What an extravagant proposition! Yale may "desperately" seek prestige — in this case the prestige of winning clerkships — but don't the students equally desperately seek prestige? Even if some of them are not so desperate, the proposition depends on en masse transfer.
Yale Law School must feel so secure after all these years on the top of the charts. Being #1 leads to being #1 as everyone chooses #1. Who can stop?
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Landing that coveted clerkship will be a lot easier if I'm 1 of 10 Yale law students than if I'm 1 of 100. So, sure, if I'm an incoming 1L, I'm rooting for as my potential classmates to follow his advice as possible. Ideally, all of them. Then I'm heading to the Supreme Court for sure.
Kind of like being Alabama football...recruiting for Nick Saban is like shooting fish in a barrel.
The rich get richer...
Btw, why would anyone want to pick on Yves Saint Laurent?
Ann can focus on the language but if I understand the strategy the incentives are correct. We know denying conservatives from tenure worked for secondary education.
It will take time but could work...
I think his point is that if Yale ever slips down to number 2, or (God Forbid!) number 3, the Dean of the Law School would be torn apart by wild horses.
Isn't "prestige" impossible if your organization is revealed to be acting in ways that undermine the legacy that got you the prestige?
Students will not transfer. But a better, organized campaign to force YLS to repeatedly defend anti-intellectual actions could bear fruit.
The original "trap house" email was interpreted as racist because it mentioned getting Popeye's fried chicken. I drive by YLS every workday, and literally the first fast food restaurant that you encounter as you drive off campus is Popeye's! I guess the student should instead have asked everyone to get Wendy's, which is further down the block, and he wouldn't have gotten in trouble.
YLS would love nothing more than all of its conservative and libertarian students to leave.
Transfers go both ways. If YLS conservatives transfer out YLS will accept more of the highly qualified transfer applicants who will then be hired by the judges who would otherwise have hired the ones who transferred out. But hey, JB gets his name out there for being provocative.
"Who can stop?"
Judges. Law firms. Stop hiring any YLSs. As if.
An extravagant proposition indeed, and naive: the kerfuffle proves YLS' progressive bona fides and therefore will solidify its prestige and ease hiring by progressive firms and judges and governments. Gerken knows her audience.
What an extravagant proposition! Yale may "desperately" seek prestige — in this case the prestige of winning clerkships — but don't the students equally desperately seek prestige?
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do clerk selecting judges count under which profs the law student/clerk took courses or is it just the magic YSL?
Who can stop it?
Avis Law School.
Maybe #2 tries harder? And numbers 3, 4, 5, 6…
Should’ve been held accountable. Normally, such egregious, shameful actions would prompt a heartfelt resignation, but lefties don’t embarrass easy.
Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia.
Every year it's the same short list of power programs at the top. The answer is obvious. We need to go to a 16 school round-robin playoff system. Possibly with a play-in format that will allow lower rated schools like UW-Mad an occasional opportunity at the big time.
I kid, I kid. But it's worth noting that Crimson Tide Law (25) is ranked ahead of UWM (29) in the latest USNWR.
This is likely the result of the Althouse retirement.
PS: Saban could move you guys up the list in no time at all. Sure he's not a lawyer and would be a striking choice as a law school dean (like a Communist as head of the US banking system), but the man gets things done.
Why the hell would you transfer out of Yale unless you were flunking. Even then, if you got in they'll drag you to the finish line.
This guy is delusional.
For a second I was wondering: Why does someone want Yves Saint Laurent to suffer?
tim maguire said...
Landing that coveted clerkship will be a lot easier if I'm 1 of 10 Yale law students than if I'm 1 of 100.
Not if every conservative judge is looking at teh behavior of YLS, and deciding to just stop taking any clerks from there.
Which, IMAO, is the proper things for them to do.
Or, if they're kind, impose a "Yale quota" over a 3 year grace period. This year talk with all your fellow conservative judges, and take at most only 1/2 as many Yalies as last year. Cut in half again over the next 2 years, then drop it to 0.
For that matter, any conservative who applies to YLS is presumptively an idiot, given the hostility environment there.So it's wise of honest judges to look elsewhere
Nothing ever changes until it does.
The idea that the Yale law school is invincible is quaint. History is littered with the bodies of the invincible, the untouchable, the eternal. Institutions that at one time seemed indispensable are now footnotes. The gold standard is no longer the gold standard. Not only have the mighty fallen again and again and again, often they are not even missed.
This should be obvious to anyone who had been paying attention, especially anyone who had been alive the past decade. For everyone else, 2020-2021 has been a cram course.
I mistook YSL for YKK and had to read a bit more before I realized the subject wasn't zippers. My PhD is from an enormous state university in Texas that runs on oil money. My old school envies Yale's endowment holdings. The only way to decrease Yale's self-satisfaction would be to strip it of the $$$$. Good luck with that.
You don't transfer out to "deny Yale its prestige". You transfer out because you're scared to death of the people in charge of your university, and you're just waiting to see when they turn on you.
I see I'm not the only one who read "YSL". I'm thinking: I wonder what Yves Saint Laurent is in trouble for. Wait, isn't he dead? So it can't be sexual harassment complaints. Maybe third world garment factory work conditions... I was a paragraph in before my brain got it sorted out.
My favorite personal Althouse post misreading was when she started right in quoting Louis CK talking about "the thing" and I was a paragraph or so in before I realized it wasn't Trump speaking.
Took me until the third paragraph before I realized this post was not about Yves Saint Laurent. One of the first splurge purchases I ever made was a vintage YSL burgundy velvet blazer.
Yale Law School’s administration is rotten to the core—not the renowned professors and not the top notch students. I assume Dean Heather Gerkin is a super fund raiser and whoever is giving the big bucks endorses her Marxist Stasi rule.
Or, ya know, you could use your power to organize students to demand certain protections in the spirit of free speech, vigorous debate, and transparent disciplinary procedures. And then create oversight measures as student governing bodies.
At this point, there is only one way to make YLS suffer: deny it the prestige it so desperately seeks — but don't the students equally desperately seek prestige?
"If they suffer, they're gonna make you suffer."
'Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia.
Every year it's the same short list of power programs at the top. The answer is obvious.'
Yes, we obviously need to start taxing their multi-billion-dollar endowments.
They are now hedge funds with an education subsidiary attached.
'I see I'm not the only one who read "YSL".'
Only the cool kids use the 'YLS' abbreviation.
It's like saying, 'I was talking to Marty (Scorcese) the other day, and...'
Readering said...
Transfers go both ways. If YLS conservatives transfer out YLS will accept more of the highly qualified transfer applicants who will then be hired by the judges who would otherwise have hired the ones who transferred out.
Are you really that stupid Readering?
The conservative judges who are taking Yale Fed Soc members for clerks aren't going to take left-wing shit for brain YLS graduates for clerks.
because they don't want to be sabotaged by their clerks
Please, GTCT, enlighten us further about how federal judges select law clerks from among the dozens and dozens of applications they receive each year. As a product of "Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia", although admittedly before the creation of FedSoc by folks I had gone to college with, I would be interested to learn more.
About Josh:
“Josh Blackman is a national thought leader on constitutional law and the United States Supreme Court. Josh’s work was quoted during two presidential impeachment trials. He has testified before Congress and advises federal and state lawmakers. Josh regularly appears on TV, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the BBC. Josh is also a frequent guest on NPR and other syndicated radio programs. He has published commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and leading national publications.”
Once the students at South Texas College of Law Houston where Josh teaches figure out what a gadfly they are funding with their tuition dollars, maybe they will all transfer to Yale Law School.
As far as Yale losing its #1 ranking, it gets great peer rankings because no one feels threatened by Yale. Harvard is #1 on the business and corporate law rankings, which is what the most competitive law students want.
The rankings at the top haven't changed since I took the LSAT in 1976. Yale and Stanford are at the top in part because they are small, and so the most competitive to get into. Harvard at 3 is one of the 2 or so largest law schools, so not quite as competitive to get into, and more competitive while there. Columbia is in NYC, the country's legal capital. As such, more of its graduates want to go straight for the big bucks, and skip clerking, which matters more for academia and federal prosecutors. Then there are Chicago and NYU, the former also small, the latter also in NYC.
FedSoc founded primarily at Yale and Chicago. I can't see FedSoc members who got into the school of Thomas/Alito/Sotomayor/Kavanaugh fleeing over trap house/wine soiree kerfuffles. Where will they go? As an applicant, I viewed Yale, Stanford and Harvard as the truly national schools, and all others to a greater or lesser extent regional.
Perhaps, rather than punishing Yale (which is only doing in public what other “prestige” law schools are doing more privately), we should think
about screening candidates for clerkship. The Federalist Society has done a superb job of both education and screening, and although no one is required to listen to them, they have incredible influence, to the extent that we have far more constitutionalists than at any time in at least the last 60 years. I’m confident that over time they could achieve a similar result for clerk candidates, while also putting on seminars presented by former clerks from both sides of the debate. In this manner, they could go a long way toward countering if not supplanting the influence of the major law schools which are uniformly far left in orientation.
Is Yale really that good or are the judges just being lazy and using a "legacy" mindset when recruiting? How can we get the law establishment to think outside the box?
I'm with those who read Yves St. Laurent until I realized the order of the first letters didn't match.
--gpm
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