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The New York Times Economix Blog reports today on the number of lawyers passing the bar per state, compared to the number of openings for lawyers in existing firms, and whether that amounted to a surplus or shortage. They created a nifty chart, including hourly wages for the 2009 bars. They conclude that the most over-lawyered states, in order:
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Robert Morse, at ” writes that US News and World Report may change the way it computes the percent of students employed at graduation and 9 months after for rankings purposes, following the ABA’s shift in its requirements for law schools filling out annual questionnaires. The Morse Code refers to the blog, Law School Transparency for reporting on the ABA changes to the rules on reporting post-graduation employment in a clear manner. Read the rest of this entry »
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How bad is the job market for new attorneys? According to this press release from NALP, the National Association for Law Placement, the class of 2010 “faced [the] worst job market” since 1996. NALP Executive Director James Leipold stated that
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Do we get it yet?! This past week saw the ruling in the Proposition 8 case in California, where now-retired federal judge Vaughn Walker has been challenged in his ruling on the case because he didn’t recuse himself as an openly gay person in a long-term relationship. Many commentators in the news stories noted that we are just where we were 30 years ago with respect to African-American and female judges being challenged for not recusing themselves on civil rights and sex discrimination cases. Judges should not be challenge-able on the basis of their membership in a minority group, whether it is based on ethnicity, language, religion, gender, or sexuality or gender identification.
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There are a raft of big copyright cases looming involving higher education and copyright issues.
I.
Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al, (U.S. District Ct. Northern D. Georgia, Atlanta Division)
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Bloomberg News, Eric Engleman and Adam Satariano reported on a hearing in the Senate Commerce subcommittee on mobile privacy on May 19, 2011.
Apple, Google and Facebook and the makers of applications for these these companies platforms faced scrutiny at the hearing over how they collect, use, store and share information on users wireless devices, from smartphones to any sort of PDA.
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American Libraries offers a fascinating article on one possible cause of the Civil War–overdue library books! Seriously, the article by Rob Lopresti, based on a longer treatment of the same subject that was published by Lopresti and August A. Imholtz in the March 2011 issue of Library and Information History, highlights the “odd scandal” that involved the “New York Times, a library with no catalog, and … the Dred Scott decision.” The Times accused seceding members of Congress of stealing books worth thousands of dollars from the House of Representatives Library with the goal of starting a library in the Confederacy. Subsequent investigation revealed shockingly poor mismanagement of the House Library (there was no catalog; in fact, there were no records of any kind) and lack of adherence to journalistic standards which led the Times reporter to rely on “exaggerated rumors passed on by loose-lipped clerks.” You’ll have to read the article yourself to figure out the connection to Dred Scott! Read the rest of this entry »
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The academic law review is like the weather–everyone complains about it, but no one knows how to fix it. The iconoclasts over at The Green Bag have an idea, which is discussed in an enlightening article in today’s Inside Higher Ed. The Green Bag, founded in 1997, seeks “to make short, topical legal writing both cool and tenure-able.” Moreover, it “has spawned progeny serious (collections of ‘in chamber’ opinions by Supreme Court justices), lighthearted (bobblehead dolls and trading cards … ), and controversial (its own law school rankings).” Its latest initiative is The Journal of Law, which is actually not one new journal, but three, all very different in tone and substance. The first journal is The Congressional Record, FantasyLaw Edition, student edited and meant to be a diversion. It lets readers create a team from members of Congress and then follow their activities, legislative and otherwise. The second journal is Law & Commentary which takes a new approach to peer review. It publishes articles that are unlikely to get placed in a high-profile journal but are worthy of such a placement; the journal also solicits commentary on the article from well-known senior scholars which it also publishes. To quote Professor Ross E. Davies of George Mason Law School, a founder of The Green Bag and editor of The Journal of Law:
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In the summer 2011 issue of Marquette Lawyer, there is an informative two-page article about legal-research instruction at Marquette University Law School. Like most law schools, Marquette has a mandatory first-year research course, but it also has a required advanced course in legal research, “one of the few requiring that second course.” The focus at Marquette is on training students to be good legal researchers, but also on teaching students “to become discriminating and careful users of the results they get.” Because of the amount of information that is freely available, the latter focus is especially important. According to library director and Professor Patricia Cervenka, “[m]ore emphasis is being placed on critical thinking about what legal research finds … You need to know how to blend sources, how to weigh different sources, and especially what sources to regard as reliable and authoritative.”
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The Boston Globe has been covering a crisis at the Boston College archives. They had collected a series of interviews from IRA members, assuring them of complete anonymity. And now the Northern Ireland Police Services have appealed to federal prosecutors to subpoena parts of the archive collected under that agreement. I presume that this crisis has been triggered by the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland. Nevertheless, the archivists are facing a difficult decision. In order to keep faith with the people who trusted the journalist who collected the information in the archive, they may have to destroy the archive. Read the rest of this entry »