"Above the Law leaked the latest edition of the U.S. News law school rankings last week..."

Wow! I didn't even notice. I really am retired.

"... but now the actual publication date is upon us, and the 2020 rankings are officially out. We’re very pleased to announce that all of our leaked information has been confirmed (with the exception, of course, of the Penn State schools and Rutgers, all three of which were curiously absent from the leaked data; we know their ranks, and will get to them in a moment)."

Above the Law blogs.

"Here are REAL COMMENTS students have made to me about their exams. What I say to them is in quotations, and what I’m thinking is in italics."

"I’m not so proud of my thoughts in these times.  I very clearly need to work on practicing my patience."

That's from "Lawprofblog" who, I guess, is a real law professor, writing at Above the Law. I'm assuming it's a real law professor based on the reputation of Above the Law, not because I as a law professor identify with the experience, which I actually don't.

"Above the Law" kills its comments section.

Ah! I've been there and back more than once. Let's see how it's reasoned out:

In the early days of ATL... the comments were amazing.... Today the comments are not what they once were. Although occasionally insightful or funny, ATL comments nowadays are generally fewer in number, not very substantive (often just inside jokes among the commentariat), yet still often offensive. They also represent a very small percentage of our total traffic (as we can tell because of the click required to access them).

It’s not clear how or why our comments changed in number and quality....

This is like a lovers' quarrel: You changed! In the lovers' quarrel context, when that line comes up, what's the next line? I think it's: You never really knew me.

... [N]umerous websites have eliminated their comments sections in recent years, largely because they felt that the comments were not adding sufficient value and that discussion had migrated to social media....

So it's not like a lovers' quarrel, because it's not a face-to-face discussion. It's the writer on one side and whoever all those people are who choose to respond in that writer's space, the comments section. The writer feels that in the old days, a different sort of person came around. It's not that those people changed. Those people left, having found better places to write — Facebook, Twitter, etc. — and the people who are here now are not changed people. They're different people.

That made me think of a line from "Grizzly Man": "He discovered that many of his bear friends had gone into hibernation and scary, unknown and wilder bears from the interior had moved in."

"Remember that whole Brian Leiter kerfuffle? Well he’s gone."

"The world (of philosophy rankings) was not ready for one as beautiful as thee."

Thanks to Joe Patrice at Above the Law for summarizing all that.

I read the underlying article — "Leiter to Step Down from PGR / The New Consensus" — but I was finding it hard to think of how to get readers up to the speed where something interesting could be said. Catch up with all that if you want, if you think you need to follow the doings of the philosophers. I'll just say that it looks as though the women philosophers are making their presence felt, and philosophy in the form of invigorating insults like "sanctimonious asshole" and "stupid" will not be the way to show one's philosophical stuff in the future.

I don't read too much philosophy, but I enjoy some of the great old aggressive aphorisms and epithets, including and especially attacks on bland, blabby, blurry writing. Here's a nice list of "The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History." Who called whom "A great cow full of ink"? "An idiot child screaming in a hospital"? "[T]he king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses"? "He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices"? "[A] queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples"?

But let the philosophers in the academy deal with their own problems. Leiter had reigned over a rankings system, and that gave his words a power to intimidate that extended beyond the meaning of those words.

By the way, I too am a woman who has been targeted by Leiter. The funny thing is that I don't care enough to remember what the dispute was. I need to publish this post so I can click on the "Leiter" tag and bone up on my own old lost history.

ADDED: Oh! I see I fought insult with insult, and — so amusingly — predicted that women would be his downfall. From September 10, 2006:

Nerd wants love.

Thinks sucking up to feminists is a good move. Don't you realize all the best feminists laugh at that?

When employees without children get envious of the accommodations made for employees with children.

You get ideas like this, expressed by a female lawyer at a big NYC law firm:

At a recent Women Lawyers meeting, we had a lively conversation discussing the notion that while large law firms have come to respect the obligations of female associates as mothers, this respect for commitments outside of the office hasn’t yet transcended to young associates who aren’t parents, both female and male for that matter. The discussion centered on the fact that no one would question or fault a woman for being unavailable on a team as a result of “having a baby”, but that other engagements may not receive the same amount of deference. In an effort to find solutions and not simply highlight problems, it was suggested that all associates on a team should be awarded a “baby” every so often – a hobby, engagement or event for which they are unapologetically unavailable and on which the rest of the team volunteers to cover, without question.

"And you actually enjoy studying law? That's weird."

From the finalists in Above the Law's Law Revue Video Contest, this one's from my old law school NYU (language warning):



For the record, I think the main character in this video has it right, it's what I expect from all my students, and it's the way I pretty much (kind of) was as a law student (30+ years ago)(except that I added a level of difficulty — pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation — to my 3L year).

"Just because Justice Scalia has every right to say stupid stuff doesn’t mean it’s a responsible move for someone occupying high office."

"He should apologize," says Joe Patrice at Above the Law, who I suspect just never liked Scalia anyway. Patrice is (or is pretending to be) all exercised about what is one of Justice Scalia's stock responses to what is a predictable question as Justice Scalia routinely travels around giving essentially the same speech about his thoroughly well-known, deeply entrenched theory of constitutional interpretation. The wonder is that it even gets reported let alone a big, drama queen response like Patrice's.

Scalia is really just pointing out The Declaration of Independence, which lies behind the Constitution. Patrice bandies the word "treason" about — his post title is "Justice Scalia Literally Encourages People To Commit Treason" and he ends with "apparently Justice Scalia thinks acts of treason are justified..." — so you'd think he'd have paused at some point to remember Patrick Henry's response to the cries of "Treason!"

It was in the midst of this magnificent debate, while he was descanting on the tyranny of the obnoxious Act, that he exclaimed, in a voice of thunder, and with the look of a god, "Caesar had his Brutus - Charles the first, his Cromwell - and George the third - ('Treason,' cried the Speaker - 'treason, treason,' echoed fro every part of the House. - It was one of those trying moments which is decisive of character. - Henry faltered not an instant; but rising to a loftier attitude, and fixing on the Speaker an eye of the most determined fire, he finished his sentence with the firmest emphasis) may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.

I supposed if Joe Patrice had been there on the scene back in 1765, he'd have editorialized at length about the need for an apology.

ADDED: Patrick Henry had the best instant comeback to heckling in the history of the world, even before you add in that, in the end, quite a few years later, people took his advice and made the most of it.

Men in shorts, lawyer version.

Above the Law is coming down hard on a judge who excluded a lawyer who arrived at court wearing shorts.

The lawyer is claiming a special medical need:

He got knee surgery two weeks ago and as he told KDFW, “I have tubes that come out of my leg that make it prohibitive to wear (pants). This connects to my ice machine that is a way of taking down the swelling in my leg. I’m also incapable of putting on long pants by myself.” [James Lee] Bright says that Judge [Etta] Mullin refused to hear him out and now he’s crying foul.

Would you have listened to a lawyer explaining that one might be capable of putting on shorts but not pants and using the word "prohibitive" to discuss the logistics of ice machine tubes? The courtroom has a "no shorts" rule.

Above the Law says: "And it’s not like shorts can’t be respectful courtroom attire. In Bermuda the lawyers wear shorts to court." And then declares that the Bermuda courtroom style looks "stupid" and the disability argument is better.

But the Bermuda lawyers in shorts are following the rules of the place where they practice, not claiming the shorts are appropriate when the rule is against them. And in fact, the shorts are no more "stupid" than lawyers in wigs look stupid. It's an issue of rules and tradition. You don't get to write your own rules, even if your shorts are fabulous, although, as you may know, the Althouse rule against shorts does have a fabulousness exception. But Althouse does not exercise the power of the state enforcing any dress codes. I am a state actor as a state law school professor, but I've never articulated or enforced any classroom dress code. My "men in shorts" comments are solely blog-based, offered up in an effort to help men look like men and not like children.

On this topic of medical devices and tubing... I assume there are a lot of people who have things like this under their clothing and do not want it to show and that tubing is routinely covered up. Does anyone with medical experience have a fact-based opinion on the lawyer's argument that it was "prohibitive to wear" pants?

UPDATE: The judge is disciplined.

"Chelsea Clinton is pregnant. Do you ponder how this will impact Hillary’s 2016 plans?"

"Then you’re stupid or sexist or both."

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade writes:

I notice, when I go to the link, that the next item down is about sexually harassing interns.

Oh! Indeed:

* Sexually harassing unpaid interns with the full protection of the law was fun while it lasted in New York. [Slate]

My original link goes to an Above the Law feature titled "Non-Sequiturs"... which suggests the sequence means nothing. I guess it's a bit like saying "no pun intended" to nudge people to see you've made a pun or "Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental" to get a laugh, as The 3 Stooges did in "You Nazty Spy" ("Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle") and "I'll Never Heil Again" ("The characters in this picture are fictitious. Anyone resembling them is better off dead").

The much-admired November 14th interview with Clarence Thomas — now on YouTube.

Discussed previously here, linking to an Above the Law item that is now titled "Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks!" but was previously titled "Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks — And Oh What A Speech!"

I'm going to guess that the "And Oh What A Speech!" part got dropped not because ATL wanted to back away from expressing enthusiasm but because it's not a speech. It's an interview. And part of what's good about it is that the interviewer 7th Circuit Judge Diane S. Sykes is excellent. The gushing over Thomas deprived Sykes of her share of the gushing.

Now, I don't like what's left of the title — "Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks!" — because it redirects our attention to a favorite liberal media meme about Thomas: He doesn't speak at oral argument. But you can easily look up his reason for that. It's been observed and discussed many times. And Clarence Thomas frequently speaks outside of the oral argument setting, so I don't like the hey-who-knew-the-guy-could-speak snark — which is what we're left with once the "And Oh What A Speech!" is lopped off.

Anyway, the fact is, this is an excellent 50 minutes of conversation, and thanks to The Federalist Society for putting it up.

"There are a lot of briefs, and people doing a lot of talking. I mean, it’s law."

Clarence Thomas said about the work of the Supreme Court.

He also said:

Even the most boring cases are fascinating to me…. I love the cloistered life — I was in the seminary. I love my law clerks. I have this wonderful work to do.

And, as summarized by David Lat:

Justice Thomas is patient enough to wait for history to catch up with him, comparing some of his jurisprudence to “a fine wine — it just needs aging.” He noted that it took the first Justice Harlan, author of the great dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, sixty years to be vindicated.

What not to do when telling women what not to do.

A memo to women lawyers is a good negative example:

Last night, we started receiving reports of a memo entitled “Presentation Tips for Women” that was distributed by a member of the Women’s Committee to all women associates across the U.S. offices of Clifford Chance.

I haven't worked in a law firm since the 80s, so you tell me: Why is there a "Women’s Committee" in the first place?

Our tipster was correct in that the vast majority of these words of wisdom aren’t tips for “women,” but rather, tips for “human beings.”

Yeah, but there's a "Women’s Committee." These are women helping women. Either you like that or you don't. Pick one.

How big law firms entertain summer associates.

They really do try, apparently, even during these troubled times. Above the Law nominates 6 law firm entertainment events for the best of the summer of '13, and you can vote for the best. I voted.

"Seriously? The mere image of eight women and one man puts you in mind of '... a high-class escort service and an ad for Charlie’s Angels LLP'?"

"Then how about this caption: 'Staci Zaretsky — get a sex-change operation already. You're embarrassing the rest of us!'"

Wow! What a sexist screwup at Above the Law.

I noticed that today, as Zaretsky had to deem somebody the winner of what was an embarrassing-from-the-start caption contest. Here's the photo that was supposed to inspire hilarity:



This reminds me of the blind judging I did back in 2008, when Above the Law had a contest to determine who would replace David Lat as the chief writer at the blog. I criticized one contestant for racism, and the contestant — Elie Mystal, who won — turned out to be black. He thought I'd be embarrassed to have said that, because ha ha he's black:

I’m male. I’m liberal. I’m Catholic (of the “a la carte” variety). I believe in evolution and global warming. I’m happily married. I’m African-American (Althouse. “Racism alert.” What does that even mean? Go jump in a Great Lake)....

Note the similar defense made by Staci Zaretsky, in her apology here:

Old stereotypes persist within the legal profession, and as Above the Law’s sole female editor, even I am guilty of propagating them, for which I sincerely apologize (some of the resulting entries in our recent caption contest were despicable)....

"Frankly, whenever I see a complaint alleging racism these days, I assume it’s a political hatchet job by political hacks."

"That assumption is generally borne out," says Instapundit, linking to this (of mine) and to Above The Law's "A Tale of Sound & Fury (But No Transcript): In Defense of Judge Edith Jones."

My post — "Character assassination attempted on 5th Circuit Judge Edith Jones" — encouraged people who actually attended Jones's talk at the University of Pennsylvania Law School to write to me. I'm still hoping someone made a recording, but I did get this response from someone who attended (and who gave me permission to reprint this):

Above the Law produces a "Top 50 Law School Rankings."

"The basic premise underlying the ATL approach to ranking schools: the economics of the legal job market are so out of balance that it is proper to consider some legal jobs as more equal than others."

In other words, a position as an associate with a large firm is a “better” employment outcome than becoming a temp doc reviewer or even an associate with a small local firm. That might seem crassly elitist, but then again only the Biglaw associate has a plausible prospect of paying off his student loans.

In addition to placing a higher premium on “quality” (i.e., lucrative) job outcomes, we also acknowledge that “prestige” plays an out-sized role in the legal profession. We can all agree that Supreme Court clerkships and federal judgeships are among the most “prestigious” gigs to be had. Our methodology rewards schools for producing both.

Take that for what it's worth. Back when I was in law school, turning away from big law firms was what the best people did. But there are different ways of being elitist, and I certainly agree with the proposition that people who pay law school tuition and put themselves through the grind of law school are doing it with the goal of getting an excellent (or at least a good) career in law.

In that light, the big red banner in the middle of the page over there says a lot: "44% of 2012 graduates did not secure a job in the law!" Now, there were 46,364 of these graduates, and 56% of them did find long-term employment in jobs that require admittance to the bar, so that's actually a lot of jobs. Any given student is betting on himself, so how bad are those odds? Of course, many of the people who get the jobs end up hating them. So there's that.

You've got to decide for yourself. Don't just bumble into law school because it's an obvious thing to do to get on a career track if you're reasonably smart and can't think of anywhere else to go. That was never a good idea. It's just a worse idea now than it used to be.

"Maybe I’ve been spoiled, but I feel like if this happened at Harvard Law School, a guy like Charles Nesson would be all over the opportunity..."

"... to just hop in, teach from the hip, and turn this upheaval into a Con Law experience like no other. Doesn’t Columbia Law have one professor like that? Doesn’t Columbia have any professors who want to teach just because interacting with young people and shaping minds about constitutional theory is kind of fun?"

Doesn’t Columbia even have any professors who at least want to send the message that lawprofs teach because interacting with young people and shaping minds about constitutional theory is kind of fun?

It's also interesting that at Columbia, a law professor is missing classes because she's going through a divorce. Back in the 1980s, when my first marriage broke up, it happened to coincide with a research grant that gave me a full semester off to write. I've always believed it would have been much better to have had classes to give some structure to those days.

Meanwhile, Instapundit links to Steven Bainbridge who talks about Columbia's solution of lumping 200 students together in one big class. What's the big deal if the teacher is lecturing, which, per Bainbridge, is a good idea anyway.

I suspect the students would have a few questions like: Why am I paying so much tuition if all I'm getting is something I could be watching on the Internet? And why are you paid so much money to lecture in person in front of people who could just as well be watching video of whoever is the very best lawprof lecturer on this subject?

Why not eliminate faculty meetings — or most of them — and conduct business via email?

Lawprof  Jacqueline Lipton asks. The first comment nails the reason:

Isn't there some concern about having a paper trail?... I assume live faculty meetings can help maintain confidentiality better than sending emails on a controversial topic....

Even on noncontroversial topics, most lawprofs don't want the risk and pressure of putting it in writing. A few reckless graphomaniacs would dominate the discussion. Squelched passive aggressives may take revenge. 

At my law school [Orin Kerr comments] an "all faculty" e-mail exchange was recently forwarded to and published by Above the Law. That was suboptimal.

Of course, he just put that in writing, and whatever was up at Above the Law is still there to be searched for. Was it this? ("You mistake me for someone who is actually intimidated by you Dick...")

"You can’t have it all. When you finally come to accept that, it’s liberating.

"You don’t have to feel like a bad employee or a bad parent for not being able to do it all. As Al Pacino says in the Devil’s Advocate: 'Guilt is like a bag of bricks, all you gotta do is set it down.'"

"So you want to be the next top legal scholar?"

"Step 1: find some better friends."