Tag Archives: Law School

News

Sandra Fluke supports mandatory coverage of sex change surgery

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The Other McCain has the scoop!

Excerpt: (links removed)

Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all:

[B]irth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
The title of the article . . . is “Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons” and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review.

Remember, as Byron York previously reported, Fluke was rejected as a last-minute substitute witness at a Feb. 16 committee hearing because staffers for Chairman Issa were unable to discover Fluke’s claim to expertise relevant to the subject of the hearing. This law school journal article is the sort of thing that might have been discovered about Fluke’s background, had the Democrats who put Fluke forward as a witness done so with the usual 72-hour advance notice. Here’s one brief quote from the article:

Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered.

Now, imagine Fluke trying to defend this language about “heterosexist” policies in a public hearing, with Republican members of the committee questioning her about whether religious institutions (or private businesses, or taxpayers) should also be required to foot the bill for “gender reassignment.”

Congratulations, America: You’ve been scammed!

And if you think that’s bad, check out this link that McCain provides.

Excerpt:

Hormone treatments for transgendered detainees, abortion services and extensive outlets for complaints — these are just a few of the reasons Texas Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith is not pleased with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) recently released Performance-Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS).

In the spirit of detention reform, in 2011, for the first time since 2008, ICE finished its revision of detention standards for those being held for being in the country illegally. Those new standards were released this month. ICE has already started to implement the changes. […]

According to Smith, however, the revisions amount to a vast and expensive expansion of privileges.

“The Obama administration’s new detention manual is more like a hospitality guideline for illegal immigrants,” Smith wrote in a statement. “The administration goes beyond common sense to accommodate illegal immigrants and treats them better than citizens in federal custody.”

The standards also outline a wide range of medical procedures available to those in detention facilities, including services such as abortion access, hormone treatments for transgendered people, dental work and a 15-day supply of medications upon release, deportation or transfer.

That’s what the left really wants – in fact, that’s already available in Canada’s socialized health care system and in the UK’s National Health Service, too. This is like the Holy Grail of the left – changing your sex from man to woman, or vice versa, and back again – all paid for by your stuck-up Christian neighbors and their children, who will have to work till they are 90 to pay for it all. Hurray for measly cheese sandwiches! Equality for all!

In addition, there is something else that emerged about this story since I wrote about it last week – the hypocrisy of the left.

Excerpt:

During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a “bimbo alert.” He called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing sl*t.” (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a “bimbo” for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.

Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.” He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his MSNBC show. His solution for dealing with Hillary Clinton, who he thought should drop out of the presidential race, was to find “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.” Olbermann now works for über-leftist and former Democratic vice president Al Gore at Current TV.

But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny is without a doubt Bill Maher…

And I’ll just stop it right there – don’t you dare click that link, because it is incredibly rude.

Here is my previous post on Sandra Fluke, in which I explain why her demand that we subsidize Yale Law School students who spend $1000 a year on contraception is bad for marriage and bad for children. (Note: I am not Catholic – I’m an evangelical Protestant). At least if I pick on particular women, which is rare – because I normally stick to general issues – they have to say something to deserve it. And I would never say anything as bad as what the left-wing media says about Republican women, and for no other reason than because they are conservative.

News

Sandra Fluke: Georgetown students spend $3000 on contraception

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From CNS News, a very funny story.

Excerpt:

A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control.

Speaking at a hearing held by Pelosi to tout Pres. Obama’s mandate that virtually every health insurance plan cover the full cost of contraception and abortion-inducing products, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage.

Apparently, four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke’s research shows.

“Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported.

It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,” Fluke told the hearing.

$3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex – and, she wants us to pay for it.

Yes, us. Where do you think the insurance companies forced to cover this cost get the money to pay for these co-eds to have sex? It comes from the health care insurance premiums you and I pay.

But, back to this woman’s complaint that she’s spending $3,000 for birth control during her time in college.

“For a lot of students, like me, who are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary,” she complains.

So, she earns enough money in just one summer to pays for three full years of sex. And, yes, they are full years – since she and her co-ed classmates are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently.

The problem with government-run health insurance is that it turns into nothing but vote buying. The government forces everyone to pay for coverages they don’t want so that they can redistribute the wealth from people who don’t engage in risky, costly behaviors to people who do. It encourages people to be more reckless and irresponsible when someone else is paying for it. In economics, this is called “moral hazard”. Promiscuity costs money – money for contraceptives, abortions, etc. What happens when support for promiscuity it is counted as “health care” is that people who abstain from promiscuity end up subsidizing the promiscuity of others. And that’s why we get more of it – you get more of anything when you reduce the costs of it.

The most troubling thing about subsidizing premarital sex is that research has shown that premarital sex reduces the stability of marriages as well as the quality of marriages. Another study showed that teenage premarital sex increases the risk of divorce. Furthermore, the more marriages break down, the more society pays to deal with the fallout – $112 billion per year according to a recent study.

The same thing happens with subsidized single motherhood by choice – the more that the government subsidizes single motherhood by choice, the more of it you get. Many women want the baby without the husband now, and it’s easier for them when the government pays for it by taking money from workers and businesses. This is in spite of the research showing how harmful the decline of marriage is to society, especially because the decline of marriage leads to increased child poverty and increased violence to women and children.

The testimony by Sandra Fluke reminds me of that Christina Hoff Sommers book “Who Stole Feminism?” where the feminists just make up numbers out of nowhere in order to blame men and portray themselves as helpless victims in need of new laws, policies and bailouts. I guess this is what they learn to do in Women’s Studies programs.

What’s scary to me is that women like Sandra Fluke become lawyers and judges and they do influence what society will look like. Men have to make decisions about what to do in a society that does not support men or marriage very much anymore.

UPDATE: A little bit more information about Sandra Fluke.

I put that in quotes because in the beginning she was described as a Georgetown law student. It was then revealed that prior to attending Georgetown she was an active women’s right advocate. In one of her first interviews she is quoted as talking about how she reviewed Georgetown’s insurance policy prior to committing to attend, and seeing that it didn’t cover contraceptive services, she decided to attend with the express purpose of battling this policy. During this time, she was described as a 23-year-old coed. Magically, at the same time Congress is debating the forced coverage of contraception, she appears and is even brought to Capitol Hill to testify. This morning, in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show, it was revealed that she is 30 years old, NOT the 23 that had been reported all along.

In other words, folks, you are being played. She has been an activist all along and the Dems were just waiting for the appropriate time to play her.

The whole thing was engineered, but don’t expect the mainstream media to report that to you.

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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).