"Law Profs Weigh In: What Is The Appropriate Response When A White Student Wears A MAGA Hat In Class?"

Lawprof Paul Caron follows up on his earlier post, "What Should A Black Law Professor Do When A White Student Wears A MAGA Hat In Class?"

I passed on blogging this story earlier, and I'm trying to remember exactly why. Was it that I knew the young lawprof was going to get slammed and I'd have to join the pile-on? Something like that. The professor —  Jeffrey Omari — scored a column in the ABA Journal. Excerpt:

I was unsure whether the student was directing a hateful message toward me or if he merely lacked decorum and was oblivious to how his hat might be interpreted by his black law professor. I presumed it was the former. As the student sat there directly in front of me, his shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me for the duration of the one hour and fifteen-minute class. ...

As my blood boiled inwardly, outwardly I remained calm. In an effort to assuage the perceived tension, I jokingly told the student, “I like your hat,” when he raised his hand to participate in class discussion. Without missing a beat, the student mockingly grinned from ear to ear and said, “Thank you.”  

He was that angry, but he assures us he appeared perfectly calm and successfully delivered what others would receive as a joke. He knows what's in his head, and how he looks to others, which is reading the inside of their head. How could he know that the students didn't hear his joke as the sarcasm it was? He's sure he knows the student's grin was mockery? Did he consider that the student may have believed that outwardly he remained perfectly polite?

Anyway, all the lawprofs easily arrive at the opinion that a professor should allow students to wear their politically expressive clothing without regard to viewpoint and it was really wrong to publish an article calling a particular, identifiable student a racist.

I really don't see how a person can teach if they get angry at students. Even if you do have a superpower of preventing it from showing, you're the teacher, you're the one with the power. You shouldn't be getting angry at them.

His shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me... MAGA hats are shiny?

My law school is as ideologically left as the average lawprof who teaches Feminist Legal Theory.

That's what I learned from Figure 2 and Figure 4 in this article "The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity," by Adam Bonica, Adam Chilton, Kyle Rozema, & Maya Sen (who are lawprofs at Stanford, Chicago, Northwestern, and Harvard).

I got there via Paul Caron, who nudged me to notice that the University of Wisconsin Law School is the 3d most left-wing law school, according to the study. If you limit your view to the top 50 law schools, we're #1:

I know you're going to say: And that was before Althouse retired. But I think the calculation was done by looking at campaign contributions. I give money to nobody.

Here's Jonathan Adler:

Assuming there is substantial ideological uniformity in the legal academy, and that this is a problem, there remains the problem of what to do about it. 

Here's my idea for any law school that wants to look less conspicuous in the next study that's done with this methodology. The professors should find some innocuous or liberal Republicans or Republicans who were going to win anyway and throw some money at them.

But that's just me and my lateral thinking. The main solutions being talked about are: 1. affirmative action for conservatives, which seems to go against everybody's predilections, and 2. some vague commitment to intellectual diversity. As Adler puts is: "the way forward begins with efforts to cultivate an appreciation of the value of differing perspectives and viewpoints and a broader recognition that ideological uniformity undermines effective legal education."

I disagree with Adler. I think professors at a pervasively left-wing law school would readily agree with the intellectual diversity abstraction. It would change nothing. Maybe Adler would push back and say that he wrote "cultivate an appreciation" — there needs to be more growth in appreciation — and "broader recognition" — there's recognition but it should be wider. I don't know. It's so anodyne. The way forward begins... Begins! I see this going nowhere.

"Does Experiential Learning Improve JD Employment Outcomes?"

A short paper by my Wisconsin colleague Jason Yackee:

The current "law school crisis" poses a number of serious challenges to the legal academy, and how law schools should respond is hotly debated. One common suggestion is that law schools should reform their curriculum to emphasize the development of practical skills through experiential learning, rather than emphasize what is described as the impractical, theory- and doctrine-heavy book learning of the traditional law school curriculum. Employers are said to be more likely to hire those with substantial skills training. This paper provides a simple empirical examination of that basic hypothesis. To summarize the paper's key finding: there is no statistical relationship between law school opportunities for skills training and JD employment outcomes. In contrast, employment outcomes do seem to be strongly related to law school prestige.

Orin Kerr discusses the paper here, saying: "I’ll be interested to see how other empirical legal studies scholars respond to the paper, and whether they think its conclusions hold up."

Paul Caron notes the paper here, where a reader observes that some schools cook the numbers by hiring many of their own students so they report them as employed, and Jason responds in the comments.

AND: Instapundit says: "It's Potemkin diplomas all the way down."

ALSO: Here's Elie Mystal at Above the Law:

"On a scale of 1-10, 1 being no damage and 10 being permanent long range damage, how much has the IRS and tax administration been damaged by the current IRS scandal?"

Question asked of a panel of tax law experts at a symposium on tax reform.

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't plan to file criminal charges over the Internal Revenue Service's heightened scrutiny of conservative groups..."

"... law-enforcement officials said, a move that likely will only intensify debate over the politically charged scandal."

The officials said investigators didn't find the kind of political bias or "enemy hunting" that would amount to a violation of criminal law. Instead, what emerged during the probe was evidence of a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules about tax-exemption applications it didn't understand, according to the law-enforcement officials....

With this year's midterm elections heating up, the FBI's decision will feed both parties' stories about why—or whether—the IRS scandal mattered. ...

"Cleveland State Law Profs File Unfair Labor Practice Charge Alleging That 'Satanic' $666 Merit Pay Raise Was Retaliation for Union Activities."

"Faculty were placed in four merit raise bands — $5,000, $3,000, $666, and $0 — based on scholarship and scholarly influence (40%), teaching as measured by student evaluations (40%), and service (20%).... In a memo distributed to the central administration and copied to the entire faculty, one of the eight AAUP organizers alleges that:"

[The $666 figure] is a universally understood symbol of the Antichrist or Devil — one of our culture's most violent religious images. Implicitly, but unmistakably and obviously intentionally, [the Dean] used his powers to set faculty salaries as an occasion to brand his perceived opponents as the Antichrist.

What do you think of the $666 raise?
	If you got a raise, you should be thankful and keep quiet.
	It's obviously retaliation for union activities and there should be a legal remedy.
	This idiotic over-expression by the dean will be justly punished by expressions like my vote here.
	Lawyers and law professors are all satanic and deserve whatever evils they inflict on each other.
pollcode.com free polls

We were never really #1.

On the Law Prof Blog Traffic Rankings, Paul Caron has figured out a way to get Instapundit back in (by using Google Analytics numbers in addition to Site Meter), so I'm down to #2 this time around, which was always understood to be the case.

The real problem with ending the 3d year of law school: What would happen to the clinics?

Instapundit asks "Should The Third Year Of Law School Be Cut?" which is a link to Paul Caron's excerpts from a set of NYT letters addressing the proposal that President Obama entertained recently.

But Caron's excerpts don't contain what I think would be the real sticking point for law schools. Let me do a different excerpt, with boldface added. From Georgetown lawprof Philip G. Shrag:

Small seminars to teach research and writing would vanish. Education in ethics would be threatened. Clinical education, which best prepares students for the real practice of law, is expensive because of its hands-on approach. It is taught mainly in the third year, and it might be the first to go.

After decades of building up clinical education in law schools, this 2-year approach looks like a devious plan to scrap them. But a second letter, from Hastings lawprof Marsha N. Cohen, makes it look completely different:

"Nerf footballs purchased for a team-building exercise but never used and currently stored in a filing cabinet."

From a list of things we bought for the IRS.

"Law Prof Blog Traffic Rankings."

Still #1.

More shaming of the "fat-shaming" professor Geoffrey Miller.

We're already talking about him in this 8 am post. But I'll start a new one for this Inside Higher Education piece (pointed out by TaxProf).

One way to respond is humor:

A new blog was launched Monday in response to the furor. The blog is called Fuck Yeah! Fat Ph.D.s and features those proud of being "fatlicious in academia."

Or you can be super-solemn. This is University of New Mexico psychology chair, Jane Ellen Smith:



According to Smith, Miller claimed his tweets were part of a research project:

"We are looking into the validity of this assertion, and will take appropriate measures. As members of the UNM community, we are all responsible for demonstrating good judgment when exercising our academic freedoms regardless of the format”....

On Twitter, Atlantic correspondent and physician Ford Vox called the validity of Miller’s apology into question, given an essay the professor wrote about Chinese eugenics....

Miller’s essay was published in Edge this year followed up by an interview with Vice, in which he argued that the Chinese government has a long history of eugenics, and he suggested that Western countries should be making greater efforts to pursue genetic research.

There are a bunch of issues colliding here: 1. Saying flippant things about the fat and hurting feelings,  2. Making students worry that they might be discriminated against, 3. The need to prevent actual discrimination against students based on their physical characteristics, 4. Holding professors responsible for things they say in social media, 5. The professor's academic freedom, 6. The taboo against talking about eugenics, 7. What we might want to say and study about eugenics if it weren't taboo.

"The National Jurist contains a law school ranking alternative to U.S. News & World Report..."

"... using the following methodology:"

Post-Graduate Success:  50%
Employment Rate:  22.5%
Super Lawyers:  12.5%
Partners in NLJ 200:  10%
Bar Passage:  5%

Student Satisfaction:  35%
RateMyProfessors.com:  20%
Princeton Review:  15%

Affordability and Diversity:  15%
Debt:  10%
Diversity:  5%

Some of those factors are incredibly lame/immensely manipulable, but I suppose I should like it because my school does well on it.

Massive support for Romney among lawprofs.

"Law Profs back President Obama over Mitt Romney 72% to 19%..."

19%! That's huge! I'm stunned!

Actually, it's not a very scientific poll, just a blog poll put up by lawprof Brian Leiter. Why would only lawprofs vote? I'm sure Leiter has non-lawprof readers. But what's most important is that Leiter's readers — lawprof or non-lawprof — probably skew left, even more than the usual group of lawprofs.

In which case: 19%! Wow! Huge!

We'll see what kind of "lawprof" result is achieved through a poll at lawprof Althouse's blog site:

Who's your choice for President?
	Gary Johnson
	Barack Obama
	Mitt Romney
	Jill Stein
pollcode.com free polls

Romney gave 30% of his 2011 income to charity — and declined to take the full charitable deduction they were entitled to.

Paul Caron reviews the Romneys' newly released tax return.

The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year. The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor's statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.

So Romney voluntarily forked over more money to the federal government than he needed to because he didn't want the percentage to look too bad.

ADDED: Sorry for the typo in the headline. It's 30%, not 40%. He's not that generous.

"Tax Court Rejects Geithner/Turbo Tax Defense."

Notes TaxProf.

"The U.S. News Law School Rankings Are Out!"

"There’s a surprising amount of movement among the top law schools. And there are some interesting tidbits from elsewhere within the rankings," says David Lat.

Here's a list showing the various gains and losses in rank. (My school, Wisconsin, stays at the same place, #35, but we suffered a loss last year.) The University of Washington went up 10 spots to #20, Arizona [State] soared 14 places to 26. Meanwhile, Illinois plummeted to 35 (to join UW). There is pain in Austin, Texas (falling 3), and cheer in Georgetown, which climbed over Cornell.

Biggest loss in the top 10 is Michigan, falling 3 places to #10. Biggest top 10 gain is Berkeley, up 2 spots to 7. The coveted 2d and 3d places switch hands with Stanford popping up over Harvard.

At Wisconsin, we like to single out the "peer reputation ranking," and Paul Caron has broken out that list. We're #24 on that scale, which, we like to think, extracts the wealth factor.  If only we had more money to bulk up our other numbers, that's where we'd be overall. And: If only we'd go all hardcore on LSAT and GPA admissions instead of the soft factors, we'd be — who knows where? — up there with Texas. But why should we change? Let those other schools stop taking advantage of those factors!

Blah blah blah. If you're not a law school person, you're going to tell me how meaningless this all is. Why am I bothering you with this. If you are a law school person, you know this is our lifeblood. Our hated lifeblood. But our lifeblood nonetheless. It's a marketplace, and the currency is U.S. News ranking.

"[L]aw school is a very risky (and expensive) investment..."

"... it should not be entered into lightly."

That doesn't mean you shouldn't enter into it heavily.

#1.

Lawprof blog rankings.

(Blogs without Site Meter aren't counted. That's why there's no Instapundit. Otherwise, Instapundit would be #1 by a wide margin.)

"Anonymous Law Prof Behind Law School Scam Blog Outs Himself: Paul Campos."

Ha.

Paul is one of the bloggers at that blog I stopped linking to after they deleted all Meade's comments (Lawyers, Guns & Money). Here's what I wrote about the Anonymous Law Professor blog. I thought it was a student, because it had some bad writing and simplistic thinking.

Is the Anonymous Law Professor blog more important now that we know who it is? (Assuming you ever cared at all.)

IN THE COMMENTS:  somefeller said:

It was dumb for him to try to write anonymously/pseudonymously, because he already was a fairly well-known blogger who writes under his own name. That really added nothing to the conversation and if anything detracted from his points by creating a biographical whodunit...

I disagree. He got attention with the "Anonymous" tease, with an Inside Higher Ed article and lots of links and discussion. If it had just been Paul Campos's next diatribe, who would have cared? Maybe by the time he'd worked the whole thing into a book, with an impressive publisher — like his "Jurismania: The Madness of American Law," published by Oxford University Press — everyone would take the trouble to read and talk about it. But this way, he got lots of publicity for his project, right at the outset. He even got the eminent lawprofcrank Brian Leiter bellyaching about it. That was pretty rich. I'd say Paul Campos is doing just fine. He should keep up the graphomania, hook Oxford University Press again, and grasp the fame and money that comes from writing a pithy polemic that hits right in the zone as people question the value of a legal education.

"Anonymous Law Prof: 'Law Professors Are Scamming Their Students.'"

Paul Caron draws attention to a new blog, purportedly written by a law professor "at a Tier One school."

Sorry, I don't think this is a law professor. I think it's a law student. Why do I think this? Well, I remember the "Anonymous Lawyer" who was supposedly a partner at a big law firm. The blogger liked to talk about how contemptuously he treated underlings. It turned out the blogger was a law student with experience being one of those underlings as a summer associate in a law firm.

This new blog has the same feeling to me. The blog tries to take the perspective of the professor as he mistreats the students. It sounds like a student uncharitably projecting thoughts onto the professor:

Now I’m sure there are certain paragons of pedagogic virtue who conscientiously keep up with the latest legislative and judicial developments in the classes they teach – who spend countless hours pouring over new statutes and opinions and law review articles, to make sure that their knowledge of adverse possession or promissory estoppel or the felony murder rule is well and truly up to date. I don’t know too many law professors like that. The typical professor teaches the same classes year after year. Not only that -- he uses the same materials year after year. I’m not going to bother to count – this is law school after all, and we don’t do empirical research -- but I bet that more than half the cases I teach in my required first-year course were cases I first read as a 1L 25 years ago. After all I use the same casebook my professor used. I even repeat some of his better jokes (thanks Bill). And, with very few exceptions, I know nothing about the formal legal material that I haven’t gleaned from reading the casebook and the teaching manual. This is how much preparation I’m doing this summer for the classes I’ll teach this coming academic year: None. And that, I guarantee you, is the median amount of time law professors have spent over the past three months preparing for the classes they’re about to start teaching again.

First of all, I don't think a real law professor at a good school would write "pouring" for "poring."  But what also rings false is the lawprof's seeming knowledge of how all the other professors are preparing for class. I've never heard any lawprof admit he just reads the casebook and the teacher's manual. Asserting that as if he knows makes me suspect that he's faking a lot.

Now, let's see what some of the other blogs are saying? Do they suspect fakery? Orin Kerr says:

Some of the author’s posts are interesting, but then a lot of the claims are pretty hyperbolic. Plus, the idea of law professors blogging truthfully about being law professors is a large part of what law professor blogs have always been about, so I don’t quite get the “speaking truth to power” tone.

David Lat says:

Is it possible that LawProf isn’t really a law prof, but just a bitter and unemployed law grad masquerading as an academic? People have been known to misrepresent their identities on the internet. For example, I pretended to be a judge-obsessed woman working at a law firm, while blogging as Article III Groupie of Underneath Their Robes, when in reality I was a judge-obsessed man working as a federal prosecutor.

With respect to Inside the Law School Scam, it appears that this is not the case. First, the site has the ring of truth to it; there’s enough behind-the-scenes and historical knowledge about legal academia to suggest the author truly is a law professor. (If not a law prof, the writer has gone to an awful lot of trouble to sound like one.)

Yeah, too much trouble. A real lawprof blogging doesn't strain to sound like a lawprof.

(And, yes, I did see that Inside Higher Ed says: "He agreed to reveal his identity to Inside Higher Ed, and his description is accurate.")

UPDATE: Anonymous Law Prof outs himself as Paul Campos.