Author Page for Paul Campos

Slate contrarianism goes too far

Craft brews would have better sales if they didn’t taste so much like beer.

But srsly, people who like to drink Bud Light just aren’t going to like craft brews — or at least not enough to pay the premium — whether the latter are “hoppy” or not (and of course there are hundreds of excellent non-hoppy craft brews — something which the author acknowledges and which would seem to undermine the central premise of the article). I suggest leaving them undisturbed to enjoy their Steve Miller albums and NY Yankee sweatshirts and re-runs of Mork and Mindy on Channel 57, rather than setting off like Kurtz into that impenetrable darkness, armed with Saison Dupont and misguided missionary zeal.

How not to talk about race and class

This Urban Institute report regarding wealth disparities and race/ethnicity is getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately, the report manipulates statistics to push a dubious conclusion, instead of emphasizing a progressive message that actually is supported strongly by the same numbers it quotes.

The report’s evidence for its claim that disparities in wealth are growing between whites on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other, is that the ratio in “average” wealth between white families and black and Hispanic families grew from around five to one to six to one between 1983 and 2010. The average white family had a net worth of around $290,000 in 1983, while black and Hispanic families had average net worth totals of around $60,000. By 2010 the average white family had a net worth of $632,000, while black and Hispanic families had average net worth totals of $98,000 and $110,000 respectively. (All figures are in 2010 dollars).

But if you take a look at the footnotes, specifically footnote 3, you discover the following: the median white household’s wealth has gone from $91,000 in 1983 to $124,000 in 2010, while the median figures for black and Hispanic households have gone from $11,000 to $16,000 and $10,000 to $15,000 during that time frame. (In other words, while median family wealth grew by 36% among white families, it increased by 45% and 50% among black and Hispanic families).

This tells us two things:

(1) While it’s true the disparities in wealth between white families and non-white families (excluding Asian-Americans) remain immense, they are, on a percentage basis, actually declining between most American families of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, since of course the median figures are far more representative of the economic circumstances of most Americans than the mean numbers.

(2) For all races/ethnic groups, the differences between the medians and the means are extraordinary. Consider how much wealth must be piled at the very top of the social pyramid to produce a situation in which the “average” white family is now more than five times wealthier than the median white family. Meanwhile, the comparable ratios for “average” and median black and Hispanic families are even higher than among white families, and have also widened significantly over the past 27 years.

What these statistics really show is that the rapid growth in wealth disparities in this country have little if anything to do with race, and everything to do with class.

The brave new world of Miranda exceptions

Are we safe yet?

Give the people what they want

Further thoughts on the relationship between violence as political theater and the social forces that enable it.

Teenage Wasteland

A fantastic bit of reporting from David Remnick.

This seems like quite a coincidence

If somebody is trying to pull off a cut-rate imitation of the post-9/11 craziness, they seem to be succeeding.

Of course it may well be a coincidence, and the kind of thing that wouldn’t have gotten much attention if not for Monday’s bombing.

Amnesty for academic sock puppets?

Oh my:

Twenty years ago, I paid a visit to Prof. Michael Broyde in his Emory University Law School office, to ask him to help me understand the Jewish legal doctrine of lashon hara–telling bad things about someone. I was interested in the relationship between this proscribed behavior and the practice of journalism. He told me that, unlike defamation in U.S. law, lashon hara is considered wrong even if the bad thing is true.

A couple of days ago, Broyde found himself on the wrong end of such journalistic lashon hara. In a punctilious piece of investigative reporting, the Jewish Channel’s Steven I. Weiss made out a case that Broyde had invented an elderly rabbi called Hershel Goldwasser to engage in some classic online sock puppetry.

Specifically, Weiss alleged that Broyde used the Goldwasser character to 1) praise himself to other scholars; 2) attack rabbinic authorities he disagreed with–including Atlanta’s most respected orthodox rabbi; and 3) gain access to a listserv of his rabbinic rivals that he wouldn’t have had access to under his own name. In his correspondence to scholarly journals, “Goldwasser” said that Broyde had been a “one-in-[a]-million” student of his in high school and that because of the relationship Broyde sent him drafts of his brilliant articles to review — thereby explaining his frequent reference to them.

Not only could Weiss find no independent confirmation of Goldwasser’s existence but he ascertained that his communications came from the same Comcast and Emory IP addresses that Broyde uses. At first, when confronted with the evidence, Broyde denied inventing Goldwasser. (“Not my character…He’s a rebbe [teacher] of mine from many years ago who’s deceased [and] made aliyah [moved to Israel] ten years ago, or something like that, maybe more, I don’t remember.”) But shortly after Weiss’ story appeared, he admitted responsibility in an email of apology to one of the rabbis on the invaded listserv.

How much of this kind of thing is out there, just waiting to be uncovered? (A few weeks ago, LGM readers were treated to the amusing spectacle of law professor Brian Leiter’s various sock puppets traipsing across the internet discussing, among many other things, the awesomeness of Brian Leiter).

Perhaps it’s time to convene a Truth and Reconciliation blog panel, which will grant amnesty to the purveyors of sock puppetry, in return for a full and frank confession, and a promise to mend one’s narcissistic ways.

On a related note, consider this suggestion, made just a couple of days ago by Broyde’s Emory Law School colleague Dorothy Brown: ($$$)

The question that needs to be asked is: What makes for successful lawyers in the 21st century and how would a new rankings system reward law schools that did the job well? Although U.S. News does not seem to care, lawyers, law schools and consumers should. The current market for lawyers rewards value added. Given this, law schools must develop leaders who are problem solvers and collaborative workers — leaders who have the integrity to say no when no one in the room wants to hear it. If a rankings system could take that into account, society as a whole would be better off . . .

We are facing some of the most intractable problems of recent history. A ranking system that rewarded those law schools that instilled integrity, developed leaders, and graduated problem solvers would be good for the country. We must find a better test to teach to.

This is the conclusion to an op-ed which is devoted to describing how structural changes in the market for legal services are eliminating jobs for lawyers.

Nothing illustrates the essential emptiness of so much of what goes on in legal academia as recommendations (and they are legion) of this sort. Do graduate programs in other disciplines advertise that they are going to “add value” by turning their charges into social leaders chock full of moral integrity, who also possess amorphous “problem solving” skills? I guess the military academies make similar claims at the undergraduate level, but leaving aside whether those claims actually have any plausibility, those institutions immerse 18-year-olds in a 24/7 experience, as opposed to spending a few hours per week attempting to convey legal doctrine to 25-year-olds surfing Facebook.

Seriously, how exactly are law professors supposed to “instill integrity” in law students, or “develop leaders?” In what way are we qualified to perform these amazing feats, even assuming such miracles could be produced in law school classrooms? And even if we assume enough can openers to make this a plausible educational mission, how is any of this going to get anybody a job?

NY Post claims 20-year-old Saudi being held in Boston blasts

Obviously our invasion of Saudi Arabia after the 9/11 attacks failed to prevent more terror.

Update: NY Post report of arrest denied by police.

From NBC News:

Federal officials told NBC News that Boston police were guarding a “possible suspect” who had been wounded in the blasts, but they cautioned that there was no information at the federal level to consider that person a suspect.

On a possibly related note, I flew on Thursday and there was clearly heightened security, at least at DIA. A line that normally would have taken five to ten minutes to get through at the security checkpoint took 40 minutes. (On second thought this is idle speculation. I’ve talked to three other people who’ve flown in the last two days, and while one encountered what seemed like heightened security procedures, the two others didn’t).

Catholic University of America to slash overall budget by 20%; plunging law schools apps to blame

Last November CUA’s law school announced that the managing partner of Kirkland and Ellis’s DC office would become the school’s dean the following July. In January the school revealed the new dean was taking over immediately, and that staff were being laid off.

Now comes word that the university as a whole will cut operating expenses by 20% (!) because the cash cow that was its law school is being ground up into hamburger by, among other things, the availability of employment statistics regarding outcomes for CUA law school graduates.

Those statistics reveal that 88 out of 246 2012 CUA law grads had a legal job (full-time long-term employment requiring bar admission) in February of 2013, not counting two people who were employed by the school itself.

The law school accounts for about 10% of the university’s overall enrollment, so the mind reels at the extent to which the rest of the university has been depending for its solvency on encouraging the law school to produce massively indebted graduates who are unable to get any sort of legal job in what is at present the worst place in the country to try to get a job as a lawyer (Washington DC).

This naturally raises the question of how many other universities depend on their law school’s graduates to cross-subsidize the rest of the campus to a similar extent. A friend who is in a position to know tells me that quite a few law schools are now actually running operating deficits, although university budgets are so byzantine in regard to cross-subsidization via the charging of “indirect expenses” and the like that it’s often very difficult to untangle the actual financial situation. We law faculty are of course encouraged by our administrative overlords not to worry our pretty little heads about these matters, not that most of us require much encouragement of that sort anyway.

Another friend makes a prediction:

My suspicion is that law schools will close when they appear to need long term subsidization. I got into a row a few times at Prawfs over this, but when you read most schools tenure guidelines as an implied contract, it starts to jump out that cost cutting would be extraordinarily hard in any department – with seniority rules, the need to show financial crisis etc. The easy out is actually to “pull the plug” on the whole department. That is why I think a few colleges could quite abruptly make the decision to simply close the law school.

I do find amusing the idea that some professors have that everyone will take a nice round 10% pay cut. You never can really sell an across the board pay cut – someone always has alimony, kids in school, impecunious parents, a big mortgage, and if it is hell to make it stick. Look how fast law firms push out partners having a bad year… The idea that senior faculty will take one for the team, or junior faculty, many of whom have big student loans – is not that realistic. The problem is that it does not look very easy to layoff tenured faculty and oddly, tenure seems to be one of the few areas in US law where the idea of constructive dismissal may actually apply (I did some research a while back.)

My own sense of the situation, which I have expressed before, is that when the first reputable college jumps and announces that its law school is closing there will be a rising wave of followers. The interesting question is how far are some schools from that point – if enrollment is way down in August/September it could start sooner than many people think.

I note your comment about lack of transparency. The late Dick Gordon told me, when he was Dean of Georgetown, that he took the decision to move to Capitol Hill so that he could segregate the finances better – that the murkiness was in overhead allocation for shared facilities – registration fees, campus upkeep, heating plant, you name it. Some departments pay essentially nothing for their use of campus facilities and office space, lecture halls, gyms, registration services, while law schools often pay inflated charges, and the law school Deans don’t necessarily know how inflated.

Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Law school is now for rich kids

While looking over the latest debt numbers for law graduates, it’s striking how high these numbers have gotten; conversely, it’s also how many people are graduating with no law school debt at all. Nationally, about 15% of the class of 2012 graduated with no law school debt, but this percentage varied widely between schools, from a high of 30% to a low of 0% (32% of UC-Irvine’s initial class graduated with no debt, but this is a special case as the entire initial class paid no tuition).

You don’t have to be an ethnologist to detect a certain pattern in the distribution of these percentages as they relate to, among other things, matters of socioeconomic status. For example, here’s a half dozen schools with especially high percentages of graduates who incurred debt:

Thomas Jefferson 98%
Phoenix 97%
Western New England 96%
Regent 98%
Appalachian 96%
Texas Southern 100%

Now here are six schools that had relatively low percentages of graduates taking out any law school loans:

SMU: 70%
Penn: 71%
Fordham: 72%
Texas: 74%
Emory 76%
Vanderbilt: 76%

Note that the estimated cost of attendance at the schools with lots of debt-free graduates is on average quite a bit higher than that at the schools where essentially everyone is graduating with law school debt. So how is it that, for example, nearly three out of ten graduates of Fordham manage to graduate without taking out any law school loans?

The answer, of course, is that lots of really rich kids go to Fordham (and SMU and Vanderbilt, etc.). These schools have become staggeringly expensive to attend: For instance, Fordham now charges just under $50K per year in tuition and fees, and has a nine-month estimated cost of living of over $25,000. (Federal loan programs only allow people to borrow living expenses when they’re enrolled in school, so summer expenses aren’t covered for most students.

Fordham also gives out very little in the way of scholarship money: two-thirds of the class gets nothing, and the median grant for those who do get tuition breaks is $10K, meaning that the school’s effective tuition rate is around $46K per year.

Yet three out of ten Fordham grads are coming up with $240K in cash to pay for three years of tuition and cost of living expenses in mid-town and environs. What happens to the rest?

The 72% of the 2012 graduating class that took out loans during law school took out an average (mean) total of $134,350 over the course of law school. But this total is misleading. First, a significant minority of that 72% are borrowing only minimally. From what I’ve seen at various schools, about 10% to 15% of the graduating class takes out relatively small loan totals, to cover for example part or all of their living expenses, while parents pay the full cost of tuition. In addition, until last summer it was possible to get $25,500 in interest-free subsidized Stafford loans over the course of law school — the government paid the interest pre-graduation — and I know some people who took out such loans purely for the arbitrage opportunity, and then paid them off at graduation.

So probably about 60%, roughly speaking, of the Fordham class took out really large loan amounts. This means the median amount borrowed among the 72% of the class that borrowed was quite a bit higher than the mean. And as of last year, all such loans accrue interest as soon as their issued, and average rate of about 7.5%. What this means is that the median amount owed in law school loans by the more than half of Fordham grads who took out significant loans was probably more on the order of $200,000 — and this doesn’t include other educational debt, or consumer debt.

Now it’s true that one third of Fordham’s 2012 class got high-paying big firm jobs (how long they’ll hang on to those jobs is a different question). But for what should be obvious reasons, it’s unlikely that the distribution of such jobs was random between the 60% or so of the class that’s incurring massive debt totals, and the 40% that’s incurring no or relatively little debt.

This back of the envelope calculation leads to the conclusion that around half of the 2012 class at this highly-ranked school is basically screwed (100 of the class’s 466 graduates were either completely unemployed nine months after graduation, or working in short-term and/or part-time “jobs” funded by the school itself, to pump up the school’s putative employment rate). And that half is likely to largely overlap with the three-fifths of the class that doesn’t come from major money.

A very similar story can be told about the graduating classes at Emory and Vanderbilt and Texas and SMU — hyper-expensive schools catering in large but all too limited part to the children of the one per cent, where the large majority of the graduating classes don’t get anything close to a high-paying entry level job, or in some cases any job at all. (A commenter points out that UT is not hyper-expensive relative to these other schools, at least for in-state residents. Although even for in-state residents annual COA is $53K a year, which will produce nearly $190K in debt if fully debt-financed. Out of state COA is $70K per year).

And, comparatively speaking, these are among the best law schools out there, in terms of “investment value.” Compared to Thomas Jefferson et. al., these schools feature good outcomes — in the sense that breaking your ankle is a good outcome relative to getting your leg amputated.