what has been happening to the legal profession, i.e., the Legally Blonde Syndrome — in which law students will be no more prone to overestimate their career prospects than Ph.D. candidates are now prone to overestimate their odds of getting a tenure track job (I”m assuming here that the latter don’t tend to indulge in too much optimism and confirmation bias, although I have to admit that this assumption isn’t actually based on anything other than my own optimistic wish that this is the case. My co-bloggers and many commentators are in a position to confirm or correct this impression, and I hope they do so).
That is all to the good, but, in terms of genuine reform, it’s very much half or perhaps a third of a loaf. Genuine reform goes far beyond even optimal transparency (which is still far away in the law school world), because the crisis of the American law school is just a particularly sharp example of a far broader crisis: that created by an economy that simply doesn’t produce anything like enough appropriate (halfway decent-paying, skills based) jobs for our increasingly educated, and increasingly disaffected, younger generations.
The real scam, in other words, is the contemporary structure of our society. Making that transparent is a goal towards which the law school reform movement is playing its own small part.
“I have sent in our federal income tax and our gift tax returns for 2013,” Rumsfeld wrote. “As in prior years, it is important for you to know that I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate.”
In his letter, Rumsfeld attributed his ignorance of whether he paid his taxes properly to the complexity of the tax code.
“The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated, that I know I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested and therefore I cannot and do not know, and I suspect a great many Americans cannot know, whether or not their tax returns are accurate,” Rumsfeld wrote.
Rumsfeld noted that he was confused about his taxes even though he “spent more money than I wanted to spend to hire an accounting firm.”
“I do not know whether or not my tax returns are accurate, which is a sad commentary on governance in our nation’s capital,” Rumsfeld wrote.
Speaking of complicated tasks, it’s too bad Turbotax doesn’t offer Nation Building software.
(h/t taxprof)
Updated below
In a stunning last-minute upset, Erwin Chemerinsky and Carrie Menkel-Meadow’s NYT piece appears to have been nipped at the wire by Oregon Law School professor Rob Illig for top honors in today’s Law Profs Posting Clueless Tone-Deaf Things on the Internet contest. Illig sent a couple of emails around, bewailing a proposal by the dean to dedicate this year’s faculty raise pool to funding public interest sector fellowships for what would otherwise be unemployed grads of the school (Oregon’s employment stats are horrendous).
I’ve watched as our culture has eroded now for almost three years.
Everyone is in everyone else’s business, instead of their own. Everyone
is worried about what everyone else is getting, not what they can
personally contribute. If some professor or professors want to donate
their raise to the students – or to some other worthy charity – that’s
their business. (Personally, i give to Food for Lane Country, Planned
Parenthood, and the United Way. I feel that having given up the chance
at a seven-figure annual income is charity enough for the students, and
I am particularly saddened by hungry children. Maybe I should move that
the recipients of summer stipends donate those funds to the poor and
needy?)
I believe the children these days favor the acronym WTF? to describe the appropriate reaction to this.
But wait there’s more. In reaction to a commenter pointing out, reasonably enough, that under the circumstances Illig should count himself lucky to have his current job:
No Justin, it’s quite the opposite. The UO and its students are lucky to have me and all the other wonderful university faculty and staff who have sacrificed to be here. It’s time somebody said out loud what a great contribution every faculty and staff member is making to this community And all of us would be making more money at any of our competitor universities.
We know jobs for graduates are scarce, but scaring us away won’t make more jobs appear. And believe me, we’re working hard to help the students. That’s our job.
In my former life, I was an M&A lawyer at a large New York law firm, where I was all but certain to be earning more that $1 million annually. No one can tell me I’m not on the students’ side.
My students are my life. I sacrifice for them every day. Today, I spent the morning trying to get one of them a summer job at Nike. I do the same every day.
But ask yourself how many of those UO graduates would have jobs if I and the other dedicated faculty and staff at this university left.
Illig was an associate at Nixon Peabody, a mid-sized Boston firm, for seven years, so how he knows that he was “all but certain” to end up getting paid like a top rain-making partner is fairly mysterious, as is his belief that there’s a tremendous demand out there right now for former Oregon Law School faculty members who dump their $150,000 jobs in a fit of pique. (How this act of professional self-immolation would depress Oregon’s already abysmal employment results is also left unexplained).
There’s a bunch of other stuff in there about his Summer Sports Institute, the financial struggles of law professors, the ingrates who fail to appreciate the sacrifices he’s making etc., that has to be read to be believed.
Or maybe this is all an elaborate parody.
Update: I suppose it’s a sign of progress that the Chemerinsky/Menkel-Meadow NYT piece has produced nothing but what sounds very much like embarrassed silence from all the top legal academic blogs, not one of which so much as mentioned it today (Normally of course a NYT op-ed regarding the state of legal education would set off a commenting frenzy in our severely self-referential little world).
Erwin Chemerinsky and Carrie Menkel-Meadow in the NYT on the “supposed” “crisis” “in” “legal” “education:”
According to the Association for Legal Career Professionals, as recently as 2007, close to 92 percent of law-school graduates reported being employed in a paid, full-time position nine months after graduation. True, the employment figures had dropped by 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, but only to 84.7 percent.
As my second all-time favorite tennis player would put it: You have got to be kidding me. You cannot be serious.
I don’t know what’s more egregious here, the laziness or the intellectual dishonesty.
As to the former, if you’re going to spin your stats in the most misleading way possible, at least bother to get them right in the first place. The claim that way back in 2007 92% of graduates “reported being employed in a paid, full-time position nine months after graduation” is wrong: NALP’s figures include part-time jobs and unpaid jobs (and part-time, unpaid jobs). 5% of law graduates with jobs reported their employment as part-time, while an unknown number weren’t being paid (the latter is an increasingly common arrangement in a world in which young people are expected to work for free in order to get their feet inside slamming employment doors). And even with all these caveats, the reported percentage of 2007 graduates with jobs of all kinds still wasn’t “close to 92%” — it was 85.3%, since NALP wasn’t able to ascertain the employment status of 2% of graduates, and another 4% of the graduating class attended schools that didn’t report their data.
Of course anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the supposed crisis in legal education will have noticed a far more egregious “oversight” in this analysis (which isn’t an oversight at all, since whatever else they may be Chemerinsky and Menkel-Meadow aren’t idiots): At this late date, EC and CMM still have the chutzpah to trot out the law school’s scam’s oldest and crudest trick, which is to imply that their employment statistics are referencing actual legal jobs.
But they’re not. Even in the halcyon days of 2007, just before one third of all big law entry-level jobs disappeared, only 68.9% of graduates were reported to have acquired full-time long-term jobs requiring bar admission nine months after graduation. That total has declined by 17% since, and goes even lower when you exclude law school-funded “jobs” and people who list themselves as having set up solo practices. Barely half of 2012 –and 2013 — law school graduates got a legal job, broadly construed, within nine months of graduation, rather than the utterly phony “84.7%” figure the authors cite to what they must hope is a profoundly naive readership (Note how even the latter wildly pumped up total employment figure is pretty grim, given that the current employment rate for 25 to 34 year olds, which includes everyone from high school dropouts to interdisciplinary JD/MPH/PhDs, is 93.2%).
The rest of the op-ed is if anything even worse, featuring a bunch of disingenuous tongue-clucking about how unfortunate it is that the cost of “college” (not law school, which has actually risen by much more) has gone up by more than 1100% since 1978 — as if a brand-new and (to put it mildly) superfluous law school in a hyper-saturated legal employment market just had to charge the $47,300 in resident and $53,900 in non-resident annual tuition and fees that Chemerinksy’s vanity project is charging this year, because of reasons. (These figures don’t include three years’ worth of living expenses in one of the most pricy areas in the country).
The most nauseating aspect of all this is the gelatinous patina of sanctimony the authors slather onto their exercise in profoundly anti-intellectual — if “intellectual” is taken to mean “minimally honest” — hucksterism. “Legal education is still an excellent choice for those committed to serving others in a rewarding career,” they primly observe. Yes, it’s certainly been an excellent choice for them. Let’s take a moment to contemplate how well these public-spirited scholars are doing for themselves by “serving others.”
The first person Chemerinsky hired onto the UC-Irvine faculty when he got this self-abnegating enterprise rolling five years ago was his wife. In 2012 this dynamic academic duo pulled down a combined salary of $597,000 from the University of California’s perpetually cash-strapped system.
Meanwhile Menkel-Meadow took home a salary of $320,000, so it’s safe to say a career in public service is working out OK for her as well.
Nova Southeastern has become the latest law school to announce publicly that it’s buying out a significant number of its tenured faculty. In Nova’s case, everybody whose age + years of service adds up to 60 is eligible. Assuming typical demographics this category probably includes a solid majority of the tenured faculty. The school says its capping the percentage of buyouts at 20% of the faculty (It’s unclear whether this means 20% of the faculty as a whole, 20% of tenured faculty, or 20% of the tenured faculty who are eligible.)
The terms of the buyout offer weren’t disclosed, although it does include three years of continued health insurance coverage. Not surprisingly, universities are discovering that this is a crucial consideration when trying to buy out faculty who are not yet eligible for Medicare within The Best Health Care System in the World ™. From what I’ve been able to gather, two years salary seems to be more or less the going rate for buy outs these days; in any case at least one Nova law professor was more than happy to take the deal:
“It’s a very fair offer,” [Bruce] Rogow said. “I accepted right away. This frees up the opportunity to hire new, fresh faculty. In the long run, it’s very good for me because I have something else that fills up my time, which is the practice of law. Teaching was just for the pleasure.”
Rogow, who served as acting dean of the law school in 1984, still may teach a class or two from time to time, but his career as a tenured law professor is over, he said. A prominent appellate lawyer, he plans to continue working full-time at his Fort Lauderdale-based solo practice.
Apparently referring to Rogow as a prominent appellate lawyer is something of an understatement. Per his CV:
In addition to teaching, Mr. Rogow has argued over 400 cases in federal and state courts,
including 11 cases in the Supreme Court of the United States. No one in Florida has argued more
Supreme Court cases than Mr. Rogow. He has been listed in Best Lawyers in America for 22 years.
In 2009 he was named in 4 categories: Appellate Practice, Commercial Litigation, First Amendment
Law, and Criminal Law. He is also listed in Chambers USA as a top commercial litigator. Mr.
Rogow is both a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Academy of
Appellate Lawyers, a dual recognition accorded to only a small number of lawyers in the United
States. For years he has been named by Florida Trend as one of Florida’s “Legal Elite.”
Mr. Rogow’s clients in 2007-2008 included Morgan Stanley (he reversed a $1.8 billion dollar
judgment against the company); Merrill Lynch; Richard Scrushy (Former HealthSouth CEO); the
Mayor of West Palm Beach, Florida; the cities of Doral, Miami Lakes, Hialeah and Pinecrest,
Florida; all the parimutuels in Broward and Dade Counties Florida; Donald Trump; Don King (the
boxing promoter); David Koch (Koch Industries); and in the Supreme Court of Florida he recently
represented appellate court Judge Michael Allen and Joe Anderson (Florida’s largest road
contractor). Mr. Rogow was appointed in 2007 by the Supreme Court of Florida to represent two
indigent prisoners, winning both cases. In 2007-2008 he argued 6 cases in the Supreme Court of
Florida. Former clients have included F. Lee Bailey, Wyeth Corporation, the Seminole Tribe of
Florida, Seminole Management Associates, and numerous lawyers and law firms, including Florida
tobacco lawyers in their tobacco litigation fees claims that ultimately resulted in fees of nearly two
billion dollars.
Rogow has been a “full-time” member of Nova’s law faculty since 1974, even though for much of that time he has also apparently been operating what may be Florida’s most profitable solo law practice. It’s unclear as to what “full-time” employment on the law faculty means for him; a check of Nova’s current web site and cached copies of it indicates that he taught two classes in the 2014 winter semester, and none in either the fall of 2013 or 2012. (I wasn’t able to find the winter 2013 schedule). And while one shouldn’t put much weight on sites like Rate My Professors, the evaluations of his teaching there suggest that their pedagogic value is perhaps questionable:
Brilliant attorney, terrible professor. I only went to his class four times and never opened my text book. He gives a review the last class before the final…and if you study that, you’ll do fine. One of my best grades in Law School. And he invites you to dinner at his place! Would take again!
I wish commenters would stop being coy and just come out with it. Rogow didn’t take attendance and didn’t know/care who anyone was or whether they came to class or not. The entire semester was basically story time featuring him. The last 2 classes were a review session where he told us EXACTLY what we needed to know to succeed on the final.
Etc.
As for “scholarship,” it hardly comes as a surprise that a search of Google Scholar indicates Rogow has published almost nothing over the course of his 40+ years in legal academia, or at least anything anyone has ever cited.
So how much are Nova students paying for having a big name lawyer who is apparently a glorified adjunct on their faculty? To its credit, Nova responded last year to SALT’s annual survey of law faculty salaries, which revealed that the median salary for a tenured Nova law professor was just under $155,000 (Plus a $12,000 summer research stipend. Do appellate briefs count I wonder?). Given Rogow’s fame and seniority, he could easily be pulling down well north of $200,000 for what sounds like about five hours a week of work, amortized over a 47-week work year (let’s assume French vacation schedules just for the heck of it).
Of course all this is ridiculous from any perspective that sees law schools as something other than extraordinarily successful rent-seeking operations. Surely Nova can (and does) pay successful practitioners a few thousand dollars per class to share war stories and advocacy tips with their students. Or if for some reason Nova wanted to transform itself to a genuine graduate department in legal studies, it could pay actual academics what it pays its faculty in its humanities and social science departments (around $80,000 per year, per this less than scientific survey).
Instead it charges students more than $35,000 per year — and last year 71.3% of its students paid full boat sticker price — for this nonsensical arrangement.
Admittedly, having Rogow teach Civil Procedure isn’t as absurd as handing that job over to somebody with a doctorate in philosophy, who has only seen the inside of a court room on TV, (this is not, needless to say, a hypothetical situation in the context of the contemporary American law school), but still . . .
Scott has already pointed out that Lisa McElroy seems to be arguing for the vigorous application of the doctrine of caveat emptor to transactions between prospective law students and law schools. Caveat emptor is a common law legal doctrine which asserts that the only duty sellers have to buyers is not to engage in affirmative misrepresentation, or fraudulent concealment of latent defects. Example: if you’re selling a house with a roof that leaks, you can’t lie if a prospective buyer asks you if the roof leaks, but if the buyer doesn’t ask, and you don’t do something to cover up the leak from discovery by a prudent inspection, then you have no liability to the buyer after the closing in regard to the condition of the roof.
Caveat emptor is (or was) applied traditionally to so-called “arm’s length” business transactions, in which the parties had no special duties toward each other.
At the other end of the spectrum, in law-talking terms, we have the fiduciary relationship, which is a catch-all term for situations in which parties to a transaction do have such duties, legally speaking. For example, if I have a great idea for a book and tell my friend, I have no legal recourse if my friend goes off and writes a book based on that idea (Legally speaking, I have no proprietary right in an idea for a book unless and until I actually turn it into a copyrightable entity, that is, an actual book). On the other hand, if I tell my agent this great idea and he turns around and pitches it to another one of his clients, Famous Author, who then writes up a proposal that the agent sells to a publisher, I can sue my agent for breaching his fiduciary duty to me, since we’re in a special legal relationship, i.e., one of agent and principal.
Note that the legalities of this situation don’t track most peoples’ sense of the moral obligations of the parties: Morally speaking, my friend’s betrayal of our friendship is worse than my agent’s breach of his legal duty to me, even though it’s not legally actionable (in part because I actually have legal recourse against the agent, but primarily because breaching obligations created by a business relationship is generally not as deplorable as betraying a friend).
So when we ask if schools have fiduciary obligations toward their students, we can be asking a narrowly legal question (“is a school a legal fiduciary in relation to the interest of its students?”), or a broader moral one (“is adopting the doctrine of caveat emptor a morally dubious or bankrupt thing to do in this particular social context, without regard to the legalities of the matter?”).
Although I’m no expert on the question, a cursory investigation suggests that there’s surprisingly — surprising to me that is –little formal legal support for the the claim that universities have fiduciary obligations toward their students, even though universities are usually organized as non-profit, quasi-charitable entities, that get all sorts of tax breaks and other benefits for being “eleemosynary” (law talk for public-regarding) institutions.
That of course is or should be to be a separate question from the question of how universities, colleges, law schools etc., ought to behave toward their students, regardless of the formal legalities. (Obviously the two are related, however. If law schools, for example, are taking the view that the only thing that matters in this world is to get someone to sign on the loan document line that is dotted, it becomes hard to see why they should be tax-exempt entities, why graduates should give them money after they’ve graduated, or why, for that matter, they should be viewed as more exalted social entities than car dealerships).
Anyway I do think educators in particular ought to consider themselves to have special obligations to their students, going beyond those created by a normal business transaction, for at least a couple of reasons:
(1) Generally speaking, students are young and naive, while teachers are older, and, if not wiser, at least warier. This obviously applies to traditional undergraduates, but it’s also true for a large percentage of law students, who are only formally adults, and — this is crucial — who have been brought up to think of institutions of higher learning as places that are doing something other than trying to figure out how to pass out the Glengarry leads to their best earners.
All of us are prone to optimism bias, confirmation bias, and the sunk cost fallacy, but, again generally speaking, the younger we are the more vulnerable we remain to these factors, which, because of the special cultural prestige institutions of higher learning possess, such institutions are especially able to exploit, should they choose to do so. That potential for exploitation means we can’t or shouldn’t always be closing, no matter how profitable it may be for the non-profit entities in which we operate for us to take this view of our present and future students.
(2) The entire economic justification (there are of course other justifications, but here we’re speaking of the dollars and the cents) for the considerable present costs of higher education is what economists refer to as “enhancing human capital.” We’re not just supposed to be providing a social signaling mechanism regarding the preexisting abilities of our students, which could obviously be provided at a vastly lower cost: we’re supposed to be enhancing those abilities from what they would otherwise be.
Law schools in particular like to plume themselves on the idea that we’re imbuing all sorts of valuable critical thinking skills to our charges. The irony here is that, if we’re actually performing this function at all effectively (assume the necessary can openers for the purposes of argument), we cannot at the same time adopt caveat emptor as the appropriate attitude toward our students, even as a practical — let alone an ethical — matter.
Consider what it means, practically speaking, for a professor at an extremely expensive law school with terrible employment statistics to actually “enhance” the human capital that funds her paycheck. To put it bluntly, if a law professor at Drexel is doing her job, in terms of what the legal academy advertises that job to be, she is in many cases transforming her students into people who will come to understand that the doctrine of caveat emptor, as applied to law schools, has produced an institution in which they would never have enrolled in the first place, if their critical thinking skills had already been improved.
In other words, a law professor at a school like Drexel who successfully educates her students is performing the economic equivalent of mailing herself a letter bomb.
. . . MacK from comments on the special obligations of legal academics: (I should have noted in the original post that the lawyer-client relationship is the epitome of a fiduciary situation):
It would be helpful to point out that law schools exist in a special category – perhaps one to a degree also inhabited by medical schools – the law and regulation of lawyers specifically provided that lawyers have a very high level of fiduciary duty towards their clients and indeed certain third parties (as officers of the court for example.) Every law school has a mandatory course in legal ethics. Moreover, lawyers are covered by extraordinarily strict conflict of interest laws especially when it comes to handling and investing client money.
Yet, here you have organisations essentially of lawyers (most law professors are still legally trained and qualified) with what are effectively their clients – in the form of their students – and the administration of those law schools, and numerous professors ranging from the egregious Ms. McEvoy to the much more egregious Brian Leiter insisting that they should be allowed to behave in ways that would make a used car salesman – or indeed a pimp blush – and for the former would probably violate all sorts of consumer protection laws and consumer credit laws. You have deans of law schools engaging in chicanery vis-à-vis their students that would get a lawyer disbarred – and the state bars are not investigating? The ABA is silent – the very institution that required legal ethics courses for law students?
Updated below
Over at The Faculty Lounge, Steve Freedman, assistant dean of admissions at the University of Kansas Law School, announced a couple of days ago that he was going to offer a series of posts about why right now is a great time to go to law school. (The first two are here and here. TL;DR: Less law students means more jobs for law graduates.)
Freedman predictably got some push back regarding his thesis, with Brian Tamanaha providing the most trenchant criticism:
Please address the apparent contradiction in advice like this. Assuming no substantial change in the legal market (for better or worse), the job outlook for graduates stands to improve precisely because fewer students are enrolling in law school these days. But of course, if significant numbers of people take your advice and “enroll today” (thinking three years hence the oversupply of law grads will be eliminated by falling enrollment), then the job outlook will worsen as a consequence because the oversupply will not go down as much. So your prediction will bear out only if most people thinking about law school do not take your advice.
It’s notable that Freedman has already closed comments to his second post, even though none of the comments were inappropriate in tone or substance, unless of course harsh criticism of one’s arguments is considered inappropriate per se.
I’m not picking on Freedman in particular in this regard, as I’ve noticed there’s a strong tendency among legal academic bloggers to either not allow comments at all, or to cut them off for no apparent reason other than that they’re highly critical. This fact says something, I think, about the level of deference that legal academics become accustomed to from their usual audiences. Apparently failure to provide that deference can easily get interpreted as “lack of civility,” or “insolence,” or some other form of lese majeste.
This in turn probably helps explain why it took so comparatively long for the legal academy to notice the disaster that was overtaking so many of our graduates. Under the circumstances, developing something other than a flypaper-thin skin in regard to criticism might be in order (especially given that we’re supposed to be training future lawyers).
Update: In regard to Prof. Lisa McElroy’s comments in the closed thread, comments at JD Underground are most definitely not closed.
Following up on Erik’s post about working hours in France, in 1939 John Maynard Keynes published what eventually became a famous essay, entitled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren,” in which he tried to predict what “the progressive countries” (what would now be called the developed world) would look like in 2030.
The essay makes two big predictions:
(1) By 2030 the developed world would be in per capita terms four to eight times wealthier than it was a century earlier.
(2) This explosion of wealth would produce a tremendous reduction of hours worked, as people chose leisure over yet more income.
The first prediction was almost uncannily accurate, while the second has turned out to be completely wrong in regard to the United States, and largely wrong about Europe. (I’m not familiar enough with the relevant statistics in regard to the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America to comment on the salience of Keynes’ second prediction to them).
Regarding the first prediction, U.S. per capita GDP was about 6.2 times higher at the end of 2013 than it was at the end of 1929 (it increased from just over $8000 to just under $50,000 in chained 2009 dollars). Extrapolating out, Keynes high end prediction appears to have been if anything slightly conservative. Keynes thought that such a trajectory would result in something like a 15-hour work week for most people who worked for income:
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
At the time, this seemed like a reasonable projection, as work hours in the US and Europe had declined considerably over the previous half century, and Keynes assumed that the income effect — the declining marginal utility of income in relation to leisure — would cause this trend to continue. Since then, however, the decline in working hours has ceased almost completely in the US, and slowed down drastically in Europe (Europeans do work about 20% fewer hours than Americans however, which is not a trivial distinction).
Economics being a rather tautological discipline, there is of course a ready theoretical explanation for this as well: the substitution effect — i.e., to the extent that productivity increases are reflected in higher income per hour worked, each hour of forgone work in favor of leisure becomes more costly to the worker.
Of course this doesn’t explain why the substitution effect seems to have won out almost completely over the income effect in the US, and to a lesser extent in Europe. And here the biggest weakness of Keynes’ analysis in the essay — a surprising weakness given how relatively sensitive he was to sociological considerations — becomes obvious: there isn’t a word in the piece about distributional considerations.
Here are some numbers from the U.S. census bureau (all figures are in 2012 dollars):
Median household income in 1967: $42,323
Median household income in 2012: $51,017
Per capita GDP 1967: $21,893
Per capita GDP 2012: $49,231
In the late 1960s, median household income was nearly double per capita GDP, while today we have nearly a one to one relationship between the two metrics (Households are on average only slightly smaller today. I don’t have figures for 1967 handy, but in 1975 the average household included 2.89 people, while in 2012 it featured 2.54 persons). Or to put it another way, if over the past 45 years the nation’s increasing wealth as measured by output had ended up getting distributed equally across income groups as income, median household income in the US would be nearly $100,000 per year, rather than half that sum.
This helps explain, I think, why in the US in particular the substitution effect has been so much stronger than the income effect: it’s much harder to forgo additional income in favor of increased leisure when the relative wealth of those above you in the SES hierarchy is increasing faster than your own — especially in a culture obsessed with the conspicuous consumption of positional goods.
Hence:
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
