Commentary

Law schools are not preparing law students to practice law

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The New York Times explains why law school may not be worth the money.

Excerpt:

 The lesson today — the ins and outs of closing a deal — seems lifted from Corporate Lawyering 101.

“How do you get a merger done?” asks Scott B. Connolly, an attorney.

There is silence from three well-dressed people in their early 20s, sitting at a conference table in a downtown building here last month.

“What steps would you need to take to accomplish a merger?” Mr. Connolly prods.

After a pause, a participant gives it a shot: “You buy all the stock of one company. Is that what you need?”

“That’s a stock acquisition,” Mr. Connolly says. “The question is, when you close a merger, how does that deal get done?”

The answer — draft a certificate of merger and file it with the secretary of state — is part of a crash course in legal training. But the three people taking notes are not students. They are associates at a law firm called Drinker Biddle & Reath, hired to handle corporate transactions. And they have each spent three years and as much as $150,000 for a legal degree.

What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”

So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime.

“The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”

[…]Consider, for instance, Contracts, a first-year staple. It is one of many that originated in the Langdell era and endures today. In it, students will typically encounter such classics as Hadley v. Baxendale, an 1854 dispute about financial damages caused by the late delivery of a crankshaft to a British miller.

Here is what students will rarely encounter in Contracts: actual contracts, the sort that lawyers need to draft and file. Likewise, Criminal Procedure class is normally filled with case studies about common law crimes — like murder and theft — but hardly mentions plea bargaining, even though a vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by that method.

[…]“We should be teaching what is really going on in the legal system,” says Edward L. Rubin, a professor and former dean at the Vanderbilt Law School, “not what was going on in the 1870s, when much of the legal curriculum was put in place.”

This is one of the reasons why I give the advice I do about studying STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Universities are politicized. They are run by people who want to push a secular leftist ideology. For such people, the more isolated you can be from feedback from the real world, the better. And that is why it is often (but not always) useless to study anything that isn’t STEM. If you’re going to the university at all, study STEM areas. That is, if your goal is to actually make money so you can support a family.

So you have two choices, in my view. Trade school/apprenticeship right out of high school. Or study STEM areas in university. That’s it.

A friend of mine who is a software engineer was thinking of doing an MBA a while back, and then decided on a Masters in securities and investing. I think that’s the right way to go. Stay as far away from anything that can be politicized as possible. Don’t give people who are embarked on perpetual adolescence any of your money (than they already get through taxpayer-funded research subsidies).

News

JPL employee who was fired for loaning ID DVDs will get jury trial

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From Evolution News. (H/T Uncommon Descent)

Excerpt:

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled Friday that a jury will decide whether NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) unlawfully discriminated against a former employee for discussing the scientific theory of intelligent design (ID) at work.

David Coppedge, a 14-year JPL veteran and team lead computer administrator on the Cassini Mission to Saturn, was demoted for lending ID-related DVDs to coworkers, behavior that one JPL complainant called “harassment,” and another branded “pushing religion.” After he filed suit to vindicate his free expression rights, JPL terminated Coppedge.

Evidence shows that JPL demoted and terminated Coppedge because he expressed a pro-ID scientific viewpoint disliked at JPL and labeled “religion” by JPL decision-makers.

“The court’s ruling allows a jury to vindicate David Coppedge’s rights,” said Joshua Youngkin, a legal affairs policy analyst with Discovery Institute. “California law forbids employers who view an employee’s expression as religion to punish or diminish the employee on that basis.”

“Although ID is not religion, it can’t be singled out by JPL or other employers in this way,” added Youngkin.

In its ruling, the court found there “are triable issues of fact as to whether Plaintiff’s demotion, written warning, negative performance evaluations, and ultimate termination were adverse employment actions” that involved discrimination.

Coppedge is represented by William J. Becker Jr. of the Becker Law Firm, who was supported in the case by Alliance Defense Fund.

So on the one hand, you have Richard Dawkins ducking out of debates, and on the other hand, you have taxpayer-funded government  employees firing people who offering to lend someone a DVD that questions the religion of naturalism – a religion that is flatly contradicted by the Big Bang, by the way.

News

Conservative MP introduces bill to abolish Section 13 speech code

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Here is the description for that video, posted by SDAMatt: (Note: Tory = Conservative)

Tory backbencher Brian Storseth wants to eliminate Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA). That is the provision in federal law that gives the Canadian Human Rights Commission authority to hear complaints of hate speech on the Internet. We wish Mr. Storseth, the MP from Westlock-St. Paul in Alberta, well in this campaign. Section 13 is a particularly pernicious infringement on free speech. Originally added to the CHRA in 2001 as a protection for vulnerable groups against racist or violence-promoting websites, the clause has more often been used by minority activists (or those purporting to act on behalf of minorities) to silence those who do not share their opinions.

The biggest problem with Sec. 13 is that its provisions make it far too easy for commissioners to find an alleged offender guilty. Unlike in a court of law – where the presumption of innocence, rules of evidence and bans on hearsay testimony protect defendants from wrongful prosecution – at a human rights tribunal complainants may remain anonymous and complaints may be filed by third parties with no direct interest in the case at hand. (Some folks even make a profitable hobby out of launching these complaints.) Hearsay evidence is perfectly acceptable, the onus to prove one’s innocence often falls on the accused, and tax dollars pay for the plaintiff’s lawyers while the accused is on his or her own to fund a defence.

A further flaw in Sec. 13 is that neither the truth nor the lack of intent to harm is permitted as a defence. It does not matter whether the offending Internet message was truthful or if adjudicators find it “likely to expose an identifiable group to hatred or contempt” (the standard employed under criminal law) – the owner of the website on which it appears and the person who posted it are guilty anyway.

In 2007, Sec. 13 was used against writer Mark Steyn for material he wrote in Maclean’s magazine that four Muslim students claimed had offended them. That same year, a similar provision in Alberta provincial human rights law was used to prosecute Ezra Levant for publishing the infamous Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the now-defunct Western Standard magazine. In both cases, the clear intent of the complainants was to limit legitimate debate about religious extremism.

Fears that getting rid of Sec. 13 will lead to a flood of vicious anti-Semitism and the like are unfounded. Sections 318 through 320 of the Criminal Code already prohibit “hate propaganda” – including “any writing, sign or visible representation that advocates or promotes genocide.” And it has been used several times to prosecute true hatemongers, James Keegstra, most famously. Nothing in Mr. Storseth’s proposal would affect those laws.

The Conservatives have a majority in the House of Commons and the Senate, and they have Prime Minister Stephen Harper there to sign the bill. They need to do this right away, and then ban political contributions by large corporations and public sector unions.

But wait! There’s more! (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

The Supreme Court of Canada recently laid the smack down on Human Rights Tribunals across the country. In a recent decision, B.C. Workers’ Compensation Board v. Figliola, a five-judge majority dramatically reduced the discretion of human rights tribunals to rehear discrimination complaints already decided by other administrative bodies such as workers’ compensation boards.

According to lawyer Peter Gall, who is also representing Dr. Brian Day in a health care related case that the Canadian Constitution Foundation is also assisting in, “the practice of workers taking a second kick at the can in front of human rights tribunals after their discrimination complaints had already been dismissed by a labour board or other administrative decision-maker ‘was happening often enough that it was a real problem'”.
This Supreme Court decision applies to all human rights tribunals across Canada and is very important to the business community of British Columbia and Canada because it provides for finality and prevents “forum shopping” and the issue of multiple proceedings.

I know that there are  a lot of conservative voters who are disillusioned with the Canadian Tories over the abortion issue and the free speech issue. The Conservatives need to get something done on these issues, immediately.