First, do the math. Can you possibly afford to make the payment? I hate this process, I hate the Department of Education, I hate the banks, I hate Sallie Mae, and I especially hate all those collection agencies, but still, if you can make the payments without too much hardship, make them. I do not advocate complete anarchy here.
If you have one of these law school debts of over $100K, you’ll probably be making monthly payments up to $1K per month. So, again, do the math. Can you afford this, plus your rent ($1,500-$2,000), plus any car payment ($300 per month) plus living expenses (which includes credit card debt: another $1000 per month)? Let’s round up to $5,000 per month, which is $60K per annum. If you make $60K per annum, read no further and pay off your student loans.
If not, listen to these words: you cannot afford this. Change your mindset and prepare yourself for a life you probably didn’t expect, but it isn’t the end of the world.
It’s funny how some people go through college and don’t understand that if you default on your student loan (that is, if you miss enough payments—usually around six) the FBI does not show up at your door and arrest you. You don’t have to move out of the country if you stiff the Department of Education!
Here’s some things you should learn about the employment world as it stands today in America. The current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and it appears that it will stay that way for a while. That means an 8-hour day will earn you $58; a 40-hour week (8 hours x 5 days) will earn you $290; a full time job at minimum wage will earn you ($290 x 4 weeks) $1,160 per month, which is $13,920 per year. The official poverty level for a family of two is $14,000 per year, so this minimum wage job puts you just under it.
Now look at what you have to make to afford your student loans, or $60K per annum. That’s $5,000 per month, $1,250 per week, $250 per day, or $31.25 an hour. There might be some adjusting to do with vacations, February, which has only 28 days, and other facts of our Western calendar. Round up to $32 per hour. If you are not making $32 per hour, you should not be attempting to pay back your student loans.
So what happens if you simply don’t pay? Again, I’m not a complete anarchist, so if you can pay something, anything, say $100 per month, do it. You’ll default and be making those payments to a collection agency, but so what. In fact, the collection agency will tell you not to send them a payment if it isn’t for the full amount. Send it anyway. They’ll take it. If you stiff them cold, they will remember that. Don't stiff them cold if you can avoid it.
Oh yes, and their hardship plans are usually bogus. They'll try to sell you those. Listen to them. But usually don't sign up for them. If the collection company treats you like a rogue because you won't sign up for their hardship plan, tell them tough titties. If they start to come down on you hard, hang up the phone.
Even if you are unemployed and have no money whatsoever coming in, a $100 payment to them now and then (say once or twice a year) will keep you out of the worst of their categories. It all goes under the general category of how to handle bill collectors.
This advice goes for stiffing credit cards as well. Do it only if you don’t have the money coming in, but don’t be afraid to do it. When the collection companies start calling, it is important NOT TO TELL THEM ANYTHING. They will say they have the force of the law on their side, but that is a bluff. Collection companies will use every trick in the book to make sure you don’t have enough money for food that month. They are despicable. Treat them like criminals, because that’s what they are.
If collection agencies start harassing you (and they most certainly will), you must demand that they stop all collection calls. You have to do this in writing. Write your demand to stop all collection calls to them in crayon. They must. Oddly, this is one of the laws they honor.
Make your priorities: stiff student loans and credit cards first; don’t stiff auto insurance if you don’t want to be fined (depending on the state you live in); don’t stiff the auto payment if you don’t want your car repossessed; and don’t ever, ever, ever stiff the IRS. With all the conservative propaganda horror stories out there about the IRS, as long as you don’t owe them mega-bucks, they are the puppy dogs of collection outfits. If you owe back taxes, set up a monthly payment with them. If you can’t afford what you owe at the end of the year, make sure you at least file on time. Send them what you can. Their collection letters are intimidating, but they are nothing like the lawless collection agencies that the Department of Education or credit card companies will sic on you.
There are a few other laws to know about. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which goes back to the New Deal during the Great Depression, is what you need to invoke if your employer works you overtime without paying you “time and a half.” If you receive an hourly wage and your employer works you more than eight hours, you can sue and usually collect twice the amount of your damages. The problem is, of course, you are going to piss off your employer if you sue them, so you have to decide if this is really worth it. Still, it is more than interesting when you work for a company and lo and behold they simply show what they are made of by completely dishonoring this law. This is one of the laws that I’m sure young JDs will be encountering when they get these temporary positions with law firms. Other employers will try to grant you “exempt” status, by making you a vice-president or something. McDonalds once thought it could successfully skirt around FLSA by making all of its burger-flippers vice-presidents, so they could work overtime. Once you thoroughly know this law, you’ll see just what your employers are made of and why you should be very suspicious of them at all times.
ERISA, which dates from 1974, is another important law, which deals with pension plans. Employers are aggressively trying to make a buck by getting you to sign up for their pension plans, and sometimes you don’t even know you have signed up for one. If you stop working for a company, make sure that they haven’t signed you up for a pension plan and if they have, make sure that they return the money they took out of your paychecks, if you are not yet vested. I don’t care how fancy the office building is where you work, these companies are ruthless. Make Xerox copies of all of your paychecks, because they will often skimp on the information provided to you on your pay stubs.
Also watch for the part-time/full-time shuffle. I worked for a company once that had me employed 7.75 hours a day, and considered that part-time employment. No, it was also not some fly-by-night organization either.
If you are a young lawyer, you have no doubt entered into the legal field at a time when downsizing is going to cream you if you let it. Don’t let Judge Judy intimidate you when she says you are a bum if you don’t have a job. Many of these places are simply not worth working for. Sometimes it is better to simply stop paying your bills than to put up with the nonsense that an employer is going to try and pull on you. It will waste your time and it is not worth the money.
Above all, make sure you get enough to eat and have a roof over your head. You are not a bum if you don’t pay back your student loans, no matter what that television tells you.
And if you get in a jam, go see a lawyer! Their first consulation is usually free.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
En garde! Taking on the Trolls
Even if you are of strong character and sound mind, trolls have the ability to knock the wind out of you. We bloggers know there are trolls out there, they get into our blogs and stubbornly fire away at everything we might stand for.
Why should we be so surprised? In a way, we pick the fight with them by taking a stand against the status quo. If we know what the law school crisis is, we try to fix it by informing others and making sure that the snake-oil salesmen out there don’t fool you with their claims.
I recently read an extraordinary feature by a writer for the Sacramento News & Review, R.V. Scheide. It’s about the current public education crisis in California:
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1380297
Scheide got the progression of what you have to go against if you are going to fight against the status quo these days: 1) Ronald Reagan; 2) Howard Jarvis; 3) Ayn Rand; and 4) Milton Friedman. The trolls have their way of thinking, and they will never give in. They are fiercely loyal and will essentially fight to the death.
They will tell you “never give a sucker an even break.” And if you are a recent JD graduate who can’t get a job, to them you are a sucker. There will be no civil effort to fix the problem as far as they are concerned. It doesn’t matter how much you argue or how much you isolate a substantial, destructive problem and identify it. Their creed is to make sure you stay at the bottom.
I mention Ronald Reagan because he was the one who originally led a political campaign against education, not when he was President, but when he was Governor of California (1967-1975). He believed that universities were harboring Marxism and should therefore be starved out of money, and maybe even eradicated altogether. His biggest enemy was UC Berkeley, where protesting against the Vietnam War had heated up to boiling point. If you want to know why tuition in law school (or any school) has continuously gone up over the years, Reagan’s attempt to crack down on universities and public funding for them was a powerful cause for the conservatives who have shaped this country for the past 30 years, since Reagan became President.
Howard Jarvis appeared on the California scene shortly after Reagan served out his term as Governor, but his tax revolt (which was the essence of his famous Proposition 13, which the voters affirmed) cut property taxes in California which were funding the public education system. The spirit of this tax revolt appears the same today as it did then: it presents itself as a grassroots movement, but in essence, it gulls the grassroots into supporting the interests of the wealthy.
And please don’t buy into the stuff you read about Ayn Rand, for example, that her Atlas Shrugged is the most important book since the Bible. Rand is a warped, pernicious thinker, angry at the world, believing through a twisted logic that religious, spiritual people are leading the planet towards death. She is the heart and soul of the conservative movement, even though she is a staunch atheist. She practically condones criminal behavior if you are among the elite of the world. She espouses a circular, tautological philosophy attracting young people by the droves because of its angry tone.
And Milton Friedman, who stood by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s side at the beginning of his first term, is one of the chief voices of the Libertarian Party and the Chicago School of Economics. He would just as soon auction off the departments of the Federal Government to the highest bidder: I often wonder what would happen if the Mafia bought the Department of Justice. He tells you there is no such thing as fat cats, and that the free market is the only way to structure a society. He has successfully taken the 19th-century version of anarchy and wrapped it in sheep’s clothing. The wolf that jumps out to eat you will be those wealthy “fat cats” that will make sure you remain jobless, unless you get down on all fours and service their needs (to put it mildly).
I realize this is California stuff, but it is apropos of the issue at hand. If we are trying to preserve the American experiment in Democracy, every voice shall be heard, even if the trolls are going to yell at the same time. Trying to solve problems with logic will make you vulnerable to their guile, but stand firm and right with the truth. Expect a fight, but it needs to be fought.
Why should we be so surprised? In a way, we pick the fight with them by taking a stand against the status quo. If we know what the law school crisis is, we try to fix it by informing others and making sure that the snake-oil salesmen out there don’t fool you with their claims.
I recently read an extraordinary feature by a writer for the Sacramento News & Review, R.V. Scheide. It’s about the current public education crisis in California:
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1380297
Scheide got the progression of what you have to go against if you are going to fight against the status quo these days: 1) Ronald Reagan; 2) Howard Jarvis; 3) Ayn Rand; and 4) Milton Friedman. The trolls have their way of thinking, and they will never give in. They are fiercely loyal and will essentially fight to the death.
They will tell you “never give a sucker an even break.” And if you are a recent JD graduate who can’t get a job, to them you are a sucker. There will be no civil effort to fix the problem as far as they are concerned. It doesn’t matter how much you argue or how much you isolate a substantial, destructive problem and identify it. Their creed is to make sure you stay at the bottom.
I mention Ronald Reagan because he was the one who originally led a political campaign against education, not when he was President, but when he was Governor of California (1967-1975). He believed that universities were harboring Marxism and should therefore be starved out of money, and maybe even eradicated altogether. His biggest enemy was UC Berkeley, where protesting against the Vietnam War had heated up to boiling point. If you want to know why tuition in law school (or any school) has continuously gone up over the years, Reagan’s attempt to crack down on universities and public funding for them was a powerful cause for the conservatives who have shaped this country for the past 30 years, since Reagan became President.
Howard Jarvis appeared on the California scene shortly after Reagan served out his term as Governor, but his tax revolt (which was the essence of his famous Proposition 13, which the voters affirmed) cut property taxes in California which were funding the public education system. The spirit of this tax revolt appears the same today as it did then: it presents itself as a grassroots movement, but in essence, it gulls the grassroots into supporting the interests of the wealthy.
And please don’t buy into the stuff you read about Ayn Rand, for example, that her Atlas Shrugged is the most important book since the Bible. Rand is a warped, pernicious thinker, angry at the world, believing through a twisted logic that religious, spiritual people are leading the planet towards death. She is the heart and soul of the conservative movement, even though she is a staunch atheist. She practically condones criminal behavior if you are among the elite of the world. She espouses a circular, tautological philosophy attracting young people by the droves because of its angry tone.
And Milton Friedman, who stood by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s side at the beginning of his first term, is one of the chief voices of the Libertarian Party and the Chicago School of Economics. He would just as soon auction off the departments of the Federal Government to the highest bidder: I often wonder what would happen if the Mafia bought the Department of Justice. He tells you there is no such thing as fat cats, and that the free market is the only way to structure a society. He has successfully taken the 19th-century version of anarchy and wrapped it in sheep’s clothing. The wolf that jumps out to eat you will be those wealthy “fat cats” that will make sure you remain jobless, unless you get down on all fours and service their needs (to put it mildly).
I realize this is California stuff, but it is apropos of the issue at hand. If we are trying to preserve the American experiment in Democracy, every voice shall be heard, even if the trolls are going to yell at the same time. Trying to solve problems with logic will make you vulnerable to their guile, but stand firm and right with the truth. Expect a fight, but it needs to be fought.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Law $chool Books: Let the $cams Begin
I know, I know. This is an easy one. Why don’t I pick on someone my own size, or something like that? Bear with me, please, Blogosphere. I just need to get this out of my system. Thank you.
So-called “casebooks” designed for use in law schools are nothing but reprinted public record. Of course, the compiler/editor of these books is a law scholar who takes credit for using his or her perspicacity to know which cases are important and which are not. The same scholar, or team of scholars, throws in marvelous little paragraphs here and there, along with other quips (gadzooks, but sometimes these other quips are even witty) to punctuate a higher legal point.
And voilà! The resulting 1,000-page tome puts you the diligent law student back about 160 smackers. But don’t worry: the financial aid office has already put a hefty item on your projected expenses for law books, so there should be a tidy sum waiting to be spent on these books once your student loan check comes through.
If you’re really lucky, there might even be a humorous cartoon or two inserted into the pages of your casebook. My Torts casebook even has a photograph of the Long Island train station where the intrepid Helen Palsgraf was hit by a flying scale, ever changing the legal world and its often impenetrable jargon forever.
I have a friend who passed the bar exam and kept telling me, “aces don’t read cases.” In other words, a successful lawyer not only doesn’t waste time reading cases; a successful lawyer knows that the act of reading and learning cases makes a younger lawyer too cocky and filled with information that is, at the end of the day, useless. That being said, it doesn’t take a Clarence Darrow to know that if you want to look good in front of your scowling law professor and scared-shitless colleagues, you’ll buy the books and read the cases. If you want to do well on the exams, on the other hand, you’ll listen to my friend. This is after all where you’ll be graded. Reading every word of these cases is going to waste your time something silly.
But what is it about the law book that reflects the smarmy corruption of the legal world in general? One such book I had to buy was a bunch of Xeroxed pages bound together with a spiral binding. It cost $70. When I asked the clerk at the bookstore if this was actually correct (shouldn’t $7 be the more likely price), she responded that it had copyrighted material in it so yes, of course, it should cost $70. Perhaps if I were smarter, this clerk intimated, I would know that too.
My Criminal Law professor actually published his own case book: a handsome hardback published by LexisNexis. That cost $80, some of which goes into his pocket. This price does not include the distinguished pipe you should smoke while reading it.
Some cases get reprinted twice. Tennessee v. Garner is in both my Criminal Procedure and Criminal Law books. Moore v. Regents of the University of California is in both my Property and Torts books. Perhaps that should be a clue to something: aren’t we wasting space by buying two books and buying the same case twice?
How about printing one big case book for all the courses, get rid of the commentary paragraphs, quips, and cartoons, and let the professors put their own spin on why one case is more important than the other? Better yet, since students all have access to Lexis and Westlaw, why not forget the casebooks altogether and just read the cases directly off our laptops?
Of course, most of the cases are edited so only the “important parts” have to be read. Again, it takes the perspicacity of a legal scholar to know how to edit the cases down. Still, the abridged versions of cases could be made available on the Internet somehow. There is a way to cut back on this waste of paper and money.
The only law book I had to buy that looked useful was the ALWD Manual. Unlike my other law books, this was a professionally edited reference book that was a guide to all legal abbreviations, citation style, and other useful information.
The ALWD Manual is used for legal writing classes, and it takes practice to master all the important stylistic details given in it. As someone who spent seven long years of his life dedicated to writing and editing for a major newspaper, I have learned the usefulness of a manual of style. Any graduate program has a course that introduces the student to the resources of a library and scholarly writing. In my day, the MLA Handbook was the guide for writing any research paper. This has been replaced by the American Psychological Association Manual of Style in most areas, although there are new styles being used, reflecting the rise of the Internet and the fact that any research paper might have literally thousands of sources--too numerous to list.
So I get to my legal writing course, and the teacher hands out a standard exercise, consisting of a poorly written legal memo that we are supposed to spruce up using the ALWD Manual. Was it fate, divine intervention, or just plain luck that I, the only professional writer in the course, was assigned the final segment of this exercise--the hardest part, the grand finale?
Here was the incorrect paragraph as stated in the exercise:
“Under proposed rules to the IRC published in the Federal Register/Vol 68. No. 131 pages 1107-1108 (Wed. July 9, 2003), even conversations between a client and the IRS auditor are protected. The proposed rules seek to amend the Code of Federal Regulations, 26 CFR Part 301, § 301.6104(b) (1999). 68 Fed. Reg. at 1112.”
And after searching through the ALWD manual, knowing that there was something tricky about this segment, I found the rule that was the key to the problem, which I’ll cite as “ALWD 19.3(e)” making the solution to the exercise look as follows:
“Under proposed rules to the I.R.C., even conversations between a client and the IRS auditor are protected. 68 Fed. Reg. 1107, 1112 (proposed July 9, 2003) (to be codified at 26 C.F.R. § 301.6104(b)).”
Mind you, this is what the author of this exercise intended. Right? OK, don’t spend a lot of time working it out or referring to your own ALWD Manual. Just take my word for it.
Alas, the poor teacher, a 30-something Vietnamese-American, using that sarcastic lawyer tone that I have never mastered, whether dishing it out or receiving, did what she could to tear apart my work. I was the only person in the class to come up with this solution. I also got the lowest grade in the class.
This same 30-something Vietnamese-American lawyer scolded me handsomely in class one day because I had used the word “charlatan” in an assignment. It was another of those situations (like the ALWD assignment) where I felt I was the only one in the class who was correct--everyone else was wrong. The teacher didn’t know what the word “charlatan” meant, and, although I can’t believe no one else in the class knew what the word meant either, the smartest girl in the class was the only one who chimed in at that moment, believing the word meant “a magician.”
20 minutes later, I was reading a case for contracts, Sullivan v. O’Connor, and there it was in the middle of the case: the word “charlatan.” But remember what my friend said, “aces don’t read cases.” I’ll say. They don’t read at all.
So why all the casebooks in law school? I know. Get yourself a dictionary and look up the word “charlatan.” Welcome to law school, young tykes!
So-called “casebooks” designed for use in law schools are nothing but reprinted public record. Of course, the compiler/editor of these books is a law scholar who takes credit for using his or her perspicacity to know which cases are important and which are not. The same scholar, or team of scholars, throws in marvelous little paragraphs here and there, along with other quips (gadzooks, but sometimes these other quips are even witty) to punctuate a higher legal point.
And voilà! The resulting 1,000-page tome puts you the diligent law student back about 160 smackers. But don’t worry: the financial aid office has already put a hefty item on your projected expenses for law books, so there should be a tidy sum waiting to be spent on these books once your student loan check comes through.
If you’re really lucky, there might even be a humorous cartoon or two inserted into the pages of your casebook. My Torts casebook even has a photograph of the Long Island train station where the intrepid Helen Palsgraf was hit by a flying scale, ever changing the legal world and its often impenetrable jargon forever.
I have a friend who passed the bar exam and kept telling me, “aces don’t read cases.” In other words, a successful lawyer not only doesn’t waste time reading cases; a successful lawyer knows that the act of reading and learning cases makes a younger lawyer too cocky and filled with information that is, at the end of the day, useless. That being said, it doesn’t take a Clarence Darrow to know that if you want to look good in front of your scowling law professor and scared-shitless colleagues, you’ll buy the books and read the cases. If you want to do well on the exams, on the other hand, you’ll listen to my friend. This is after all where you’ll be graded. Reading every word of these cases is going to waste your time something silly.
But what is it about the law book that reflects the smarmy corruption of the legal world in general? One such book I had to buy was a bunch of Xeroxed pages bound together with a spiral binding. It cost $70. When I asked the clerk at the bookstore if this was actually correct (shouldn’t $7 be the more likely price), she responded that it had copyrighted material in it so yes, of course, it should cost $70. Perhaps if I were smarter, this clerk intimated, I would know that too.
My Criminal Law professor actually published his own case book: a handsome hardback published by LexisNexis. That cost $80, some of which goes into his pocket. This price does not include the distinguished pipe you should smoke while reading it.
Some cases get reprinted twice. Tennessee v. Garner is in both my Criminal Procedure and Criminal Law books. Moore v. Regents of the University of California is in both my Property and Torts books. Perhaps that should be a clue to something: aren’t we wasting space by buying two books and buying the same case twice?
How about printing one big case book for all the courses, get rid of the commentary paragraphs, quips, and cartoons, and let the professors put their own spin on why one case is more important than the other? Better yet, since students all have access to Lexis and Westlaw, why not forget the casebooks altogether and just read the cases directly off our laptops?
Of course, most of the cases are edited so only the “important parts” have to be read. Again, it takes the perspicacity of a legal scholar to know how to edit the cases down. Still, the abridged versions of cases could be made available on the Internet somehow. There is a way to cut back on this waste of paper and money.
The only law book I had to buy that looked useful was the ALWD Manual. Unlike my other law books, this was a professionally edited reference book that was a guide to all legal abbreviations, citation style, and other useful information.
The ALWD Manual is used for legal writing classes, and it takes practice to master all the important stylistic details given in it. As someone who spent seven long years of his life dedicated to writing and editing for a major newspaper, I have learned the usefulness of a manual of style. Any graduate program has a course that introduces the student to the resources of a library and scholarly writing. In my day, the MLA Handbook was the guide for writing any research paper. This has been replaced by the American Psychological Association Manual of Style in most areas, although there are new styles being used, reflecting the rise of the Internet and the fact that any research paper might have literally thousands of sources--too numerous to list.
So I get to my legal writing course, and the teacher hands out a standard exercise, consisting of a poorly written legal memo that we are supposed to spruce up using the ALWD Manual. Was it fate, divine intervention, or just plain luck that I, the only professional writer in the course, was assigned the final segment of this exercise--the hardest part, the grand finale?
Here was the incorrect paragraph as stated in the exercise:
“Under proposed rules to the IRC published in the Federal Register/Vol 68. No. 131 pages 1107-1108 (Wed. July 9, 2003), even conversations between a client and the IRS auditor are protected. The proposed rules seek to amend the Code of Federal Regulations, 26 CFR Part 301, § 301.6104(b) (1999). 68 Fed. Reg. at 1112.”
And after searching through the ALWD manual, knowing that there was something tricky about this segment, I found the rule that was the key to the problem, which I’ll cite as “ALWD 19.3(e)” making the solution to the exercise look as follows:
“Under proposed rules to the I.R.C., even conversations between a client and the IRS auditor are protected. 68 Fed. Reg. 1107, 1112 (proposed July 9, 2003) (to be codified at 26 C.F.R. § 301.6104(b)).”
Mind you, this is what the author of this exercise intended. Right? OK, don’t spend a lot of time working it out or referring to your own ALWD Manual. Just take my word for it.
Alas, the poor teacher, a 30-something Vietnamese-American, using that sarcastic lawyer tone that I have never mastered, whether dishing it out or receiving, did what she could to tear apart my work. I was the only person in the class to come up with this solution. I also got the lowest grade in the class.
This same 30-something Vietnamese-American lawyer scolded me handsomely in class one day because I had used the word “charlatan” in an assignment. It was another of those situations (like the ALWD assignment) where I felt I was the only one in the class who was correct--everyone else was wrong. The teacher didn’t know what the word “charlatan” meant, and, although I can’t believe no one else in the class knew what the word meant either, the smartest girl in the class was the only one who chimed in at that moment, believing the word meant “a magician.”
20 minutes later, I was reading a case for contracts, Sullivan v. O’Connor, and there it was in the middle of the case: the word “charlatan.” But remember what my friend said, “aces don’t read cases.” I’ll say. They don’t read at all.
So why all the casebooks in law school? I know. Get yourself a dictionary and look up the word “charlatan.” Welcome to law school, young tykes!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Juricide: Businessmen Killing a Profession
Book Review: Douglas Litowitz, The Destruction of Young Lawyers: Beyond One L. Akron, Ohio: U of Akron P, 2006.
Read the comments to my blog and you’ll see that one commentator recommends this book by Dr. Douglas Litowitz. I bought it and, seven chapters and 144 pages later, I’m ready to discuss it in the form of a book review, even though I hope this is not too pretentious and following too closely my old profession of writing for newspapers.
As a lawyer, Litowitz is more discontented than disgruntled. Law was a lucrative career for him for five years of his life and, even though he suddenly quit his job in a huff at a large Chicago law firm to earn a PhD in philosophy, law appears to be the thing that most defines him as a thinker and, dare I say, even as a human being. He once taught at Ohio Northern University College of Law, but apparently not any more.
What then does his book, The Destruction of Young Lawyers, mean? Let’s be very careful here, splitting hairs if we have to: Litowitz’s point of view stems not from the dysfunction of trying to enter into the legal profession, although chapters two and three do touch upon law school and the bar exam, but the dystopia of what happens once you enter it. For those of us more concerned with getting through law school or getting a job, this book offers a sort of trickle-down theory, if not a vivid description of our own sour grapes.
As such, it’s also fair to first suspect a kiss-and-tell book. After all, what on earth is he complaining about if he made it through an elite law school and into a job in the legal profession? But as the story unfolds, we see someone trying to reach for more than what he has, realizing that once his goals have been achieved, they didn’t turn out to be what he wanted in the first place. Taken from this point of view, we might even see him as a 21st-century Henry David Thoreau, if not a much more articulate and voluminous version of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener.
Granted, he is isolating himself from the impersonal professional environment he once belonged to and waxing philosophic about it. But to give Litowitz a fair shake, the reader needs to delve even deeper than this. There is a central, more timely issue to his thesis: the lawyer profession used to be noble, but now it has evolved into something sinister and immoral. To swallow this, we have to accept his own parody of Dickens: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”
He most admirably tries to put his finger on the problem by blaming money and the trend in America over the past few decades of putting wealth into the hands of only a few. Some of his statistics are very dramatic, pointing out that law firms of over 1,000 lawyers never even existed until only recently. The tricky tactic of law firms designating some lawyers as “associates” versus others as “junior partners” or something else, creates a money flow that goes only to the tippy top of an elaborate money pyramid. In light of our recent financial meltdown in America, this ought to be nothing new, but I suppose it unfortunately probably is.
Nonetheless, some of Litowitz’s examples do hit the mark. For example, his law firm defended an insurance company that insisted that a properly insured motorcycle victim couldn’t collect. The law firm was called upon to wholeheartedly and without reservation defend this insurance company’s despicably sneaky tactic of policy restructuring involving keeping clients informed of changes in their policies via junk mail with clauses embedded in it too tiny and verbose to notice.
Litowitz even supports these depictions by citing the very abstract legal theories by some influential scholars. He blames them for numbing the consciences of lawyers. For example, he reminds us of Duncan Kennedy, who has no qualms about dividing cases into categories of “cold” (i.e., a routine decision that states rules) and “hot” (i.e., a decision with a clear injustice that might distract law students from more important legal rules--like bait for a trap).
He even includes a penultimate chapter about the irony of technology: what is supposed to make life easier has made it far more complex. This seems like a bonus chapter that is slightly off topic, since technology certainly can’t really be part of a larger decay of the legal profession due to a lack of conscience. Then again, it shows that the decay does make lawyers unable to adapt to the new technology with common sense--instead of allowing computers to make brief-writing an easier task, lawyers simply use computers to over-edit.
As “morosely unhappy” as Litowitz depicts lawyers, I personally wanted him to go further. It’s interesting that he brings up the late Arthur Liman as his pick for a lawyer who led an ideal, productive career. He doesn’t mention that Liman was the lawyer who stared down Lt. Col. Oliver North in what turned out to be the most crucial legal moment of questioning in the Iran-Contra Affair--a moment that the far right in America would hold up as a shining example of the triumph of good (North) over evil (Liman, representing the liberal Senate). Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the Rev. Jerry Falwell even sold video tapes of this exchange as an “inspirational” message to his followers.
Litowitz’s book came out before the financial meltdown of 2008 and before the reinvention of the American liberal movement that elected Barack Obama. It is not entirely in synch with these events, but does march tentatively to their rather slow but steady drum beat. (In contrast, I’m more the type that would rather hear the drum solo to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” at this point in history.) I figure I’m about five years older than Litowitz, which gives me a slightly more mature outlook on the Reagan years, although it does leave me wondering how he can miss what I think is the biggest piece to his puzzle.
Litowitz even quotes Karl Marx extensively, as perhaps any good philosophy scholar should, but boy oh boy does that beg a big question here. He even mentions “socialism and libertarianism” at one point as extreme postures that law schools somehow filter out of their faculties’ political postures. I would take the biggest issue with Litowitz here, reminding him that there was a perceived victory in 1989 of America in the Cold War. America, with its pop culture quips and simplifications, went on to declare the victory of Capitalism over Communism--not just on some terrestrial battlefield, but in the universal battle of abstract ideas.
This version of events has declared Marx a quack once and for all, even though you’ll find Marx’s picture pinned up in classrooms throughout the vast expanse we call China. Come on. Isn’t it a bit too chic for Litowitz to now unapologetically turn to Marx? Maybe it is not.
An analysis of what has happened to our legal system, its decadence and even moral depravity, cannot be completely examined without linking it to the end of the Cold War and the subtle but distinct message that Capitalism is now the wave of the future. Perhaps Marx is Litowitz’s ultimately cryptic way of linking the decadence of the American legal system to the decadence of this Capitalism. But if so, he should never have mentioned Libertarianism as an extreme posture left out of law school--Libertarianism has been the formulaic voice of this new version of brutal Capitalism. Meanwhile, Socialism is still a bogeyman, not only in law school, but in just about every nook and cranny of the American media--currently trying to underscore a defeat of Obama’s health care reform movement.
Our legal system stems from English law, an often discombobulated collection of ritual, esoteric rules, and very flexible concepts and theories. Nonetheless, the English were also the first to implement laws for the poor and other victims of industrialization, long before Marx ever penned his Communist Manifesto. Somehow English law, even more than the Bible’s rigid laws and morality parables, has kept Western civilization from imploding upon itself. That’s what we should be learning in law school and implementing as lawyers.
Litowitz has stated a problem and briefly attempted to articulate a solution. He promised to do that at the beginning of The Destruction of Young Lawyers, and he delivers. What he doesn’t address and needs to address is the ongoing Reagan chimera. It was Reagan that swung the Supreme Court radically to the right in the late 1980s and turned the American legal system into the back-stabbing business that has become the prototype for all American businesses in this new “Capitalism.” He doesn't need to include Marx in his solution, but he does need to state the problem with a bigger scope and, yes, even a bigger urgency.
Read the comments to my blog and you’ll see that one commentator recommends this book by Dr. Douglas Litowitz. I bought it and, seven chapters and 144 pages later, I’m ready to discuss it in the form of a book review, even though I hope this is not too pretentious and following too closely my old profession of writing for newspapers.
As a lawyer, Litowitz is more discontented than disgruntled. Law was a lucrative career for him for five years of his life and, even though he suddenly quit his job in a huff at a large Chicago law firm to earn a PhD in philosophy, law appears to be the thing that most defines him as a thinker and, dare I say, even as a human being. He once taught at Ohio Northern University College of Law, but apparently not any more.
What then does his book, The Destruction of Young Lawyers, mean? Let’s be very careful here, splitting hairs if we have to: Litowitz’s point of view stems not from the dysfunction of trying to enter into the legal profession, although chapters two and three do touch upon law school and the bar exam, but the dystopia of what happens once you enter it. For those of us more concerned with getting through law school or getting a job, this book offers a sort of trickle-down theory, if not a vivid description of our own sour grapes.
As such, it’s also fair to first suspect a kiss-and-tell book. After all, what on earth is he complaining about if he made it through an elite law school and into a job in the legal profession? But as the story unfolds, we see someone trying to reach for more than what he has, realizing that once his goals have been achieved, they didn’t turn out to be what he wanted in the first place. Taken from this point of view, we might even see him as a 21st-century Henry David Thoreau, if not a much more articulate and voluminous version of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener.
Granted, he is isolating himself from the impersonal professional environment he once belonged to and waxing philosophic about it. But to give Litowitz a fair shake, the reader needs to delve even deeper than this. There is a central, more timely issue to his thesis: the lawyer profession used to be noble, but now it has evolved into something sinister and immoral. To swallow this, we have to accept his own parody of Dickens: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”
He most admirably tries to put his finger on the problem by blaming money and the trend in America over the past few decades of putting wealth into the hands of only a few. Some of his statistics are very dramatic, pointing out that law firms of over 1,000 lawyers never even existed until only recently. The tricky tactic of law firms designating some lawyers as “associates” versus others as “junior partners” or something else, creates a money flow that goes only to the tippy top of an elaborate money pyramid. In light of our recent financial meltdown in America, this ought to be nothing new, but I suppose it unfortunately probably is.
Nonetheless, some of Litowitz’s examples do hit the mark. For example, his law firm defended an insurance company that insisted that a properly insured motorcycle victim couldn’t collect. The law firm was called upon to wholeheartedly and without reservation defend this insurance company’s despicably sneaky tactic of policy restructuring involving keeping clients informed of changes in their policies via junk mail with clauses embedded in it too tiny and verbose to notice.
Litowitz even supports these depictions by citing the very abstract legal theories by some influential scholars. He blames them for numbing the consciences of lawyers. For example, he reminds us of Duncan Kennedy, who has no qualms about dividing cases into categories of “cold” (i.e., a routine decision that states rules) and “hot” (i.e., a decision with a clear injustice that might distract law students from more important legal rules--like bait for a trap).
He even includes a penultimate chapter about the irony of technology: what is supposed to make life easier has made it far more complex. This seems like a bonus chapter that is slightly off topic, since technology certainly can’t really be part of a larger decay of the legal profession due to a lack of conscience. Then again, it shows that the decay does make lawyers unable to adapt to the new technology with common sense--instead of allowing computers to make brief-writing an easier task, lawyers simply use computers to over-edit.
As “morosely unhappy” as Litowitz depicts lawyers, I personally wanted him to go further. It’s interesting that he brings up the late Arthur Liman as his pick for a lawyer who led an ideal, productive career. He doesn’t mention that Liman was the lawyer who stared down Lt. Col. Oliver North in what turned out to be the most crucial legal moment of questioning in the Iran-Contra Affair--a moment that the far right in America would hold up as a shining example of the triumph of good (North) over evil (Liman, representing the liberal Senate). Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the Rev. Jerry Falwell even sold video tapes of this exchange as an “inspirational” message to his followers.
Litowitz’s book came out before the financial meltdown of 2008 and before the reinvention of the American liberal movement that elected Barack Obama. It is not entirely in synch with these events, but does march tentatively to their rather slow but steady drum beat. (In contrast, I’m more the type that would rather hear the drum solo to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” at this point in history.) I figure I’m about five years older than Litowitz, which gives me a slightly more mature outlook on the Reagan years, although it does leave me wondering how he can miss what I think is the biggest piece to his puzzle.
Litowitz even quotes Karl Marx extensively, as perhaps any good philosophy scholar should, but boy oh boy does that beg a big question here. He even mentions “socialism and libertarianism” at one point as extreme postures that law schools somehow filter out of their faculties’ political postures. I would take the biggest issue with Litowitz here, reminding him that there was a perceived victory in 1989 of America in the Cold War. America, with its pop culture quips and simplifications, went on to declare the victory of Capitalism over Communism--not just on some terrestrial battlefield, but in the universal battle of abstract ideas.
This version of events has declared Marx a quack once and for all, even though you’ll find Marx’s picture pinned up in classrooms throughout the vast expanse we call China. Come on. Isn’t it a bit too chic for Litowitz to now unapologetically turn to Marx? Maybe it is not.
An analysis of what has happened to our legal system, its decadence and even moral depravity, cannot be completely examined without linking it to the end of the Cold War and the subtle but distinct message that Capitalism is now the wave of the future. Perhaps Marx is Litowitz’s ultimately cryptic way of linking the decadence of the American legal system to the decadence of this Capitalism. But if so, he should never have mentioned Libertarianism as an extreme posture left out of law school--Libertarianism has been the formulaic voice of this new version of brutal Capitalism. Meanwhile, Socialism is still a bogeyman, not only in law school, but in just about every nook and cranny of the American media--currently trying to underscore a defeat of Obama’s health care reform movement.
Our legal system stems from English law, an often discombobulated collection of ritual, esoteric rules, and very flexible concepts and theories. Nonetheless, the English were also the first to implement laws for the poor and other victims of industrialization, long before Marx ever penned his Communist Manifesto. Somehow English law, even more than the Bible’s rigid laws and morality parables, has kept Western civilization from imploding upon itself. That’s what we should be learning in law school and implementing as lawyers.
Litowitz has stated a problem and briefly attempted to articulate a solution. He promised to do that at the beginning of The Destruction of Young Lawyers, and he delivers. What he doesn’t address and needs to address is the ongoing Reagan chimera. It was Reagan that swung the Supreme Court radically to the right in the late 1980s and turned the American legal system into the back-stabbing business that has become the prototype for all American businesses in this new “Capitalism.” He doesn't need to include Marx in his solution, but he does need to state the problem with a bigger scope and, yes, even a bigger urgency.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Heck, Go For Broke: Sue The Department of Education!
Law students should feel betrayed by a system that seemed to promise them so much and then pulled the rug out from under when jobs never materialized. The fact is, this is the American education system now catching up with law students.
Go back a couple of decades and you’ll find all sorts of dismayed young people fresh out of graduate school working at Xerox shops, tearing tickets at multiplexes, or driving delivery trucks. These were the kids that didn’t go into a “reliable” course of study such as law, business, engineering, or medicine. These were the history majors, philosophy majors, art majors, and anything else left over in what suddenly became the big bad pedagogical wasteland called the humanities.
Our American education system did not start out to be a trap for the young and idealistic, stripping them of their dreams and dignity. Ever since the 1980s, the effect has been a gradual metamorphosis, tempered by a new era of hardball business practices and the tail end of the Cold War--it wasn’t a victory for America, after all, it was a victory for Capitalism!
Along the way there were signs that this runaway Capitalism wasn’t quite the ticket to utopia the new age economists were predicting: the Savings and Loan debacle at the end of the 1980s, the dot.com bubble bursting in the 1990s, and now the meltdown of practically the entire financial system, thanks to a few bold speculators trying out Ponzi schemes and writing bogus mortgages.
Take it from one of these grumbling grads of yester-decade: you haven’t even seen the best of it yet. When I started law school in 2008 at the age of 50, the first order of business was to pay off a defaulted student loan before I could start borrowing the bigger student loans law school required. The student loan I had to pay off was from my masters degree in 1982, for which I had borrowed up to $12,000. The balance I had defaulted on was about $5,000. I defaulted on this $5,000 back in 1996 when I finished my PhD and couldn’t get any more deferments.
For 15 years of my life, I kept the Department of Education’s collection agencies on the run. If you ever default on your student loans, you’ll find quickly that the worst thing you can do is talk to them, try to reason with them. By the way, these agencies believe they are staying within the laws of debt collection but they are not: they will use abusive language, profanity, and deception to try to get you to hand over anything you might have lying around the house to make a payment. They will tell you that the Department of Education should not be “messed with” (sounds like a threat to me, however weird). When I somehow let slip that I did have a position as an adjunct professor, they found out where and tried to garnish wages. Because the school that had hired me was laundering my status improperly, with the unions by the way doing absolutely nothing on my behalf to correct the impropriety, I lost that “position.” It seemed the debt collection agency would rather I have no money coming in than enough money to pay them.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the state of affairs we live in today. The more you complain about it, the more you’ll get average Americans stepping forward to tell you that you should blame yourself. And guess what? You will start blaming yourself. The last thing you ever thought you’d be when you picked up that masters degree diploma was some sort of Horatio Alger story. Don’t the rags-to-riches stories always start out with the rags being worn by children (i.e., who were born into poverty)? Now we have well-fed, even bratty educated young adults who got straight As in graduate school slipping into poverty. But guess what, there are no riches at the end of the rainbow. They slip into poverty and stay there.
And do I really have to illustrate this for all those new-age economists who believe I’m unfairly engaging in some sort of class warfare? In 2001, I got a “job” at Barnes & Noble as a clerk. It was a minimum wage job, which meant that an 8-hour day earned you $40. Even if you could put in a 40-hour week, which they won’t let you do because then you’ll be full-time and eligible for benefits, you’d make $160 per week, $640 per month, $7,680 per year. The average rent in the area of this Barnes & Noble on Manhattan was $1800 per month. I also found out the hard way that this Barnes & Noble was engaging in a Wal Mart technique of changing your work schedule every week so you were supposed to keep your private, personal schedule free--they were trying to keep you from getting a second job. Most of the fellow workers at Barnes & Noble, a few of them with graduate degrees, couldn’t even get bank accounts: they would line up at the cash register to cash their paychecks every week. Better get used to this situation, young JDs, because this is what the powers that be in America have in store for you.
I take that back. Don’t get used to it. Above all, don’t blame yourself.
Let’s sue the Department of Education in a big class action suit. Above all, there is no reason why these student loan debts should be different than any other debts: if you can’t pay them back in seven years, they should be taken off the books. Here’s another interesting piece of information: in Germany and other European nations, there is no tuition. Money is actually seen as a corruption to the system. I'll drink to that!
The American education system is set up so that a young adult with no debt to his or her name, signs a piece of paper, and a seven-figure amount immediately goes from the Government into the coffers of a law school--a shiny building filled with air-conditioned offices. Remember the pages of material your financial aid office had you read before you signed the promissory note? They made you also sign a statement that if you are not satisfied with the education you get, you can’t claim your money back. What kind of legal issue does that raise?
The truth is, the Department of Education knows that the student loan system is improper and unethical. Why else would they have you sign all those documents and create a special class of loan that can never be written off the books? This is a special class of consumerism where in order to go to school, you have to sign away your rights. I can also speak from the experiences of a close member of my family that even though the Department of Education promises that the loans will be forgiven if you become disabled and unable to work, forget about them keeping this promise. It doesn’t matter how carefully you gather your doctors’ notes and put all your ducks in a row, the matter goes before an entirely anonymous “panel” of sorts that rejects your claim and sends it back to you on an unsigned form letter.
Used car dealers and snake oil salesmen have nothing on the Department of Education. Young idealistic students fresh out of undergraduate programs are not just keeping the buildings at law school shiny and the air-conditioning running. Their life blood is being tapped to pay for the families and comfortable life styles of their law professors. If this isn’t class warfare, what is?
Go back a couple of decades and you’ll find all sorts of dismayed young people fresh out of graduate school working at Xerox shops, tearing tickets at multiplexes, or driving delivery trucks. These were the kids that didn’t go into a “reliable” course of study such as law, business, engineering, or medicine. These were the history majors, philosophy majors, art majors, and anything else left over in what suddenly became the big bad pedagogical wasteland called the humanities.
Our American education system did not start out to be a trap for the young and idealistic, stripping them of their dreams and dignity. Ever since the 1980s, the effect has been a gradual metamorphosis, tempered by a new era of hardball business practices and the tail end of the Cold War--it wasn’t a victory for America, after all, it was a victory for Capitalism!
Along the way there were signs that this runaway Capitalism wasn’t quite the ticket to utopia the new age economists were predicting: the Savings and Loan debacle at the end of the 1980s, the dot.com bubble bursting in the 1990s, and now the meltdown of practically the entire financial system, thanks to a few bold speculators trying out Ponzi schemes and writing bogus mortgages.
Take it from one of these grumbling grads of yester-decade: you haven’t even seen the best of it yet. When I started law school in 2008 at the age of 50, the first order of business was to pay off a defaulted student loan before I could start borrowing the bigger student loans law school required. The student loan I had to pay off was from my masters degree in 1982, for which I had borrowed up to $12,000. The balance I had defaulted on was about $5,000. I defaulted on this $5,000 back in 1996 when I finished my PhD and couldn’t get any more deferments.
For 15 years of my life, I kept the Department of Education’s collection agencies on the run. If you ever default on your student loans, you’ll find quickly that the worst thing you can do is talk to them, try to reason with them. By the way, these agencies believe they are staying within the laws of debt collection but they are not: they will use abusive language, profanity, and deception to try to get you to hand over anything you might have lying around the house to make a payment. They will tell you that the Department of Education should not be “messed with” (sounds like a threat to me, however weird). When I somehow let slip that I did have a position as an adjunct professor, they found out where and tried to garnish wages. Because the school that had hired me was laundering my status improperly, with the unions by the way doing absolutely nothing on my behalf to correct the impropriety, I lost that “position.” It seemed the debt collection agency would rather I have no money coming in than enough money to pay them.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the state of affairs we live in today. The more you complain about it, the more you’ll get average Americans stepping forward to tell you that you should blame yourself. And guess what? You will start blaming yourself. The last thing you ever thought you’d be when you picked up that masters degree diploma was some sort of Horatio Alger story. Don’t the rags-to-riches stories always start out with the rags being worn by children (i.e., who were born into poverty)? Now we have well-fed, even bratty educated young adults who got straight As in graduate school slipping into poverty. But guess what, there are no riches at the end of the rainbow. They slip into poverty and stay there.
And do I really have to illustrate this for all those new-age economists who believe I’m unfairly engaging in some sort of class warfare? In 2001, I got a “job” at Barnes & Noble as a clerk. It was a minimum wage job, which meant that an 8-hour day earned you $40. Even if you could put in a 40-hour week, which they won’t let you do because then you’ll be full-time and eligible for benefits, you’d make $160 per week, $640 per month, $7,680 per year. The average rent in the area of this Barnes & Noble on Manhattan was $1800 per month. I also found out the hard way that this Barnes & Noble was engaging in a Wal Mart technique of changing your work schedule every week so you were supposed to keep your private, personal schedule free--they were trying to keep you from getting a second job. Most of the fellow workers at Barnes & Noble, a few of them with graduate degrees, couldn’t even get bank accounts: they would line up at the cash register to cash their paychecks every week. Better get used to this situation, young JDs, because this is what the powers that be in America have in store for you.
I take that back. Don’t get used to it. Above all, don’t blame yourself.
Let’s sue the Department of Education in a big class action suit. Above all, there is no reason why these student loan debts should be different than any other debts: if you can’t pay them back in seven years, they should be taken off the books. Here’s another interesting piece of information: in Germany and other European nations, there is no tuition. Money is actually seen as a corruption to the system. I'll drink to that!
The American education system is set up so that a young adult with no debt to his or her name, signs a piece of paper, and a seven-figure amount immediately goes from the Government into the coffers of a law school--a shiny building filled with air-conditioned offices. Remember the pages of material your financial aid office had you read before you signed the promissory note? They made you also sign a statement that if you are not satisfied with the education you get, you can’t claim your money back. What kind of legal issue does that raise?
The truth is, the Department of Education knows that the student loan system is improper and unethical. Why else would they have you sign all those documents and create a special class of loan that can never be written off the books? This is a special class of consumerism where in order to go to school, you have to sign away your rights. I can also speak from the experiences of a close member of my family that even though the Department of Education promises that the loans will be forgiven if you become disabled and unable to work, forget about them keeping this promise. It doesn’t matter how carefully you gather your doctors’ notes and put all your ducks in a row, the matter goes before an entirely anonymous “panel” of sorts that rejects your claim and sends it back to you on an unsigned form letter.
Used car dealers and snake oil salesmen have nothing on the Department of Education. Young idealistic students fresh out of undergraduate programs are not just keeping the buildings at law school shiny and the air-conditioning running. Their life blood is being tapped to pay for the families and comfortable life styles of their law professors. If this isn’t class warfare, what is?
Saturday, February 13, 2010
More LSAT Horrors: Composer John Cage
Yes, I’ve heard it many times before: when answering LSAT questions, forget, forget, forget what you know. The LSAT tests your “speed logic,” not your knowledge.
I tried hard to do this when practicing for the LSAT. Then came a question on a practice exam about the 20th-century composer John Cage (1912-1992).
I won’t call John Cage a friend of mine, since I only met him a couple of times, exchanged letters with him, and interviewed him once over the telephone for several hours for a newspaper story. I’ve also attended numerous performances of his music, sometimes performances he even attended or participated in. I’ve read several books he has published: Silence, A Year From Monday, M, and Empty Words. I even gave a lecture about another of his books/lectures, I-VI, at the University of Frankfurt in 1991.
So I’ll call John Cage a colleague of mine. I won’t call myself an expert in his music either, even though I’ve published articles about it and wrote about it prominently in my doctoral dissertation.
So guess what happens one day while taking an LSAT practice exam? In the reading comprehension section, I come across a text about John Cage. If you’ve taken the LSAT, you know the drill: read the text and answer eight or nine multiple-choice questions about it.
The clock was ticking and I had to forget, forget, forget what I knew about John Cage and read the text. I did my best. Then I graded the practice exam, and all of the questions I had answered about John Cage were wrong.
I was furious. Livid. What was this test supposed to determine, anyway? How well we misunderstand the arts so we can successfully become boring, humorless, tone-deaf lawyers?
I fired off an angry email to the publisher of the practice exam. They wrote me back, assuring me they were concerned, but wanted me to explain in detail what I thought the problem with the questions were.
So I sat down and took one question at a time, picking it all apart, trying to explain why the author of the questions had, of course, misunderstood John Cage’s philosophy, but, more importantly, misunderstood the gist of the text itself. Mostly, the text was a general description for the layperson of John Cage’s use of the word “indeterminacy.” Suffice it to say, this is a loaded word that Cage used satirically, tongue-in-cheek.
Here’s what the layperson doesn’t know. Cage was ribbing his arch-rival composer Milton Babbitt, a Princeton music and mathematics scholar who applied Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system to his own music. Schoenberg, who was actually Cage’s teacher and called Cage a “genius,” approached his 12-tone technique methodically, not to mention mystically, but never with the mathematical rigor of Babbitt. In fact, I have always held that Babbitt made a mistake when he used the term “determinacy” to describe his method: one of his mathematician friends must have commented that Schoenberg’s 12-tone row was a “determinant,” which according to the dictionary means something that determines something else (Babbitt’s usage); but, most scientists can tell you that the mathematical definition of “determinant” is a set of elements in which each element is used once without repeating (a concise definition of Schoenberg’s 12-tone row).
The world of musicology may never acknowledge my observation, since I have been blacklisted and squeezed out of that world’s journals and academies many times over. Nonetheless, I must remember the LSAT mantra: forget, forget, forget.
So I did my best to forget, forget, forget. And sure, Cage wasn’t just making a joke, there was a genuine meaning attached to the word “indeterminacy” that applied to his music: he sometimes wrote music using “chance procedures,” such as rolling dice, as if he wasn’t “determining” the outcome--although it has often been said that both Cage and Babbitt were trying to do the same thing: maximize what the listener did not expect. The word “indeterminacy” could also apply to some of Cage’s written scores that either could be changed for every performance (“open form” pieces) or in which the performer had some freedom of interpretation as to what a symbol in the score might mean, if there is no explanation as to how to interpret it.
So the LSAT text was probably by an informed critic simply giving general descriptions of what Cage’s music was and a general idea of what the word “indeterminacy” might mean. The text was nothing unusual, something you might find in a newspaper or magazine. Suffice it to say that what the LSAT people did in making up questions about this text was sacrilegious.
For some reason, the LSAT people thought that Cage was talking about improvisation and jazz when he used the word “indeterminacy.” It is not necessarily egregious to say that Cage’s music involved some improvisation, although that is an issue that could be debated. Cage also influenced many jazz and rock musicians who improvised. What is egregious is trying to claim that Cage’s use of the word “indeterminacy” had anything to do with jazz or jazz improvisation.
This is not splitting hairs. The LSAT people simply misunderstood this text and based almost every question on this misinterpretation. I know I’m supposed to forget, forget, forget, but what on earth is going on here? Perhaps I should have changed my LSAT mantra to stupid, stupid, stupid.
I believe that legal education is on a veritable warpath to take over every other discipline in the scholarly world and reinterpret it their own way. That’s a leap in my logic from this incident involving John Cage, but I’m taking it. Together with other “competitive” degrees outside of science or engineering that are stepping stones into lucrative positions, like the MBA, the JD mill would like to be the king of the academic hill. They set up their law schools like Mensa societies and use their own “speed logic” to weed out the dummies. Unfortunately, in the end, it is cynical politics at its worst.
I tried as hard as I could to explain to the publisher of the LSAT practice exam why it was wrong to conceive that Cage had any interest in jazz, even based on the most liberal interpretation of the text at hand, but I never received an answer back. Meanwhile, onward LSAT soldiers, marching as to war! Perhaps lawyers will some day completely annex the topic of John Cage, distorting it into their own pointless characature, leaving us useless musicologists stewing in our own sour grapes. Obviously, they aren’t even interested in John Cage, but because it is “out there," lawyers must divide it and conquer it.
Then, some sunny day in their future, they can easily (without contention, dissent, or challenge) tell me the answers to my LSAT questions were wrong. They can even make me feel shame for getting those questions wrong. Until then, I proudly declare myself the bad boy of law.
I tried hard to do this when practicing for the LSAT. Then came a question on a practice exam about the 20th-century composer John Cage (1912-1992).
I won’t call John Cage a friend of mine, since I only met him a couple of times, exchanged letters with him, and interviewed him once over the telephone for several hours for a newspaper story. I’ve also attended numerous performances of his music, sometimes performances he even attended or participated in. I’ve read several books he has published: Silence, A Year From Monday, M, and Empty Words. I even gave a lecture about another of his books/lectures, I-VI, at the University of Frankfurt in 1991.
So I’ll call John Cage a colleague of mine. I won’t call myself an expert in his music either, even though I’ve published articles about it and wrote about it prominently in my doctoral dissertation.
So guess what happens one day while taking an LSAT practice exam? In the reading comprehension section, I come across a text about John Cage. If you’ve taken the LSAT, you know the drill: read the text and answer eight or nine multiple-choice questions about it.
The clock was ticking and I had to forget, forget, forget what I knew about John Cage and read the text. I did my best. Then I graded the practice exam, and all of the questions I had answered about John Cage were wrong.
I was furious. Livid. What was this test supposed to determine, anyway? How well we misunderstand the arts so we can successfully become boring, humorless, tone-deaf lawyers?
I fired off an angry email to the publisher of the practice exam. They wrote me back, assuring me they were concerned, but wanted me to explain in detail what I thought the problem with the questions were.
So I sat down and took one question at a time, picking it all apart, trying to explain why the author of the questions had, of course, misunderstood John Cage’s philosophy, but, more importantly, misunderstood the gist of the text itself. Mostly, the text was a general description for the layperson of John Cage’s use of the word “indeterminacy.” Suffice it to say, this is a loaded word that Cage used satirically, tongue-in-cheek.
Here’s what the layperson doesn’t know. Cage was ribbing his arch-rival composer Milton Babbitt, a Princeton music and mathematics scholar who applied Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system to his own music. Schoenberg, who was actually Cage’s teacher and called Cage a “genius,” approached his 12-tone technique methodically, not to mention mystically, but never with the mathematical rigor of Babbitt. In fact, I have always held that Babbitt made a mistake when he used the term “determinacy” to describe his method: one of his mathematician friends must have commented that Schoenberg’s 12-tone row was a “determinant,” which according to the dictionary means something that determines something else (Babbitt’s usage); but, most scientists can tell you that the mathematical definition of “determinant” is a set of elements in which each element is used once without repeating (a concise definition of Schoenberg’s 12-tone row).
The world of musicology may never acknowledge my observation, since I have been blacklisted and squeezed out of that world’s journals and academies many times over. Nonetheless, I must remember the LSAT mantra: forget, forget, forget.
So I did my best to forget, forget, forget. And sure, Cage wasn’t just making a joke, there was a genuine meaning attached to the word “indeterminacy” that applied to his music: he sometimes wrote music using “chance procedures,” such as rolling dice, as if he wasn’t “determining” the outcome--although it has often been said that both Cage and Babbitt were trying to do the same thing: maximize what the listener did not expect. The word “indeterminacy” could also apply to some of Cage’s written scores that either could be changed for every performance (“open form” pieces) or in which the performer had some freedom of interpretation as to what a symbol in the score might mean, if there is no explanation as to how to interpret it.
So the LSAT text was probably by an informed critic simply giving general descriptions of what Cage’s music was and a general idea of what the word “indeterminacy” might mean. The text was nothing unusual, something you might find in a newspaper or magazine. Suffice it to say that what the LSAT people did in making up questions about this text was sacrilegious.
For some reason, the LSAT people thought that Cage was talking about improvisation and jazz when he used the word “indeterminacy.” It is not necessarily egregious to say that Cage’s music involved some improvisation, although that is an issue that could be debated. Cage also influenced many jazz and rock musicians who improvised. What is egregious is trying to claim that Cage’s use of the word “indeterminacy” had anything to do with jazz or jazz improvisation.
This is not splitting hairs. The LSAT people simply misunderstood this text and based almost every question on this misinterpretation. I know I’m supposed to forget, forget, forget, but what on earth is going on here? Perhaps I should have changed my LSAT mantra to stupid, stupid, stupid.
I believe that legal education is on a veritable warpath to take over every other discipline in the scholarly world and reinterpret it their own way. That’s a leap in my logic from this incident involving John Cage, but I’m taking it. Together with other “competitive” degrees outside of science or engineering that are stepping stones into lucrative positions, like the MBA, the JD mill would like to be the king of the academic hill. They set up their law schools like Mensa societies and use their own “speed logic” to weed out the dummies. Unfortunately, in the end, it is cynical politics at its worst.
I tried as hard as I could to explain to the publisher of the LSAT practice exam why it was wrong to conceive that Cage had any interest in jazz, even based on the most liberal interpretation of the text at hand, but I never received an answer back. Meanwhile, onward LSAT soldiers, marching as to war! Perhaps lawyers will some day completely annex the topic of John Cage, distorting it into their own pointless characature, leaving us useless musicologists stewing in our own sour grapes. Obviously, they aren’t even interested in John Cage, but because it is “out there," lawyers must divide it and conquer it.
Then, some sunny day in their future, they can easily (without contention, dissent, or challenge) tell me the answers to my LSAT questions were wrong. They can even make me feel shame for getting those questions wrong. Until then, I proudly declare myself the bad boy of law.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Why Not Sue Your Law School?
After all, they taught you how to do it. So do it.
Consider first suing them on a theory of promissory estoppel: you took out all those loans relying reasonably on explicit or implied promises that law school would be a stepping stone to a job decent enough to earn enough to pay the loans back. Whether you were academically disqualified after the first or second year or completed the JD, passed the bar, and still can’t find work, that school has some explaining to do.
Or, try a theory of fraud. St. Thomas University School of Law of Miami is a TTTT that culls routinely 25% of its 1Ls. Thomas Bentey, one of the these disgruntled, culled students, sued St. Thomas U. and others in 2006 for consumer fraud. No details were ever given about a settlement; apparently Bentey walked away from the suit the following year.
No matter what theory, keep in mind that Bentey stepped into a malestrom of mocking and derision from the Blogosphere just for exercising his right to sue. There were two distinct kinds of criticism. The first came from conservative-leaning pundits who thought Bentey had gaul to use the court system simply to say that the dog ate his homework. The other type came from law students themselves, testifying to their own hard work at earning every painstaking credit--Bentey obviously didn’t work as hard as they did.
Since law schools are so fond of also teaching legal analysis, let’s “IRAC” (Issue-Rule-Analysis-Conclusion) a case for both promissory estoppel and fraud. The first is from contract law, and the second is from torts.
If you use promissory estoppel, you’re suing for breach of contract. The elements are 1) a promise; 2) a promise which the promisor should reasonably expect to induce action; 3) the promise does induce such action; and 4) injustice can be avoided only by enforcement of the promise.
1) D: Law schools can always argue that they never make any promises to the students. They might mention statistics, such as “92% of our graduates get jobs within the first nine months of graduating,” but that’s not a promise. Even if they might have even cooked these statistics, it’s a statement not a promise.
P: But a promise, by legal definition, is a manifestation of intention to act, made as to justify a promisee in understanding that a commitment has been made. Law schools finesse their inductees, pampering them with glowing projections of their success stories. The entire package of disinformation is indeed a manifestation of intention to act and leads any reasonable person to believe that this law school is committed to the success of its students--all of its students.
2) D: Law schools can also argue that their spiel in getting law students to come to their schools, which involves a heaping helping of smiles and pats on the back during orientation sessions, as well as sitting in on lectures, is mere custom. Prospective students should reasonably know this, so the law school never realized the student would take the custom seriously and rely on it. Besides, everyone knows that lawyers are tricky.
P: We all should reasonably know that lawyers are tricky, but what about schools? Anyone who grows up in America is led to reasonably believe that schools are honest and will not be tricky about their statistics or their methods--that's the only custom at issue here. Until it becomes customary for schools themselves to be dishonest and this is clearly known to prospective students, caveat emptor in matters of education should not apply to them.
3) D: Law schools can point to many things that induce students into law, from family pressure to greed. Law schools are so competitive, that students apply to many schools and then pick the highest ranked school that accepts them. Law schools can claim that their promises, based on deceptive statistics or otherwise, therefore do not specifically induce a student.
P: In my own case, I showed up at my law school’s orientation and went through my first two months without having spent a dime on tuition. I was testing the waters and wanted to make sure this was going to work out before signing over my life in the form of student loans. It was my law school’s specific assurances that they had my best interests in mind, and I relied specifically on those assurances. If not, I would have walked away from law school without paying after my second month there.
4) D: The elusive concept of justice may always be in the eyes of the beholder, but schools maintain their integrity be preserving the power to cut those students not doing well from their programs. It is a just process to keep students free to make their own decisions--a freedom which includes taking the consequences of their own bad decisions.
P: It is never in good faith to bargain with deception. Puffing may be allowed and is a process of exaggerating the quality of what you are selling, but puffing is always supposed to be recognized as such. Deceiving a reasonable person always shows bad faith, and bad faith is always unjust. The only way injustice can be avoided is for the law school to pay back the money an injured former student lays out for tuition and living expenses.
Then there is fraud. Fraud has nine elements: 1) a representation; 2) falsity of representation; 3) materiality of representation; 4) speaker’s knowledge of the falsity; 5) speaker’s intent it should be relied on; 6) hearer’s ignorance of the falsity; 7) hearer’s reliance on the representation; 8) hearer’s right to rely on representation; and 9) hearer’s consequent and proximate injury caused by reliance.
1) granted: law schools make representations about their schools.
2) D: Although representations about the schools are sometimes deceptive, they are often carefully made to maintain some truth.
P: Here is an example of a claim made by a law school recently during its orientation, which I attended: “among students who maintain a ‘B’ average or better, 80% pass the bar on the first attempt.” That makes the school sound terrific. Keep in mind this school is a TTTT with a low first-time bar pass rate, usually more like 20-30%. If you do the math, based on their very brutal grading curve, 50-70% of their students maintain a “C” average. In their materials, it clearly says “no more than 25%” of their students maintain a “B” average or better. In other words, a class that starts out with 60 students the first year, winnows down to about 35 students after routine culling, and will have two to three students passing the bar on the first attempt. The numbers are clearly deceptive, but accurate. So far, this isn’t enough to prove falsity (although it is a pretty clear indicator that at least this school is being inordinately tricky). Then again, this same school mentioned its “attrition rate” after the first year of 10-20%, when its own description of the grading curve in a book handed out to prospective students clearly shows that it routinely culls 30% of 1Ls. “10-20%” is a falsity. It is typical for a law school to create deceptive statistics, but one can usually find the patently false claims mixed in with these deceptive claims.
3) D: Law schools argue that education is not about bar pass rates, culling, or even about getting a job afterward. It is about instilling a community of legal thinkers in order to develop their own legal philosophies. The only thing material about law school is the education itself.
P: This was the line I was handed when I sat down with the dean of my former law school after being academically disqualified after the first year: “I know you spent a lot of money, but just think of the education you got.” After all those deceptive statistics and promises that induced my reliance in the first place, the law school is telling me that it’s dedicated only to the education, not what these statistics indicate. There are many reasons why I went to law school, including just the joy of learning, but passing the bar and getting a job are clearly material to the decision. At my station in life, I was clearly attempting to better my professional career by signing on to this law school, not just enriching my life with knowledge.
4 & 5) D: Assuming a law student could prove that one of its statements was false, so many numbers were given, a mistake could always be made. In other words, they can always claim they never meant to make a false claim or trick anybody.
P: The real essence of the sleaze of law school is its knowledge that they are not only deceiving and spinning their numbers, but patently making false claims. No one knows better than the law school itself what their numbers are. That they calculate and prepare their deceptive and false claims carefully, reveals their knowledge of falsity, not to mention the level and sophistication of their trickery.
6) D: If a law student has taken the LSAT and researched law schools enough to apply for them, they should be aware of all the information out there available to them and the raw statistics about such things as culling and bar pass rates, let alone about jobs available to graduates.
P: Although it is true that a caveat emptor theory gives the law schools some leeway as to what they can expect their law students to know, this balancing test needs to be taken in context of the fact that no school that collects money from a Government agency in the form of student loans should be making any deceptive or false claims--at all. Law school “rankings” or law school guides published privately are not held to the same standard as the Government. Even if a student knew all the statistics published in law school guides, a law school accredited by the American Bar Association and that is capable of distributing Federally insured loans represents the final, “official” authority of all statistics and information. Students who are generally not accustom to their government lying to them should not be held to a caveat emptor theory.
7) D: Law schools can point out that other factors, such as family pressure or even greed, can motivate a student to study law; but P: clearly students rely on the deceptive and false claims of law schools when choosing where to study. Otherwise the law students wouldn’t bother to spin such sophisticated deception.
8) granted: a law student can chose any law school they are accepted into and they have a right to rely on any pitch the law school gives them.
9) D: Again, the law schools claim there couldn’t possibly be any damages since the law student invariably learns something from the experience.
P: But any student who falls prey to the deceptions and falsity of a law school runs the risk of damaging their professional career for the rest of their life. If any school is not working with honesty and integrity, they must return tuition and any other expenses that a student incurred. If a career is ruined because of a law school’s shenanigans, they should even collect money for future earnings, based on the careers they were promised by the law schools in the first place.
These are certainly not the only two theories from which a prima facie case could be made. Other torts, such as misrepresentation, could be similarly applied.
However, another significant factor comes into play: the 11th Amendment, as demonstrated in Lupert v. California State Bar, 761 F.2d 1325. Lawyers are all officers of the court and must be given the freedom to make statements in the course of their work even though they might be distortions of the truth. Of course, this type of immunity was granted to officers of the court so that they can participate in the adversarial justice system: a lawyer could not get far if he or she was sued every time someone was accused of committing a crime or having bad character.
Still, I was shocked with the issue of the 11th Amendment as used to defeat the plaintiff’s case in Lupert. 11th Amendment immunity is granted with the intention of justice being served in a court of law, not so that lawyers can run law schools on the side and make big bucks on extracting tuition from gullible young lawyer wannabees.
Lupert also states that no one has a right to be a lawyer. It is a case about a woman who fails the California “Baby Bar” (FYLSE) exam and complains that the test is too difficult, with a pass rate of only about 20%.
Perhaps no one has a right to be a lawyer, but if the law is to be respected, it needs to practice what it preaches. Lupert may not have had a good case, but I do believe Bentey probably did.
Unfortunately, lessons about life in the real world will show anyone trying to change the system that social activism is required, even if the legal case is sound. This is, after all, the same court system that hung witches in 1692, and protected and enforced the South’s racist policy of segregation for almost 100 years after the American Civil War.
We live in a competitive society that often ties itself up into knots trying to determine who should advance and who should be “fired” (as Donald Trump famously appears to draw pleasure from saying). I’ll always root for justice when it plays a role in this process, but justice for our justice system is an issue that gets complicated quickly.
If you must, sue your law school, but expect the same results as Bentey got, no matter how good your case is. Law schools, which are a part of the legal system, require pressure from the outside if change is to occur. So at least let’s keep blogging about them.
Consider first suing them on a theory of promissory estoppel: you took out all those loans relying reasonably on explicit or implied promises that law school would be a stepping stone to a job decent enough to earn enough to pay the loans back. Whether you were academically disqualified after the first or second year or completed the JD, passed the bar, and still can’t find work, that school has some explaining to do.
Or, try a theory of fraud. St. Thomas University School of Law of Miami is a TTTT that culls routinely 25% of its 1Ls. Thomas Bentey, one of the these disgruntled, culled students, sued St. Thomas U. and others in 2006 for consumer fraud. No details were ever given about a settlement; apparently Bentey walked away from the suit the following year.
No matter what theory, keep in mind that Bentey stepped into a malestrom of mocking and derision from the Blogosphere just for exercising his right to sue. There were two distinct kinds of criticism. The first came from conservative-leaning pundits who thought Bentey had gaul to use the court system simply to say that the dog ate his homework. The other type came from law students themselves, testifying to their own hard work at earning every painstaking credit--Bentey obviously didn’t work as hard as they did.
Since law schools are so fond of also teaching legal analysis, let’s “IRAC” (Issue-Rule-Analysis-Conclusion) a case for both promissory estoppel and fraud. The first is from contract law, and the second is from torts.
If you use promissory estoppel, you’re suing for breach of contract. The elements are 1) a promise; 2) a promise which the promisor should reasonably expect to induce action; 3) the promise does induce such action; and 4) injustice can be avoided only by enforcement of the promise.
1) D: Law schools can always argue that they never make any promises to the students. They might mention statistics, such as “92% of our graduates get jobs within the first nine months of graduating,” but that’s not a promise. Even if they might have even cooked these statistics, it’s a statement not a promise.
P: But a promise, by legal definition, is a manifestation of intention to act, made as to justify a promisee in understanding that a commitment has been made. Law schools finesse their inductees, pampering them with glowing projections of their success stories. The entire package of disinformation is indeed a manifestation of intention to act and leads any reasonable person to believe that this law school is committed to the success of its students--all of its students.
2) D: Law schools can also argue that their spiel in getting law students to come to their schools, which involves a heaping helping of smiles and pats on the back during orientation sessions, as well as sitting in on lectures, is mere custom. Prospective students should reasonably know this, so the law school never realized the student would take the custom seriously and rely on it. Besides, everyone knows that lawyers are tricky.
P: We all should reasonably know that lawyers are tricky, but what about schools? Anyone who grows up in America is led to reasonably believe that schools are honest and will not be tricky about their statistics or their methods--that's the only custom at issue here. Until it becomes customary for schools themselves to be dishonest and this is clearly known to prospective students, caveat emptor in matters of education should not apply to them.
3) D: Law schools can point to many things that induce students into law, from family pressure to greed. Law schools are so competitive, that students apply to many schools and then pick the highest ranked school that accepts them. Law schools can claim that their promises, based on deceptive statistics or otherwise, therefore do not specifically induce a student.
P: In my own case, I showed up at my law school’s orientation and went through my first two months without having spent a dime on tuition. I was testing the waters and wanted to make sure this was going to work out before signing over my life in the form of student loans. It was my law school’s specific assurances that they had my best interests in mind, and I relied specifically on those assurances. If not, I would have walked away from law school without paying after my second month there.
4) D: The elusive concept of justice may always be in the eyes of the beholder, but schools maintain their integrity be preserving the power to cut those students not doing well from their programs. It is a just process to keep students free to make their own decisions--a freedom which includes taking the consequences of their own bad decisions.
P: It is never in good faith to bargain with deception. Puffing may be allowed and is a process of exaggerating the quality of what you are selling, but puffing is always supposed to be recognized as such. Deceiving a reasonable person always shows bad faith, and bad faith is always unjust. The only way injustice can be avoided is for the law school to pay back the money an injured former student lays out for tuition and living expenses.
Then there is fraud. Fraud has nine elements: 1) a representation; 2) falsity of representation; 3) materiality of representation; 4) speaker’s knowledge of the falsity; 5) speaker’s intent it should be relied on; 6) hearer’s ignorance of the falsity; 7) hearer’s reliance on the representation; 8) hearer’s right to rely on representation; and 9) hearer’s consequent and proximate injury caused by reliance.
1) granted: law schools make representations about their schools.
2) D: Although representations about the schools are sometimes deceptive, they are often carefully made to maintain some truth.
P: Here is an example of a claim made by a law school recently during its orientation, which I attended: “among students who maintain a ‘B’ average or better, 80% pass the bar on the first attempt.” That makes the school sound terrific. Keep in mind this school is a TTTT with a low first-time bar pass rate, usually more like 20-30%. If you do the math, based on their very brutal grading curve, 50-70% of their students maintain a “C” average. In their materials, it clearly says “no more than 25%” of their students maintain a “B” average or better. In other words, a class that starts out with 60 students the first year, winnows down to about 35 students after routine culling, and will have two to three students passing the bar on the first attempt. The numbers are clearly deceptive, but accurate. So far, this isn’t enough to prove falsity (although it is a pretty clear indicator that at least this school is being inordinately tricky). Then again, this same school mentioned its “attrition rate” after the first year of 10-20%, when its own description of the grading curve in a book handed out to prospective students clearly shows that it routinely culls 30% of 1Ls. “10-20%” is a falsity. It is typical for a law school to create deceptive statistics, but one can usually find the patently false claims mixed in with these deceptive claims.
3) D: Law schools argue that education is not about bar pass rates, culling, or even about getting a job afterward. It is about instilling a community of legal thinkers in order to develop their own legal philosophies. The only thing material about law school is the education itself.
P: This was the line I was handed when I sat down with the dean of my former law school after being academically disqualified after the first year: “I know you spent a lot of money, but just think of the education you got.” After all those deceptive statistics and promises that induced my reliance in the first place, the law school is telling me that it’s dedicated only to the education, not what these statistics indicate. There are many reasons why I went to law school, including just the joy of learning, but passing the bar and getting a job are clearly material to the decision. At my station in life, I was clearly attempting to better my professional career by signing on to this law school, not just enriching my life with knowledge.
4 & 5) D: Assuming a law student could prove that one of its statements was false, so many numbers were given, a mistake could always be made. In other words, they can always claim they never meant to make a false claim or trick anybody.
P: The real essence of the sleaze of law school is its knowledge that they are not only deceiving and spinning their numbers, but patently making false claims. No one knows better than the law school itself what their numbers are. That they calculate and prepare their deceptive and false claims carefully, reveals their knowledge of falsity, not to mention the level and sophistication of their trickery.
6) D: If a law student has taken the LSAT and researched law schools enough to apply for them, they should be aware of all the information out there available to them and the raw statistics about such things as culling and bar pass rates, let alone about jobs available to graduates.
P: Although it is true that a caveat emptor theory gives the law schools some leeway as to what they can expect their law students to know, this balancing test needs to be taken in context of the fact that no school that collects money from a Government agency in the form of student loans should be making any deceptive or false claims--at all. Law school “rankings” or law school guides published privately are not held to the same standard as the Government. Even if a student knew all the statistics published in law school guides, a law school accredited by the American Bar Association and that is capable of distributing Federally insured loans represents the final, “official” authority of all statistics and information. Students who are generally not accustom to their government lying to them should not be held to a caveat emptor theory.
7) D: Law schools can point out that other factors, such as family pressure or even greed, can motivate a student to study law; but P: clearly students rely on the deceptive and false claims of law schools when choosing where to study. Otherwise the law students wouldn’t bother to spin such sophisticated deception.
8) granted: a law student can chose any law school they are accepted into and they have a right to rely on any pitch the law school gives them.
9) D: Again, the law schools claim there couldn’t possibly be any damages since the law student invariably learns something from the experience.
P: But any student who falls prey to the deceptions and falsity of a law school runs the risk of damaging their professional career for the rest of their life. If any school is not working with honesty and integrity, they must return tuition and any other expenses that a student incurred. If a career is ruined because of a law school’s shenanigans, they should even collect money for future earnings, based on the careers they were promised by the law schools in the first place.
These are certainly not the only two theories from which a prima facie case could be made. Other torts, such as misrepresentation, could be similarly applied.
However, another significant factor comes into play: the 11th Amendment, as demonstrated in Lupert v. California State Bar, 761 F.2d 1325. Lawyers are all officers of the court and must be given the freedom to make statements in the course of their work even though they might be distortions of the truth. Of course, this type of immunity was granted to officers of the court so that they can participate in the adversarial justice system: a lawyer could not get far if he or she was sued every time someone was accused of committing a crime or having bad character.
Still, I was shocked with the issue of the 11th Amendment as used to defeat the plaintiff’s case in Lupert. 11th Amendment immunity is granted with the intention of justice being served in a court of law, not so that lawyers can run law schools on the side and make big bucks on extracting tuition from gullible young lawyer wannabees.
Lupert also states that no one has a right to be a lawyer. It is a case about a woman who fails the California “Baby Bar” (FYLSE) exam and complains that the test is too difficult, with a pass rate of only about 20%.
Perhaps no one has a right to be a lawyer, but if the law is to be respected, it needs to practice what it preaches. Lupert may not have had a good case, but I do believe Bentey probably did.
Unfortunately, lessons about life in the real world will show anyone trying to change the system that social activism is required, even if the legal case is sound. This is, after all, the same court system that hung witches in 1692, and protected and enforced the South’s racist policy of segregation for almost 100 years after the American Civil War.
We live in a competitive society that often ties itself up into knots trying to determine who should advance and who should be “fired” (as Donald Trump famously appears to draw pleasure from saying). I’ll always root for justice when it plays a role in this process, but justice for our justice system is an issue that gets complicated quickly.
If you must, sue your law school, but expect the same results as Bentey got, no matter how good your case is. Law schools, which are a part of the legal system, require pressure from the outside if change is to occur. So at least let’s keep blogging about them.
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