Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel listen to Senators speak during the Senate Foreign Relations hearing to debate the authorization for use of military force in Syria on Tuesday, September 3, 2013. By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call.
https://twitter.com/rawiniathompson/status/358796481152565249
Jeff Redding thinks the debate over shortening law school misses the real problem with legal education today:
This big-picture problem concerns many, many law students’ lack of exposure to political theory, history, sociology, and other disciplines which help make up what we call the liberal arts. Rather, what I often see are incoming law students who—to no fault of their own—have majored in fields like marketing, finance, and accounting, or even physical therapy. … I call this a problem for a number of reasons, some of which I will develop further in future posts, but for now I’d like to mention how difficult this kind of undergraduate education makes it to get law students (incoming and otherwise) to understand why there are legal disputes in the first place. Put succinctly, I commonly get responses in class and on exams (and in papers) that suggest an underlying befuddlement at why everyone in a given dispute can’t just apply ‘the rule.’
Previous blog debate on the subject here. A reader continues the in-tray debate:
Your readers miss the point entirely. Yes, it’s very nice to take wonderfully interesting classes – I loved the clinics and seminars I took my third year – but why should they be mandatory at a price of $50,000+? That is just insane.
Your reader who taught “street law” may have enjoyed it, but it is entirely useless and irrelevant to the day-to-day experience of a practicing attorney. And the idea that anyone who wants to be a lawyer should have to take these interesting classes, and sink deeper into debt to do so, is pure pie-in-the-sky bullshit.
Can you fathom medical school students being forced, after mastering all the science know-how and specializing in one area (which law students don’t even do), they had to do a fifth or sixth year where they took fascinating classes on the role of medicine in our society, or a seminar on the big toe? If it’s entirely irrelevant to their practical career paths, why force that debt load on them?
If I could take a year to study such nonsense as “Wealth, Democracy and the Rule of Law”, or just get a masters in early colonial American history or comparative government, I would do it in a heartbeat! That’s not the question. The question is: would I step up and pay $50K for the privilege to do so? Well, maybe, but first I have to finish paying off my goddamn law school loans.
Another:
Your readers’ comments are interesting, and I think there are a lot of interesting sub-issues involved with this discussion. I agree that students need more practical experience. The ABA is definitely run by people with some old-fashioned thinking, so that organization needs a shake-up. The number of people who go to law school who really shouldn’t is also a problem. Bankruptcy law regarding loans is insane. The bar exam is just institutionalized hazing and in no way reflects whether someone is qualified to practice law. There is no shortage of problems with law school, but the third year might not be the worst one.
Many people do get that extra practical experience through internships and clinics in your third year. Most people would be honest that during their first-year summers, they were mostly idiots, but by their third years they had a better sense of what they were doing. Perhaps for people like that, a better plan would be to front-load classes in those first two years and then allow firms and the government to hire third-years for full-time paid jobs as paralegals (or paralegals-plus). This way they could focus on the practical skills and get paid. Ideally they would not have to pay tuition, but I am not holding my breath on that one.
We should be discussing all these issues, but I think that the third year of law school really helped in my case. I am a tax lawyer, and tax is one of the areas of the law that is so complex and that changes so often that many people go on to get another law degree (an LLM) specifically for tax law. I frankly recommend it for people trying to break into tax law because it really can matter on your résumé. If I am hiring someone for a tax law job, I need to know that person knows more than just basics like constitutional law and contracts. I also want them to know how about corporate accounting and depreciation and capital gains and a host of other issues. An LLM gives people a background that can help with the hiring process.
I personally don’t have an LLM in tax, but I was able to secure a tax law job by interning in tax jobs every semester and summer after first year and by taking every tax and business class available in my law school during my second and third year in addition to the general bar exam classes everyone takes. My third year was basically my LLM. I had a hiring attorney tell me I was hired from my second-tier law school because I basically had an LLM already. So my third year saved me the money I see so many people putting into LLM programs after law school.
Not all kinds of law require an LLM, but if you aren’t spending your third year taking classes focused on exactly what you want to do with your law degree, then it is a wasted year and a wasted line on your résumé. And if you don’t know what you want to do with your law degree, then why are you shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for one? The third year should be your year to focus on practice and specialization year, but you have to know how to use it. Don’t waste it on Madden like Elie Mystal did.
Boehner supports the president’s decision to attack Syria:
Cantor, Pelosi, and Reid have also voiced their support for intervention. Only McConnell isn’t onboard yet. Dreher sighs:
Unless there is a rebellion in the Congressional ranks, in both parties, we are going to do this thing. We are going to bomb Syria to make Syria safer for al-Qaeda and other Islamists. This country never, ever learns.
Benen, on the other hand, argues that passage still isn’t a sure thing:
[W]ith Boehner and Cantor endorsing the president’s position, GOP lawmakers will obviously have to consider whether to embarrass their own leaders while also embarrassing the president. They might very well do this anyway, but at a minimum, it should give rank-and-file Republicans pause. Indeed, if there’s a contingent within the caucus that’s inclined to follow the leadership’s call, and there’s a similarly sized element of House Democrats who’ll follow House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) lead, then the odds of the chamber approving a resolution are probably slightly better now than they were a few hours ago.
The Fix is counting votes. Meanwhile, Galupo bets that any acts of bipartisanship won’t last:
If, as I suspect, a majority of Republicans vote aye on a strike against the Assad regime, they might feel emboldened to confront Obama on the domestic front. If politics stops at the water’s edge of foreign policy, as the cliché goes, Republicans will have earned a measure of good will from the media, and even, to a lesser extent, from the Obama administration itself. With Syria behind them, Republicans could thus reenter the budget and debt ceiling debates with renewed resolve: Okay, Barack; we’re on this side of the water’s edge again.
Miles Klee highlights a study:
[E]xperimenters set up duplicate “decoy ads” in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist and the adult/escorts section of Backpage.com for 15 different cities, collecting the phone numbers and texts of everyone who replied. When all was said and done, they had amassed 677 points of contact and 451 numbers. On average, they estimated, under 5 percent of men in a metropolitan city area – supposedly just those “over 18,” as if a curious youngster wouldn’t lie on a terms of use agreement – are soliciting online sex ads. [They found that] some regions are a little hornier than others: “On average, within the 15 markets explored, one out over every 20 males over the age of 18 in a metropolitan city area was soliciting online sex ads. The findings ranged from approximately one out of every 5 males (Houston, 21.4 percent) to less than one of 166 males (San Francisco, .6 percent).
Update from a reader:
Let me assure you, more than 0.6% of men in San Francisco are looking for sex online. But not on Craigslist (what is this, 1998?) We have apps for that now.
Another:
I call bullshit on this study. The results were pretty sensational and the sample size seemed small – 451 numbers in 15 cities. That’s 30 people per city. So I looked up the actual paper to see if it was credible, and was not exactly impressed.
I’ve laid out an example of how they appear to be doing the math below, but short answer is that they appear to both make math errors and also make unrealistic assumptions to make their numbers look bigger. They even appear to have screwed up population data (which seems pretty hard to do).
Their methodology was to post two fake ads, assume the small number of responses was representative and random, do some math and assume every single other ad posted got the same response rate from a totally different set of customers. Their entire methodology is based on using repeat callers to estimate population sizes, but then they assume other ads get completely different “customers” calling in.
It’s ridiculous and they make much too sweeping claims from their research. Now, I was surprised at the levels of activity they cited other (presumably less grandiose) research as showing, but their research doesn’t appear to add much real evidence. I’m not even sure it’s useful as a measure of relative behavior between cities. They may just be capturing relative popularity of the particular sex sites.
I’m going to use NYC as my example because it’s the most obviously ridiculous. Their headline: 3.4% of men over 18 years old solicit sex online in NYC.
Ridiculous underlying data: They received responses from 7, yes SEVEN, people. Three of whom called twice. They extrapolated from this ludicrous sample an entire population estimate. And they made what appear to be two math errors in doing so.
Math error #1: They say there are about 21 thousand sex ad users, which implies NYC adult male population of ~500 thousand. It’s more like 3 million. Maybe they only considered Manhattan under the logic that Johns, like witches, cannot cross moving water.
Math error #2: My best estimate is that their own math would show an estimate of about 4,400 [((8+7)/4-1)*341.5] as the population using the formula from Chapman they provide and maximizing the possible values. Maybe they used one of their other (apparently arbitrary) methodologies, but they don’t actually say.
Combined these errors change their estimate by an order of magnitude so it’s more like 0.25%. Whoops.
Other cities are slightly less absurd, but it pisses me off when sloppy research gets elevated in the media because it tells a good story. I’m all for confirming my bias that Houston sucks, but this one isn’t fair.
A reader can relate to this post:
I have some seriously rednecked cousins-in-law down here in Florida, and if there are two things they are proud of, it’s their Southern heritage and their liberty. They still bristle over the Northern War of Aggression and consider anyone north of Orlando a Yankee. They all smoke pot, are still convinced Obama’s a Muslim, work hard, and will fight each other over anything. They would welcome legalization in a heartbeat. One less intrusion on their lives by the goddamned government.
Another illustrates that theme by pointing to the lyrics from “Team Party darling Charlie Daniels’ 1974 song, ‘Long Haired Country Boy'” (seen above):
“People say I’m no good, and crazy as a loon
‘Cause I get stoned in the mornin’, I get drunk in the afternoon…
“‘Cause I ain’t askin’ nobody for nothin’
If I can’t get it on my own
If you don’t like the way I’m livin’
You just leave this long haired country boy alone…“A poor girl wants to marry, a rich girl wants to flirt
A rich man goes to college, a poor man goes to work
A drunkard wants another drink of wine, and a politician wants your vote
I don’t want much of nothing at all, but I will take another toke“‘Cause I ain’t asking nobody for nothin’
If I can’t get it on my own
If you don’t like the way I’m livin’
You just leave this long haired country boy alone”
Another reader:
Your post mentioned Willie Nelson, which reminded me of a wonderful Texas Monthly article on the Outlaw Country movement, which brought the rednecks and hippies together in the early ’70s. My favorite quotes:
BILL BENTLEY “The thing that turned Austin inside out was cocaine. The city got flooded with it.”
STEVE EARLE “It created a caste system. The democracy goes out when people are hiding in bathrooms because some can afford cocaine and some can’t.”
WILLIE NELSON “I never liked it. Eventually I told everybody, ‘You’re wired, you’re fired.’ If you’re going to play music, you better all be on the same drug. You can’t have a guy up here wailing away on cocaine while you’re laid back on a little pot. It just don’t work.”
Frum lists four. Among them, “What will it cost?”
A Syria campaign is being advertised as comparatively cheap in money and American lives. We’re promised “no boots on the ground.” But there’s another cost in danger of being overlooked: the opportunity cost.
The president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and other top officials have only so much time and energy. If they commit to resolving the Syrian civil war, inevitably they give second shrift, or third shrift, or worse to many other concerns of arguably greater importance to the region and the world.
Egypt, for example, seems to be heading toward the same civil strife as Syria. Who is developing the plan for helping to prevent that outcome? How much high-level support and attention are they getting?
Dave Schuler rattles off other questions:
Assume an attack on Syria is unsuccessful in the sense that Assad continues to use chemical weapons after the attack. What then?
Assume an attack on Syria is successful, Assad stops using chemical weapons (he might have done so anyway), but he is able to defeat the rebels without them. What then?
Assume an attack on Syria is successful, Assad stops using chemical weapons (he might have done so anyway), he is unable to defeat the rebels outright, and the civil war just continues. What then?
Assume an attack on Syria is successful and Assad, hamstringed in his attempts to preserve his regime, is ousted by the rebels. The rebels are radical Islamists. What then?
We attack Syria. Syria, Iran, or both retaliate by attacking Americans or American interests in the Middle East using asymmetric warfare techniques. What then?
We attack Syria. An American aircraft carrier is sunk by asymmetric warfare techniques (that’s actually occurred in war games of conflict in the Middle East). What then?
Kiss interruptus:
Adam Ozinek ponders the economic perks and social drawbacks of an entertainment market driven by Big Data. He notes that the “more information we have, the more profitable first degree price discrimination will be”:
If knowing where people go on the web can increase profits by over 1% compared to simple demographics based price discrimination, then how much will it help to know where people go in the real world? How about who they encounter and speak with? What products they look at and how much time they spend looking at them?
Is this kind of world sort of creepy and unfair? I think this is somewhat true and my guess is most people think this is very true. But consider the benefits. For example, I’ve written before that TVs that watch us are the best hope for breaking up the technologically stagnant and poor service that cable companies provide. Many wish for an a la carte system but the economics mean that whatever system replaces cable is going to need to find a way cover the large fixed costs of creating TV shows. This is why I am skeptical of any systems that only manage cheaper prices. What is needed is alternative revenues to provide a subsidy or lower real costs, and few have found a way to deliver this. TVs that watch you, in contrast, can deliver on the former.
Previous Dish on Netflix’s Big Data strategy here. Recent thoughts from Kevin Spacey on the Netflix model here.
Casey N. Cep’s visit to The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, mingled with childhood memories of bookshelves her father built, sparked these reflections on the future of reading:
Few people believe that the end of bookstores would be the end of reading, or even the end of browsing or serendipitous encounters with literature. No matter how far into the digital realm literature moves, there are those who will always revere the book. Rare book libraries and manuscript archives will always, and for good reason, keep vaults full of parchment and paper. Artists like Michael Piscitello, David Lovejoy, Jena Priebe, Brady Westwater, Nick Lord, and the many others who have contributed to the Last Bookstore will continue to make art from physical books, while artists and archivists will always devote themselves to the book as concept.
The rest of us, though, will realize it is not books that we have loved, but words and stories.
Take those bookcases in my childhood room. It was not the stained pine shelves that I cherished, but the father who made them. Take the sawhorses that my father used to build the shelves. It was not the battered pine sawhorses we prized, but the grandfather who built them and used them for his trade. The charity and hope and utility of the sawhorses and the shelves are what we loved, not the things themselves.
The same, I think, is true of books. Had we come of age in the scroll era, we would be just as resistant to the codex. But here we are, creatures of the book looking for new homes on Web sites and Kindles. The charity and hope of the stories we love are still there in their digital equivalents. Telling a story, communicating an idea, capturing an emotion: these are all possible with words whatever their format.
Recent Dish on bookshops here and here.
(Photo of The Last Bookstore, described by Cep as “equal parts mausoleum, shrine, and warehouse,” by Scott Garner)
Patrik Jonsson wonders if legalization will catch on below the Mason-Dixon line:
[L]ook a little closer at Dixie’s denizens and one sees small but potent signs of a legalization groundswell, in part fueled by the South’s unique contributions to marijuana culture and prohibition. In Texas and all over the South, there are a lot Willie Nelson-style social and cultural “outlaw” attitudes, all of which overlap with Ron Paul libertarianism. … More critically, the South is one of the country’s premier pot growing grounds, with Kentucky and Tennessee surpassing northern California in marijuana tonnage each harvest. Evidence also suggests that it’s used recreationally as much in the South as in other corners of the country.
The Dish 