"Why should we continue to care about Guantánamo?"

A student asked Linda Greenhouse on the last day of the law school course she taught on the sole topic of Guantánamo. She doesn't mention that the law school is Yale, which is the most difficult law school to gain admission to and therefore the one with the most elite set of students. Odd to think that someone who got into Yale and elected to take a course dealing solely with Guantánamo — it can't possibly be a required course — endured the experience to the last day and still asked why should I care?

I wasn't there, so I don't know the tone of the question. Greenhouse gives the context the student presented — "the Guantánamo population has shrunk even as urgent human rights crises that place many more people at risk have erupted in other parts of the world" —  and characterizes the question as "deliberately provocative and not entirely rhetorical." Greenhouse informs us that the class was provoked to "lively" "conversation" that "quickly" produced "consensus."

Of course, the intense activity of devoting a law school semester to one legal problem needs to make sense in the end. Simple human defensiveness could explain the quick trip to consensus. Why did we take this course instead of Information Privacy Law or Law and Regulation of Banks and Other Financial Intermediaries or whatever else might have captured our hearts on Yale Law School's rich menu of course offerings?

Here's how Greenhouse, in her NYT column, phrases the consensus:

We care because the Guantánamo saga isn’t only about the 162 men still held there, or the hundreds who have come and gone. It’s about the health of our own institutions, our own commitments. We look in the mirror of Guantánamo and see ourselves.

From "isn’t only about the 162 men" I gather that the students got weary of caring about those 162 men. If they are the 162 who are left, they are there for a reason. Bush put them there, but Obama has kept them there. Must we really go over and over the question of whether it all was done precisely right? And then you see it: the place of refuge from this nagging doubt about whether these 162 men deserved all this elite law study.

And that place is: ME! This is about ME! This is US! This is WHO. WE. ARE. Ah, relief. So I haven't been staring for months into the dismal stories of 162 shady-but-perhaps-procedurally-abused characters. I've been staring into a mirror at myself. Ah! The relief! It was about me!

That was where the elite students quickly found relief from provocation. I suspect that practically any particular legal problem can support the claim that it's really about the legitimacy and principle of the entire legal system, so the quick consensus position — to me, seen from a distance — feels more like evidence of the students' desire to free themselves from the anxiety of having paid a semester's worth of attention to something they believed they would care about, because they liked the idea of being the sort of people who do care when others do not care, but then they saw that they did not really care at least not quite that much.

And then the relief comes, and it has sufficient resonance with the original choice of what to study: I am studying myself caring about the people I wanted to believe I cared about. I've been looking into the mirror to see if I care, and I must now see that I care, or it doesn't make sense to have chosen to stare for months into a mirror to see if I care. I do care. I care about me caring.

"I’m just a university faculty member who expresses his own opinions, thoughts and proposals, which is absolutely my right. This is an out-and-out witch hunt."

Said Zhang Xuezhong, fired from his job at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai.

Professor Zhang, 47, has had run-ins with school administrators over his writings, but their unhappiness with him deepened last May after he publicized the contents of a secret document, produced by the central government, detailing seven subjects that are not allowed to be discussed in Chinese classrooms. The banned topics included democracy, freedom of speech and past mistakes of the Communist Party....

Professor Zhang’s undoing appears to be an article he published online in June titled “The Origin and the Perils of the Anti-Constitutionalism Campaign in 2013.”

"Sure, let’s have the whole 'is now a good time to go to law school?' debate again."

Teases David Lat linking to "To Apply or Not to Apply? That’s a Tough Question" in the WSJ Law Blog. Lat's implication that the very article he's linking to is not worth reading is, I think, apt.

Lat follows on with "Especially if you’re a minority, since white people are losing interest in law school," linking to The Am Law Daily's "'White Flight' Hits Nation's Law Schools," which I'd noticed yesterday and decided not to blog. Are white people losing interest in law school? There are some numbers and charts at the link, but plenty of white people still go to law school. My hypothesis would be that it's not "lack of interest" or "flight" but individuals with imperfect information assessing the risks and potential benefits.

Using the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings—not because they measure prestige precisely but because they are widely known—it's clear that the bulk of the 6,528-person decline in white 1Ls occurred at lower-ranked schools.

So it seems that there's more of a tendency among white applicants to decide that in a soft job market, it's not worth getting a degree from a less prestigious school. Why should there be a racial difference in sensitivity about risk, awareness of prestige, and belief in the strength of the connection between your personal fate and the name of your school?

"So why is it important that we have a multitude of desperate law school graduates and many more politically ambitious rich than 30 years ago?"

"Past waves of political instability, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War, had many interlinking causes and circumstances unique to their age. But a common thread in the eras we studied was elite overproduction."

Excerpt from an article at Bloomberg.com (by Peter Turchin, vice president of the Evolution Institute and professor of biology and anthropology at the University of Connecticut) titled "Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays."

Worth clicking for the illustration, a diagram of how this terrifying process, depicting "Unemployed Lawyers" as a crucial link in a chain between "Wealth Glut" and Elite Fratricide."

But the chain can be broken — "catastrophe isn’t preordained" — and you can probably guess how. But first, you gotta believe the catastrophe is coming, so soften up and get scared.

"Law attracts some very bright people. But it is not profound. It is one of the simplest professional fields."

"... The young are analytically sharper than the old but lack experience. In an analytically weak field, experience may be essential to successful problem solving."

Writes Richard Posner, the 74-year-old judge, in his "Reflections on Judging."

AND: In line with this stress on real-world problem-solving is this proposal for law schools:

Law schools should require students who lack a technical background... to take a course in accounting and a course in statistics; a course that places a field or fields of law in its (or their) technological context; and at least one course, elsewhere in the university, of a purely scientific or technical character, such as applied math, statistics, economics (at the level at which it employs calculus and statistical analysis), physics, physiology, biochemistry, organic chemistry, some branch of engineering, or environmental or computer science.... If room needs to be made in the curriculum by cutting or shortening other courses, there is a good place to start: it is called constitutional law. Dominated as it is by the most political court in the land, constitutional law occupies far too large a role in legal education.

"Law reviews are not really meant to be read."

Writes Adam Liptak at the meant-to-be-read New York Times:

They mostly exist as a way for law schools to evaluate law professors for promotion and tenure, based partly on what they have to say and partly on their success in placing articles in prestigious law reviews. The judge, lawyer or ordinary reader looking for accessible and timely accounts or critiques of legal developments is much better off turning to the many excellent law blogs.

Well, that should get some links from blogs to the NYT, which needs traffic and isn't going to get much from law reviews. The on-line game is so much more energetic and invigorating than the tedious slog to write the unreadable stuff that can be placed — placed, like an unread book is placed on a shelf — somewhere prestigious.

Ever stop in the middle of trying to read a law review article and say to yourself: What am I reading? What this is is a line on somebody else's resume. It wasn't meant to be read. It was meant to be a title with a citation that would be a line on someone else's resume.

And how many law review articles will you write before you rankle at perversely worrying 100 pages into a conventional style and form to be edited by students who will strain to eradicate whatever shred of personality made it through to your final draft? At what point will your earnest effort decline into the cynical production of verbiage to be condensed into a single line on your resume?

Liptak cites a new survey of "2,000 law professors, lawyers, judges and student editors," which found that "Law professors were more critical than any other group." Guess who the lawprofs blamed? Students. I've been through this before. I told you 7 years ago about an article I wrote back in 1994 called "Who's to Blame for Law Reviews?" You can read that if you want, but it is a law review article — albeit a very short one — so I'm sure you don't want to read it. The link on "I told you 7 years ago" goes to a blog post, summarizing what I will now compress even further: Don't blame the students, professor. They're your students.

What are law students doing to protect themselves from the horror of a law school exam that lawprofs could easily write following the advice I am giving in this post?

Do law professors realize how much law students are relying on Wikipedia for summaries and insights into the cases we are assigning? In the old days, students spent a lot of money on commercial outlines, stuff like this. I've never looked at any of those books, not as a student and not as a teacher, though over the years, I've had many students ask me to recommend one.

Back when I was a law student — I graduated in 1981 — you wouldn't want the professor to know you were the sort of person who'd need or want to use a study guide, so it always surprised me that students would ask me, and I had no answer to the question other than to be careful: These things can be out of date, they may contain errors, and you can be wasting time on a lot of detail that I am not including and missing things that I will develop in class.

The best view of what will be on the exam is what we're talking about in class, which is based on the assigned readings, so why would you put time into reading some questionable alternative material instead of reading the casebook, taking notes on that book, paying attention in class, and condensing your reading and class notes into an outline that forces you to understand precisely those things that the exam will be about?

These days, from what I've heard, students have shifted to Wikipedia, which has lots of great entries for the cases that we read.

I love Wikipedia. I think it is one of the greatest things that has happened in the history of mankind. But you've got to know what it is and what it is not. Who is writing and tweaking those articles on important Supreme Court cases? They're quite well done, but that means they are done by lawyers, law students, and law academics. These contributors offset each other and enforce Wikipedia norms of neutrality, but, of course, law folk are expert at embedding political and policy preferences in seemingly neutral material. (That's what makes the cases so hard to read and understand.)

The first time a student in my class referred openly to Wikipedia, he quoted something that was a bit off. Perhaps it described a state constitutional law provision as banning racial discrimination when what it banned was using race as factor in affirmative action. It was something that needed better editing in Wikipedia.

It immediately occurred to me that a very efficient way to write an exam in this course would be to quote the Wikipedia entry on various cases and, for each, ask whether it is inaccurate. One could pick 10 statements about 10 cases — or 20 statements about 20 case — and ask the student to pick the 3 — or 5 or 6 — that you believe to be most inaccurate and explain why.

It's fine to use Wikipedia. I love it. But you've got to know what you are dealing with.

Notes on success from 2 Scotts — Adams and Fitzgerald — and one Bob.

"In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success."

Writes Scott Adams, who followed his passion and invested in a restaurant that failed, then started drawing a comic strip — "Dilbert" — as "just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try" and became passionate about cartooning as it began to make him rich.

So Adams advises us not to take the advice "Follow your passion." Then he moves on to rejecting the advice that one ought to have goals. What you need is a system.

That's a pretty amusing column at the link, and I see it's adapted from a book that's coming out next week — "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big."

***

There are only 2 Bob Dylan songs that use the word "success" and they are both on the same album which is probably the album that made the deepest impression on my mind when I was a malleable teenager, "Bringing It All Back Home":

1. "She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all."

2. "Get dressed, get blessed/Try to be a success/Please her, please him, buy gifts/Don’t steal, don’t lift/Twenty years of schoolin’/And they put you on the day shift...."

Naturally, after 12 years of schoolin', I went to art school. After 16 years of schoolin' and 5 years unschooling, I went to law school. There's a "Bringing It All Back Home" "Highway 61" song with the word "lawyers":

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known...

After 19 years of schoolin', it took 20 years of professing — looks liked or not — to get to blogging, which included, inter alia, The Gatsby Project, which never officially ended, so here's another sentence:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

"Mars Needs Women."

Movie title invoked by me in the context of critiquing philosophy departments. That's participating in my own comments thread section, where I also say something I'd like to reprint here:

The question of politeness is important.

The notion that women are "polite" in some special way needs examination. Women may have developed a strategy that gets called politeness that works in many situations. But let's be honest about what that really is and why it developed, both biologically and culturally.

No one is engaging in physical combat here. It's verbal sparring, and there's an emotional element that affects your predisposition to that kind of fighting.

There's no reason to think women are less able than men in verbal argument, but there is an emotional aspect to it. Still, when you do verbal argument, you are using emotion. You can't extract all emotion.

Lawyers know this perhaps more than philosophers.

Philosophers are stewing in their own juice. They think the juice needs more women, because lack of women is not the current taste.

They're going through an awkward phase of trying to add women. But women are not passively accepting the role as ingredient in their foul stew.

Why should they?!

Where do those female undergraduates in philosophy go if not to philosophy grad programs?

I bet they go to law school, which would be an extremely rational thing to do.

Although if philosophy departments are desperate enough [about needing] to display chunks of female floating in their gloppy gumbo, it may be a good bet for a few individuals to offer themselves up as the women philosophers, at least for a while, and these women may play the game especially well if they package themselves as specialists in "women in philosophy" issues.

Circa 1970, females entering law teaching would do "Women in the Law" and "Family Law" topics. When I was graduating from law school in 1981 and going into a law teaching job search, one of my female lawprofs advised me (and other women) to resist getting assigned Family Law or any of those women-associated topics. Get right to the seemingly "male" things like Contracts and Corporations.

The cooking metaphor began in the post proper, and the philosophers introduced it.

I just want to warn women to be very careful if any of these aliens displays a text — written in abstruse language — titled "To Serve Women."

Tales of gender difference, the Socratic Method, and the hostile environment that is philosophy.

The story of one female University of Wisconsin-Madison student and the undergraduate club the Socratic Society:

“People were yelling and banging on the table to make their points,” [Macy Salzberger] says. “It was basically a free-for-all... The environment felt hostile, and often I was the only girl in the room”...

“I told women that I understood the problem, but that it was possible to balance out the combative tone if more of us came. The women who started coming were intentional, as well. They shared that goal.”...

“Macy has been an outstanding leader,” says Philosophy Department Chair Russ Shafer-Landau. “It’s absolutely vital that we enfranchise all who want to participate in philosophical discussion, and Macy’s efforts have been exemplary in this regard.”

Can we get some Socratic dialogue on what "enfranchise" means here? And nice as it is to feature some hard work by a UW student, do you really believe that if only more women came in at the intake level and "shared" a "goal" of inclusiveness, then some "tone" you view as exclusionary would be "balanced out"? What do you think women are? Are we some bland ingredient to be added to an over-spiced stew to make it more palatable for everyone?

And I say that as a female who went to law school, where the Socratic Method supposedly reigns, in 1978, and who has been teaching in law school since 1984, doing something that some people might call Socratic, but which got watered down long before 1978. ("The Paper Chase" is a cornball Hollywood movie, people.) Law school discussions are facilitated by professors who dearly want the participation spread around. It's in no way a free-for-all and there's nothing hostile about the environment, and the numbers of males and females are close to equal, and still — if you go on volunteers — the males talk more than the females.

Circa 1990, there was an uprising of female students who took the position that the Socratic Method was required in order to reach gender equity. The mellow, volunteer-based classroom oppressed women, we were told by earnest advocates. They demanded an authoritarian environment as the way to make women equal. That was perhaps the most surreal experience in my 30+ years inside law schools.

Oh, but enough of my memories. I need to keep reading this article:

 “I had been reading more about why women are less represented in philosophy,” [Salzberger] says. “One article documented the 'tapering effect,'which shows that even though a lot of women tend to major in philosophy as undergrads, there are a lot fewer in grad school and even less in faculty positions.”

And here's UW Philosophy Professor Harry Brighouse (who spoke on a panel on the status of women in philosophy):

“It is easy for people to think this is a male discipline.... there is a degree of aggression. Philosophers don’t act in ways that others might see as polite.”

Adjusting the heat from “boil” to “simmer” would go a long way toward improving the climate for all undergraduates, he says.

Ah, so they do have a cooking metaphor. I still have the question: Why would making things friendlier at the intake level solve the problem of failure to continue on to grad school and a professional (academic) career? If you've already got — as Salzberger says — "a lot of women" majoring in philosophy as undergrads, how would lowering the heat prepare them for the fighting they'll need to do when the competition gets tough?

This is a very old issue, and philosophy departments sound like they are where law schools were 40 years ago.

Nude descending a staircase.

Is this helping anyone?



This stairwell is gloomy and deserted, and a nude that's more studiously analytical might enliven the minds of the enlibraried souls, but this is so literal and depressing for everyone. It's a flappy slap in the face as you hit the landing:




In the same stairwell — stare well — you get this:



Closer, with alienating reflections from fluorescent lights:

"I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest."

Said Frank Sinatra. I found that quote because I was Googling to try to find out how intelligent Frank Sinatra was, a propos of yesterday's PR from the Farrow family that it's possible that Ronan Farrow came into existence because Mia Farrow continued — during her long relationship with Woody Allen — to have sex with the love of her life, her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra.

Ronan Farrow seems to be a young man of very high intelligence (since he started attending Yale Law School at age 15), so one naturally wonders about the relative intelligence of the 2 possible fathers.

What's Woody Allen's IQ? He once said "I've got a 150, 160 IQ," but that was as a character in a movie. "To Rome With Love." One might only guess that it's actually Woody Allen's IQ, but we know that he wrote the dialogue, and he was smart enough to write the dialogue, which had Judy Davis coming back with: "You're figuring it in Euros. In dollars, it's much less."

How intelligent is Mia Farrow? Presumably intelligent enough for Sinatra — the liker of intelligent women — to have married her. But what kind of judge of intelligence was Sinatra? His quote is pretty funny, maybe not Woody Allen funny, but funny in that it has a set up and punch line. "I like intelligent women" is the straight line. The joke — "When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest" — also works as Sinatra's definition of intelligent: able to keep up one end of a conversation. That might be kind of a low standard. He's saying he wants someone at his level and we're hard-pressed to infer what his level was. (ADDED: In a staring contest, no one is talking, so he may be saying he's pretty dumb and somebody needs to be able to say something.)

Sinatra was a genius at singing, but does musical intelligence express itself genetically in offspring who do things like go to Yale Law School at age 15? I doubt it! [ADDED: Ronan was accepted to YLS when he was 15, but deferred admission until he was 19. In the interval, he worked for UNICEF.)

But that gets us no closer to the answer to the question who is Ronan's father, since Woody Allen is also a genius of a particular sort — writing comedy — and that sort of genius also seems disconnected from the sort of mind that gets drawn into law school at 15.

By the way, I love the question whether high-level legal analysis is more like comic writing or more like the vocal interpretation of song lyrics.

Googling for answers to my idle questions, I ran across the 1992 Farrow PR that — like this new piece — appeared in Vanity Fair. It came up because it had "IQ":

Soon-Yi issued her own statement... “I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather—not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia.”...

Mia’s family were astounded by the statement. “Soon-Yi doesn’t know half those words, what they mean,” one close to them said.... When Soon-Yi was in the third grade, her I.Q. tested as slightly below average.... “She’s a very typical L.D. kid, very socially inappropriate, very, very naïve,” says [a woman who tutored Soon-Yi]. “She has trouble processing information, trouble understanding language on an inferential level. She’s very, very literal and flat in how she interprets what she sees and how she interprets things socially. She misinterprets situations."

One might infer that Woody Allen is most likely the father, since Woody, unlike Frank, seems to have gravitated to females who don't seem so intelligent to him. Since both men gravitated to Mia Farrow, that may mean that Woody was more intelligent than Frank, if she seemed relatively dumb to Woody and relatively smart to Frank.

"Faced with rising student debt and declining applications to law schools, a task force of the American Bar Association is calling for sweeping changes in legal education..."

"... including training people without law degrees to provide limited legal services and opening the bar to those who have not completed four years of college and three years of law school."

"Young men in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada have also fallen behind."

"But in stark contrast to the United States, these countries are energetically, even desperately, looking for ways to help boys improve," writes Christina Hoff Sommers in The Atlantic.

Using evidence and not ideology as their guide, officials in these countries don’t hesitate to recommend sex-specific solutions. The British Parliamentary Boys' Reading Commission urges, “Every teacher should have an up-to-date knowledge of reading material that will appeal to disengaged boys.” A Canadian report on improving boys’ literacy recommends active classrooms “that capitalize on the boys’ spirit of competition”— games, contests, debates. An Australian study found that adolescent males, across racial and socioeconomic lines, shared a common complaint, “School doesn’t offer the courses that most boys want to do, mainly courses and course work that prepare them for employment.”

This tracks the "Gendertopia" hypothetical I use in my Constitutional Law II class when I teach about Equal Protection and classification by sex. And it ties to the topic, raised in the previous post, about schools using nonfiction books to teach reading, an issue I tied to the boys-falling-behind problem here.

Hoff Sommers stresses recognizing the differences between boys and girls and taking steps to help boys (which of course lights a fire under those who've argued that girls have been held back and if anyone's going to get special help, it should be girls). I recommend avoiding all that drama and ideological struggle by embracing what are, after all, the best American values. We don't need to follow Britain and Canada. We should forefront individuality, autonomy, and freedom.

How? Have a variety of schools, built on different learning models that are built on preferences that  relate to things that could be portrayed as stereotypically male and stereotypically female, but don't talk about how the learning styles are male or female, and don't bias the individual children and their parents to match the boys to the boy style and girls to the girl style. Give them choice and freedom. If your son or daughter wants to learn how to read with science books, to experience a teaching method built on games, contests, and debates, and to figure out how things work by taking them apart and putting them back together, he or she could pick the school that works like that. And there's an equivalent school — perhaps with the cooperative projects and long periods of quiet reading — that can be chosen by boys and girls who flourish in that environment.

I realize that I'm being stereotypically feminine in wanting to move forward in a way that makes everyone happy and avoids discord, but I'm sure that the schoolchild version of me would pick the school built on the stereotypically male learning model. Don't dissuade girls like the young me from going to that school by calling attention to it as a solution for the problems of boys. And don't propagate the idea that boys are a problem, that masculinity is a disease! That's all so unnecessary, and it's offensive to the core American values of individuality and freedom.

I know Christina Hoff Sommers is trying to stir us up and we need to rouse ourselves, but once roused, people will fight, so let's have some impressive harmony-enhancing solutions at hand.

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:

President Obama seems to have endorsed this week the lawyer training model being implemented by our new national nonprofit, Lawyers for America.... Fellows spend their third year at a legal nonprofit or government agency. After graduation and the bar exam, they return to the same workplace for a year, earning a fellowship stipend, the funds for which are provided by the agency, which benefits from low-cost fellows.

This program is not cost-free for law schools. Clinical education is far more costly to provide than classroom instruction. Without the supervision that clinical faculty provide, the practical training year could well be like many internships: young people providing cheap labor, without receiving significant instructional value in return.

In this vision, there really is a third year — off site — and the clinical teachers are more numerous and more important than ever. It's the teachers of seminars and specialized courses who are weeded from the faculty.

And how do you like everyone getting their start in "a legal nonprofit or government agency," where they spend 2 years working for nothing? The effort to cut law school back to 2 years ends up inflating it to 4!

***

Here's a flashback to 1982 — 6 years before Barack Obama became a Harvard law student. Harvard Law School — facing ''malaise'' and presser from "the school's self-described 'left,' which says the current curriculum buttresses the nation's political status quo" — issued a report that diminished the value of studying court opinions:

The Michelman committee... recommended expanded practical, or ''clinical,'' training for students, both as a teaching device and as an incentive for public service work.

Clinical training involves practice on real or simulated cases, such as work in a legal services clinic for the poor or through dramatizations before video cameras. At elite schools like Harvard, such ''practical'' training has historically been considered undignified, better left to the first years of practice.

''It is in the field under supervision, or in the life-sized simulation, that a student seemed likeliest to gain an enduring perception of the particular ways in which the conduct of lawyers may help make 'the law in action' a rather different thing from the 'law in the books,' '' the committee said....

One left-wing committee member, Duncan Kennedy, labeled the committee's findings ''homilies'' and charged in a written dissent that it failed to present ''a trenchant analysis of the educational problems of Harvard Law School and the program of reform designed to solve those problems.''

He proposed his own curriculum, including courses in case and rule ''manipulation,'' along with a mandatory two-month internship in a legal services office, and urged the school to discontinue its ''current policy of indoctrinating on the sly."...

''We are an academic institution, and it's not clear that clinical training is something we do well,'' said Prof. Charles Fried. E. Clinton Bamberger, a staff attorney at a legal services program sponsored jointly by Harvard and Boston University Law Schools, questioned the sincerity of Harvard's commitment to clinical education as legal aid. ''Harvard as an institution does not have the courage to make an explicit commitment to helping the disadvantaged through the law, because it is captured by the system,'' he said.

Think about the history and politics of these proposed changes.

What was Obama doing back when that report came out? Not community organizing. That lay ahead. He was in New York City, studying political science and international relations at Columbia University.

"The legal profession is 'right-sizing,' and law schools should follow suit."

Argues David Lat, rejecting the alternative of keeping up the present incoming class size by lowering admissions standards. The shrinkage model is painful:

Last week, we heard reports of one law school basically axing its entire junior faculty. All of the untenured professors received notice that their contracts might not be renewed for the 2014-2015 academic year. Ouch.

"Perhaps the biggest difference between the racers and the randonneurs was socioeconomic."

"Racing was a working-class sport — prize money was a way out of the coal mines or factories."

"You don't have the liberty to say, 'Well, the other guy deserves to win' if your living depends on it," [Jan Heine, editor of Bicycle Quarterly, a Seattle-based magazine about the history, technology and culture of biking].

Randonneuring was more of a refined hobby. "If you're doing this for fun, suddenly the distinction between winner and second becomes meaningless," says Heine.

Also:

"There was a lot of animosity in France, actually, between the tourists and the racers," Heine explains. "Because the tourists said, 'We are going in the mountains, and we are a participatory sport.' " Participatory meaning that women could ride alongside men — and people could ride basically whatever they wanted. This drove innovations in bicycle technology that today are widespread: If you've ever ridden a bike with a derailleur, thank the randonneurs.

Interesting the way the inclusiveness toward women changes things — this particular activity... and everything else. Who wins and who loses? Or... shall we say?... the inclusion of women changes the nature of the activity so that speaking in terms of winning and losing becomes inappropriate and those who play to win and triumph over losers become socially unacceptable oafs?

ADDED: I am reminded of the perennial efforts to restructure law school to suit women. Recently, in the Harvard Crimson:

Harvard Law student Jessica R. Jensen hates the Socratic method. “It’s the worst thing in the world,” she said. “It forces you to talk like a man... It made me feel really uncomfortable and incompetent at first, and it really impacted my performance in classes the first year.... You feel like you don’t know the material really well because you feel like an idiot in class.”

The worst thing in the world? Worse than coal mining or — the coal miner's alternative income source — the Tour de France?

Employed in some form across most classrooms at Harvard Law School, the Socratic method, a teaching style that relies on cold-calling, lies at the heart of the debate over gender issues and serves as a focal point for the Shatter coalition. Today, many students and faculty have raised concerns over the teaching method, saying that men are more likely to participate voluntarily in Law School classes than women....

Yet the root cause of this disparity remains contested, as professors, students, and administrators debate whether the Socratic method—the traditional form of legal pedagogy—needs to be adapted to account for gender disparities in the classroom.

Note that both calling on students and relying on volunteers is bad for women.

“Women take longer to process thoughts before they feel comfortable to say them out loud than men do,” Jensen said, adding that men feel more natural in that kind of classroom atmosphere.

I guess as long as you mean well — which is to say, you think and get others to think you're helping women — you can engage in sex stereotyping even when it's disparaging women. I know you can restate Jensen's stereotype so that it's more flattering to women — a paraphrasing skill you might want to work on. Just say that women are reflecting deeply, forming more refined ideas, and contemplating the social dynamic of the classroom —  while these brutal, competition-addicted men lunge at the first opportunity to dominate and blurt out whatever comes to mind with little concern about what others in the room think about them.

Harvard Law professor Lani C. Guinier ’71, who has authored several articles on legal pedagogy, said... “women’s reaction to law school is an important warning sign, but a warning sign that the problem will not go away simply by focusing on helping the women think more like their male counterparts”....

Inclusiveness toward women changes things.

"Washington & Lee pioneered an experiential third-year program that has won accolades"... but employment stats for graduates are terrible. .

Lawprof Deborah Merritt — who does clinical ("experiential") teaching herself — explains the program at Washington & Lee’s School of Law (which aims to make grads "practice ready"), shows the truly bad results for students who had reason to hope they'd be more (not less!) marketable, and comes up with 4 possible reasons for the unintended consequences:

1. Practice-ready lawyers don't cause there to be more jobs openings (and they might even cause there to be fewer jobs, if these people can do more work sooner).

2. For all the talk about practical training in law school, employers might not care quite that much when it comes to choosing among job applicants.

3. The practical experience in law school might not align closely enough with the job. Merritt teaches a criminal defense clinic and admits that students who take this clinic "are stereotyped as public defenders, do-gooders, or (worse) anti-establishment radicals–even if they took the clinic for the client counseling, negotiation, and representation experience." She also asks: "If a student chooses experiential work in entertainment law and intellectual property, does the student diminish her prospects of finding work in banking or family law? Does working in the Black Lung Legal Clinic create a black mark against a student applying to work later for corporate clients?" The political slant of law schools — especially when it comes to who wants to teach clinics — tends to result in clinics that may send the wrong signals to the employers who have slots to fill.

4. Maybe the program stimulates "higher or more specialized career ambitions" in the students, so that they don't want the kinds of jobs that are available. The actual practice of law — as experienced by most lawyers — might not be what these supposedly "practice-ready" graduates want to do.

I'm sure you can add to this list or synthesize these elements.

"Which Highly Ranked Law Schools Operate Most Efficiently?"

Another permutation of the U.S. News Ranking.

My school comes out at #4 on this one, so I'm inclined to be impressed. The idea of "efficiency" is "Spending per student for each point in the overall U.S. News score." That is, the thing schools are visualized as competing for is U.S. News rank, and the less money you spend to get to whatever rank you've been assigned on the master ranking — "Best Law Schools" — the better you do on this "efficiency" ranking.

Another way of looking at this is — to get back to a popular old activity among law professors — is to impugn the master ranking. Here, one would say that what you can infer from this new chart is that many schools are simply buying their way up the rankings, overshadowing some deeper, truer, more substantive qualities that are revealed if the things money can buy are stripped away.

That's how folks tend to talk around here.

"The U.S. needs a leader, not a law professor."

Says the Washington Post in line 2 of a front-page teaser. The first line is: "Barack Obama, Agonizer in Chief" — which implicates a stereotype about law professors.  

(Do we agonize? Maybe the law school class is some sort of theater of agonizing over whatever it is we're talking about as we do what we can't do — or we'd be lying/putting ourselves out of work — just tell the students what the answer is.)

But when I click on the link I get to this Ruth Marcus column which begins: "No doubt: Barack Obama has what it takes to be a terrific law student. It’s less clear those are the ingredients of a successful president." So... not even a law professor. A law student. I guess the WaPo couldn't bring itself to tease us with "The U.S. needs a leader, not a law student."

Marcus tells us that a "terrific law student" analyzes everything "in a dispassionate, balanced way" without necessarily really taking much of a position, which is what, she says, Obama did in his speech last week at the National Defense University. "Barack Obama... the Agonizer" is at least way better than "George W. Bush... the Decider," because Obama must be better than Bush, because Bush was terrible. Bush was so not terrific. Bush, Marcus tells us, "decided too precipitously and agonized too little." But Obama is just too thoughtful.

Marcus compares Obama's speech to "scribbling exam answers in a blue book." She calls him "ever the A-plus student," even as she looks ready to give him a C- as he calls Guantanamo "this legacy problem" that ought to be "resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law."

This answer doesn’t even pass the law student test. How, exactly? That the solution is elusive does not justify this blatant dodge.

The lawprof in me wants to say that if Obama's speech is the text to be understood, Marcus is the one who's not a terrific student. Her writing rests on the presumption that the words of his speech are the same words that run through his head as he thinks about the various problems and the words that he speaks in private. I say "her writing" because I'm not deluded enough to think that the words in the Washington Post are the words inside Marcus's head. She's arguing to him and his advisers that he needs to do something different and he's not getting away with the seemingly dispassionate, balanced analysis. She'd like to manipulate his mind.

And Obama, in his speech, was attempting to manipulate our minds. The performance in the Theater of Agonizing is for a purpose. We can try to discern his purpose — perhaps to get us to trust in his caretaking and to be patient while he continues to do the things that need to be done and not to look too closely at the incoherencies and possible illegalities. This is what leaders do.