Category Archives: Law School

According to this article in something called The Independent Florida Alligator, law school applications nationally are down 9.5% this year, but UM is down only 4%.

Given that our percentage increases in applications during the past decade have tended to be way above recent increases in the national pool, it’s nice to see the pattern of UM beating the trend continue even when there is shrinkage in the over-all number of applicants.

Note: I have never served on the admissions committee.

Update: This decade-long increase in our applicant pool may explain why recent classes seem to have a substantially better median student then when I first got here. What’s especially notable is how much better the weakest students are today than they were over a decade ago (the best students were and are wonderful). It has been a long time since I flunked anyone who didn’t turn in a blank, or nearly blank, blue book (which usually means panic attack, but sometimes means pass/fail gambler). Indeed, I give almost no D’s and very very few C-‘s these days. This is a big change from 12-15 years ago, and while it’s possible I’m a victim of unknowing grade inflation, it would certainly be unknowing.

This will probably get me in trouble, but I wanted to respond to one of the comments to UM Promises to Be Good About Something, which actually seems to be responding to something I said in Class Warfare. There I wrote,

I’d expect that most of the faculty see students as junior versions of themselves and their friends. After all, we were (almost) all law students once. What the current fracas reveals is that many students not only don’t see the faculty as senior versions of themselves, but seem quite unaware that even when it doesn’t feel their pain, the faculty wants them to learn, and to go out into the world prepared to do good and to do well.

The commentator disagreed,

Your students see you and your colleagues as the Havard/Stanford/Yale elites that you and they are. When a Miami student looks around, they do not see senior versions of themselves because you are not that. Miami students do not see themselves as attorneys in the top DC/NY law firms, as federal clerks (and certainly not federal judges), as US/DOJ attorneys, and certainly not as law professors. How are you a senior version of the students that you teach? Almost none of them will be a tenured professor at a law school. You know that.

To which a former student replied, “Shoot higher…people in other UM Law classes certainly saw themselves in those roles…and are currently in those roles.”

I think that’s absolutely the right answer, and that the first commentator has let his reverse elitism get the better of him.

It’s true that the odds of getting a teaching job coming from UM are low compared to a top 10 law school, although it has been done. But most of the students in any law school other than Yale, which is both small and a bit of teacher factory, are not going to be professors either, so this is hardly unusual. (If you want to teach, write publishable stuff: get on a law journal, publish a note and also write something else for publication in a non-UM journal — something a number of my students have done while in law school. After graduation, work a bit, then get a pre-teaching fellowship from one of the schools that offer them. It can be done.)

OK. Here’s where I get myself in trouble:

Continue reading →

The professor blogs are abuzz about To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It’s All About Me, a New York Times front-page story about inappropriately needy, rude, or revelatory email from students to professors.

I have only two comments: First, this was an article that was mostly about undergraduates. In my experience this sort of thing is almost never a problem for me with UM law students. On the other hand, I see it all the time in requests I get from undergrads who want to go to law school (or to some other part of UM) and think I will be their research assistant or white pages service. Not to mention the occasional foreign law student or US high school student, who wants me to do their homework for them. Including the the unforgettable one who wrote me during final exam season that my essay on the three top problems in cyberlaw was urgently needed by 2pm that day…

Second, one striking thing about the NYT article (which may explain the above?), is that it it mostly quoted female professors. Could it be that undergraduate students find women more approachable, or look at them and see mommy? Are the students in some sexist manner more willing to bother the women than the men because they see the men as more ‘professional’? Or are the women faculty more willing to speak out about the problem? Or just more likely to feel lingering guilt about not responding–something that the men perhaps tend to dismiss?

Equal Process? Due Protection?: Brilliant ideas (not mine) points to 3L Epiphany, which includes this arresting passage:

“I’m getting credit for this.”

Law school credit, that is. I’m getting law school credit for blogging. And as far as I know, I’m the first law student to do so.

To which EP appends,

Maybe I’ll try it next semester. I imagine the conversation will go something like this:

Me: “Hey dean [or whoever is in charge of deciding to give credits for things like this], do you want to give me a couple of credits to criticize everything I don’t like about this school, rip the third-world bathrooms, complain about the woeful parking conditions and idiots who run the parking shuttles, moan about my lack of job prospects, point out the absurdities of law school, wonder whether it’s all worthwhile, take note of the eccentricities of the faculty, mention my incompetent LRW teacher, and occasionally reveal my personal problems?”

Dean: “Um, no. I don’t think so. Get the hell out of my office now.”

In fact, at UM any faculty member can do an independent two-credit writing project with a student. I could, for example. And I would be delighted to work out a blogging-for-credit project. But not anything so shapeless as the project described above.

What would a good blogging-for-credit project look like? There’s room for negotiation, but I think that the project would have to be focused as to subject, involve the application of actual legal research, and ideally be somewhat sensitive to current events. It might follow a notorious local trial, involving in-person attendance and explanations of what’s going on. Or it could be a running commentary on, say, the most interesting cases decided by a particular circuit. (The trick here would be to contextualize, to add value to what we’d get anyway from the advance sheets.)

I’m sure there are other models too, and invite suggestions.

Potentially interested UM students should read what I tell students who want to write ordinary papers, and also consider themselves on notice that I’m apparently considered a tough grader….

In There’s something about law school, a law student frets about “The arbitrariness and randomness of law school grading”:

This is not a major revelation I’ve recently had, but this semester, more than any, underscores this point for me. After each of my three exams, I felt worse about my performance than I had following any other law school exams. And yet, I had my best semester in terms of grades. Only in law school can you leave an exam not only having no clue how you did, but thinking you might’ve actually failed (well, that’s not true – I knew I never failed but I’ve definitely left exams thinking I got a C or C+) and then end up with a good grade.

Here’s another example that emphasizes how grades have no correlation to actual knowledge or skill. Let’s talk about two students, named X and Y. X had the same Business Associations prof I did. Y had a different prof. X got an A. Y got a B. X did a lot of reading but by the mid-point of last semester was only reading High Courts – she basically read in their entirety maybe 5 cases over the final half of the semester. X never participated in class because Prof. BA didn’t care whether you participated and in fact created very little opportunity for students to get involved. Don’t get the wrong impression – X is not lazy by any means. X just decided that in doing all the work necessary for law school, it was not productive to wade through 12-15 pages of mind-numbing minutiae for every case. Y did all the reading and participated a lot, which Y thought was important because Y’s prof said participation will be counted in the final grade. Y’s participation added a lot to the class discussion because Y had intelligent things to say; Y wasn’t just raising her hand to open her mouth.

So what’s the problem? X, who got an A, basically knows nothing about business, corporations, finance, economics and money, etc. X is more into history, sociology, creative writing, etc. Y, who got a B, worked for 6-7 years before law school in a field where one need to know about business, finance, economics, corporations, etc. (I know by using these terms I’m not exactly summarizing all that BA is about, but you get the idea – some people are going to do corporate transactions because they’re good at that stuff; other people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about business, finance, economics, etc. … I’m not saying one person is smarter than the other, just that people have different aptitudes for different things.) Basically X could never have even been hired where Y worked. And I guarantee if you take X and Y at the same law firm and give them the same assignment, if the task is business-related, Y would do a better job.

But X got a better grade. When X and Y apply for jobs, someone will look at Y’s transcript and see the BA grade and think something like “He doesn’t really get it” but they’ll think X does “get it.” But that’s incorrect. Y gets it and X doesn’t. Yet X got a better grade.

I tried to post comments there, but for some reason the blog wouldn’t let me. So here’s what I tried to say:

I wouldn’t be too quick to jump to the conclusion that “grades have no correlation to actual knowledge or skill,” both because it is so different from my experience as a student and also because I know I wasn’t alone.

My experience was that on the rare occasions when I thought I did great, I didn’t do so great. And frequently, when I thought I did badly, I did very well. I came to believe that on time-limited exams, if you were able to put down everything you knew, which tended to cause a happy feeling, it was usually a sign you didn’t know enough. On the other hand, if you could think of 20 more things you coulda shoulda said, which tended to create a bad feeling, it was a sign you knew the subject pretty well.

Yes, the facts you describe relating to your own experience may be consistent with the “arbitrariness” theory you offer, but they are also consistent with an “unreliable subjectivity” theory that I think I experienced. And, for that matter, in classes with curves they are also consistent with a “Well or badly as I did, it was worse (or better) than the next guy” theory. Or maybe you knew some subjects better than others?

Without lots more info, it’s not that easy for you, or me, to know which of these stories might be right in any given case. So, I say: go look at your exams. Read the model answers if any are provided and compare them to your answers. Ask the prof what you did wrong. It might be informative … and you might even learn something.

As for the sad tale of student X and student Y, I am much less sympathetic. Who knows what they put in their blue books. It’s blind grading — all the stuff in your head is not going to help much if you can’t get it on paper. And, yes, there are other skills that matter for lawyers too — like the ones reflected by in-class participation. But at the end of the day, if you can’t get it on paper, that’s an important fact.

I know people who didn’t do well in law school who are terrific lawyers; sometimes that was evident in school, sometimes it manifested later. I also know a small number of great students who are not great lawyers, but I have to say that this is a rarer phenonenon. In other words, high grades do tell you something very likely to be meaningful about the person who earned them; the reverse is not as reliably true, and that’s why smart employers also consider things like writing samples, recommendations, experience.

After we turn in our grades — long after, in my case — we get our student evaluations. I wish the students filled them out after the exam: it would more fairly represent what I’m doing. But instead the administration has them fill them in about 2/3 of the way through the semester, just when they are most anxious.

I got mine today. Like every year I get dinged for talking too fast — but it’s genetic. And I do tell the students to stop me if I go too fast. The best ones do.

This year, unusually, I got substantial amounts of hostility for part of my class policies. You see, I require that all male students come to class in a coat and tie, and female students must wear comparable professional attire. Students must address me as “sir” and each other as “my esteemed colleague” or words to that effect. No one — other than me, of course — is allowed to talk for more than one minute. No one is allowed to miss more than one week’s worth of classes without an excuse from the Dean of Student’s Office; miss more than that and it counts as negative class participation and can hurt your grade. Anyone who is late is marked as having half an absence, so more than six latenesses can hurt your grade.

Ok, I’m kidding. Actually, the only parts of the above paragraph that are true are the parts about being late and missing class. And the part about the hostility this policy engendered. Yes, I take attendance, in part because the ABA rules say that by turning in a grade I’m certifying that my students went to class. (And as the Dean of Students will write an excuse for just about anything, the true sanction, for people with a minimum of common sense, is the minor hassle of getting a form filled out and signed.)

I penalize lateness because late people disturb others, disturb me, and likely have unprofessional habits that could use some push back. I used not to penalize latenesses, and students just drifted in in droves during the first 10-15 minutes of class. (Then they complained they couldn’t follow what was going on….) I had ten people out of 60 come in late one day. It was ridiculous.

So while I want to be sympathetic to student concerns, and might even experimentally lower the tariff next year to, say, lateness equals 1/3 of an absence, I just don’t see why expecting people to be on time, and incentivizing them a little, is such a terrible thing.

Am I hopelessly behind the times here?