Legal Docs LibraryKnow Your Rights

The New York Times features an in-depth article on the start-up Social Intelligence which helps human resources do deep background checks on possible hires. They scour the web, looking not just at social networking sites, but all sorts of sites such as Craig’s List or Flickr, to see what sorts of things might be revealed about the applicant. The applicant is first asked if he or she consents to a background check. (Don’t be a fool! But what will it say about you if you refuse?!) Also, the individual is shown the results of the search before it is reported back to the potential employer. And apparently the searches shouldn’t cover the sorts of questions that are out of bounds for an employer to ask in an interview (Like, are you married? Do you have children?)

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I have loved my association for more than 20 years. I joined in 1986, as a freshly minted, eager, hopeful (not quite so young) law librarian. And I have been a member of AALL ever since, as well as a member of whichever regional chapter I lived nearest. But, this is like a lot of marriages….

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National Jurist has two articles that raise some new and unpleasant questions about the rankings game. A New Low in the Rankings Arms Race, by Jack Crittenden chews over again Villanova’s February admission that it misled the ABA in reporting LSAT and GPA statistics for years. Villanova’s new dean, John Gotanda, announced last January that he found that the previous administration had been knowingly reporting false LSAT and GPA data to the ABA for some years up to 2010, in an attempt to raise its ranking with the US News and World Report. This announcement confirmed long-running rumors of smoke and mirror tricks at certain schools where the numbers just seemed too good to be true. What is surprising is that the first school stepped forward voluntarily, rather than slipping up and being caught. Villanova and Dean Gotanda deserve a round of applause for rock-ribbed morals and principled behavior. The new dean launched an immediate internal investigation, hiring Ropes & Gray for an independent audit, which found significant differences between what should have been reported and the figures which were turned in. The admissions reporting process and organizational structure will be reconfigured as part of the housecleaning.

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The chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Roderick Ireland and the chief justice for administration and management, Robert A. Mulligan, sent a strongly worded statement to Governor Deval Patrick. Seven justices of the Supreme Judicial Court joined in a letter requesting Governor Deval Patrick not to nominate any more judges because of the impact on the overstrained budget for support staff. And Mulligan sent a letter to Patrick as well.

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The struggle over the papers of Robert F. Kennedy continues. We previously blogged about papers dating from Kennedy’s time as Attorney General, held by the John F. Kennedy Library, but closed to researchers because the Kennedy family refused to grant full public access. On March 1, the presidential library decided to open up the sixty-three closed boxes, and archivists have been “organizing and declassifying” the papers since then; this work should take between six months to a year to complete.

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Jason Kaufman, a fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society put together a research team in 2006, of 5 sociologists. Himself, 4 others from Harvard, and one from UCLA, to look at the Facebook pages from the students at Harvard College who would graduate in 2009. They hired student assistants at Harvard to help them go through, and collect data, as they followed the students through their 4 years at college. They collected information such as home state, major, political views, network of friends, gender, romantic relationships and preferences. They believed they were redacting information in a way that would protect the identities of the subjects adequately.

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International criminal law has been in the news of late. The International Criminal Court recently issued an arrest warrant for Muammar Khadafy; it remains to be seen if he will ever be brought to justice. In addition, Ratko Mladic,
commander of the Bosnian Serb army, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, and went on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on June 3. This is the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazi policy of forced deportation of European Jews, who was responsible for the deaths of millions. The conjunction of current events and the anniversary of the Eichmann trial inspired a thoughtful piece in The Boston Globe, written by Illana Bet-El, a writer and historian.

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NALP Executive Director James Leipold, speaking at the Northeast Association of Pre-Law Advisors, pointed out a few bright spots in the otherwise dismal job market for lawyers:

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The angry law students and recent graduates, disillusioned by the terrible job market have been much covered by the legal press and blogs like Above the Law, and the ABA Journal online. Their blogs like Third Tier Reality, Law School Transparency, and the Temporary Attorney, Lawyers Against the Law School Scam, Subprime JD, and many more have been noted at law schools and the ABA alike.
The ABA reports on law professor Lucille Jewel of John Marshall Law School in At;anta who has an article in the latest issue of the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology (vol. 12, issue 1, Winter, 2011), You’re Doing it Wrong: How the Anti-Law School Scam Blogging Movement Can Shape the Legal Profession, at page 239-278. Prof. Jewel argues that the acid tone of the proliferating blogs by angry students and graduates is having a slow but powerful effect changing the law schools and the ABA which accredits law schools. The blogs raise the problem of an oversupply of lawyers in the job market, the exorbitant expense of legal education, and a lack of transparency in how law schools report and publicize post-J.D. employment data. Deans and administrators are reacting to the criticism.

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There is a nice little article in the newest Chronicle of Higher Education reporting on a conference meeting for university general counsel. The thing I liked about this brief little article was the insight it gave me about the job of a university general counsel. They have to keep the interests of the institution in mind, because that is their client, not the various individual employees who might be speaking with them. And that must be a bit confusing for new GCs, and certainly can be for their colleagues — as is pointed out in the article. There are so many layers of hierarchy at a university, and the individuals at those levels shift and change over time, though not usually very quickly.

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