Update: What's in a name?

In the spirit of throwing good money after bad, South Texas College of Law has decided to double-down and fight the lawsuit filed by UH.

I can't think of a good reason to do so - other than so much time and money has been sunk in this flight of idiocy that no one has the good sense to pull the plug on it.

Anyway, here's South Texas College of Law's response to the lawsuit.

  STCL Press Release by Paul B. Kennedy

What's in a name?

The other day I received a letter from something called the Houston College of Law. The letter stated that Houston College of Law was the new name for South Texas College of Law (the law school I attended). The letter also contained the usual gibberish about strategic plans, mission statements and the like.

Apparently someone along the line decided that the name of the school needed to be changed. Never mind that South Texas has a sterling reputation when it comes to advocacy competitions. Gerald Treece has put together one of the best advocacy programs in the entire country.

But someone with a market research firm decided that didn't matter. And, to top it off, that firm decided that the scales of justice should be white against a red background. Hmmm. Doesn't that color scheme sound familiar?

So we are supposed to forget about 96 years of history and pretend that a law school is just as much a commodity as soda, shoes, cars and phones. Not that law schools are paragons of virtue as they have marketed their schools without a thought to what fate awaits their graduates. Apparently that federally guaranteed student loan money is just too much to ignore.

However, as Lee Corso would say "Wait just a minute!"

On Monday the Board of Regents for the University of Houston filed suit in federal court against South Texas College of Law arguing that the name and color change is a trademark infringement and designed to confuse the public and seeking an injunction to prevent the name change.

I hope UH is successful with its suit. I hope that South Texas has to crawl back downtown with its tail between its legs. Allowing a marketing firm to dictate the name of a school is beyond ridiculous and every member of the board of South Texas the participated in this process and that voted to make the name change violated their fiduciary responsibility to the students, faculty and donors. This exercise in stupidity will result in untold legal fees and expenses that would have been much better used to enhance the education of the law school's students.

The President and Dean of the law school, Donald J. Guter, should do what Roy Hodgson did after England lost to Iceland yesterday - resign.

I should probably go down and buy as much gear as I can with the new name on it because once the court rules against South Texas, all that merchandise could beome collectible - or at least be a conversation starter.

See also:

"University of Houston Law Center files suit against unranked law school," Above the Law (6/27/16)

"UH files suit over Houston law school name change" Houston Chronicle (6/27/16)

It can't possibly be his fault, can it?

And then along comes Martin Odemena to make lawyers (or wannabe lawyers) look ridiculous again.

According to this piece on the ABA Journal's website, Mr. Odemena is a former law student who was still a bit upset over the D he received in his contracts class. He was so upset, in fact, that he filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts School of Law alleging that the school's decision cost him over $100,000.

It seems that Mr. Odemena decided to blow off days in which his contracts professor, Joseph Devlin, gave quizzes in class. Mr. Odemena understood, incorrectly so, that those quizzes wouldn't count toward his final grade. The result was a D in contracts class.

The grade led to Mr. Odemena's suspension from school which, according to his lawsuit, made it impossible for him to transfer to another school. And, just like that, another promising career in the legal field went up in smoke.

Okay. I get it. Mr. Odemena really, really wanted to be a lawyer. He flamed out in law school. He was upset because he wouldn't get that fancy BMW he had his eyes set on. He wouldn't be able to impress the ladies with his tales of carrying briefcases and doing meaningless work for a big law firm. Surely it wasn't his fault his dream had gone poof.

On the other hand, he avoided carrying a whole lot of debt around with him after he got his ticket to ride. He didn't get sucked down into the drudgery that BigLaw has become now that the bean counters are tracking the rate of profit from every task. He didn't have to live with the anxiety that he would be cut loose when he failed to make the partner track in a few years.

Let's face it, law school is a mechanism for weeding out those folks who think they want to be lawyers. Mr. Odemena was looking for the easy way out. If the quizzes didn't count he could take it easy during the term and then get down to business toward the end of the semester when it counted. What does that tell you about how he would do his job once he got to put Esquire after his name?

And if he didn't get to be a lawyer afterward? So freaking what. None of us are given a guarantee of what we're going to do after school. That's not how life works. The bar down the street is full of folks who didn't get the job they yearned for. You can either get over it or you can let it drag you down the street of self-pity and self-absorption.

Mr. Odemena didn't get to be a lawyer. The legal world won't miss him. There are already too many of us anyway. Instead of pouring more and more new lawyers out on the streets year after year, law schools need to do a better job of weeding out the folks who don't need to be lawyers.

And that's exactly what the Massachusetts School of Law did.

A little cognitive dissonance on the side, please

One thing you can't accuse the State Bar of Texas of is having a post-modern sensibility. There's little sense of self-awareness and not a hint of irony in the monthly Texas Bar Journal. Maybe that's because the State Bar has always been by and for the white shoe firms in Houston and Dallas.

It certainly doesn't help that all of us who practice in Texas are blackmailed into joining the State Bar. Fail to pay your annual dues and you'll find yourself unable to practice law legally in the Lone Star State. With a captive audience (and big firms that pay the dues of all its lawyers), there is no incentive for the State Bar to take any other perspective other than what's good for Baker & Botts (or feel free to substitute any BigLaw firm in its place) is good for the profession.

I don't need to tell you what a colossally illogical statement that is.

In the current issue of the Texas Bar Journal we hear from Heather Venrick, a third-year law student at SMU's Dedman School of Law. She's feeling a bit blue because she thinks SMU didn't quite tell her the truth about the state of the legal profession. She was told to keep up her grades, get into law review, join a bunch of student groups and clerk for a variety of firms. Such things, she was told, would help her get that dream job.

Only there is no dream job.

She was sold the typical law school white wash job. BigLaw isn't hiring. Ever fewer students are walking into a job that puts them in a BMW and a nice zip code. As unrestrained capitalism has forced its nose under the tent, firms are more and more concerned with the bottom line than providing service to their clients. Add that to the glut of graduates from law school and you get a capitalist's wet dream - a desperate work force with far more people than jobs. Even the most ardent disciple of Ayn Rand knows what that means.

Of course it wouldn't be the State Bar without an upbeat (unrealistic) attitude, now, would it? Despite her inability to find her dream job, Ms. Venrick is still happy she decided to pursue her dream of becoming a lawyer.

Ms. Venrick might want to read The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis, a book that I reviewed back last April. In fact, if you're considering law school, you need to pick up a copy and read it. If you choose to enter the legal profession, you need to do it with eyes wide open.

But if there is a shortage of jobs and a surplus of applicants, why not just shut that spigot down and reduce the supply of new lawyers? That would be the logical thing to do, wouldn't it?

Only there's money to be found in operating a law school. Students are forced to sit for three years when everyone will acknowledge that that's at least one semester more than necessary. Students are charged an arm and a leg to attend law school and pay for the academic Shangri-La it has become for those on the tenure track (maybe not so much for the ever increasing number of adjunct faculty). High tuition rates are subsidized by the government with easy money being doled out to those reaching for the brass ring. The loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy so the schools and banks are guaranteed their pound of flesh.

And into that breach has stepped the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law - the newest law school in Texas. And, without even a hint of irony, the Texas Bar Journal ran a fluff interview with the dean of the new school right after Ms. Venrick's attempt at venting.

We find out in the course of the interview that UNT's mission is to provide a "top-notch" legal education at a bargain price for those who might not be able to get into one of the state's other law schools. Now I'm all for expanding opportunity but who the fuck are we kidding? There is no market for another 120 lawyers a year in Texas.

The only beneficiaries to this newest law school will be the University of North Texas who will be counting the cash rolling in thanks to subsidized student loans and the BigLaw firms who will see even more downward pressure on wages.

The addition of even more new lawyers on the market will only serve to get us closer to the end of the race to the bottom. More new lawyers than the market can bear means more lawyers walking down the street wearing hot pants looking for that next new lead dangling from the marketeers' back pocket.

But it will also mean more money for UNT, the State Bar of Texas and the ABA -- and isn't that what it's all about anyway?

I've got a theory about that

The other day Scott Greenfield pointed out that law schools are failing their students. And he had the bar exam pass rates to prove it. He asked just what is being taught in law school these days.

The problem, according to Mr. Greenfield, is that the academy is out of touch. Law profs across this country are so caught up in their own esoteric research and scholarship that they have neglected to teach impressionable young minds how to be a lawyer.

There is no reason for the high failure rates when it comes to the bar exam. The problem can't be put solely at the feet of law students who have to pay to take an additional bar review course after three years of school in order to pass the test. The problem is either that the modern law school curriculum is not rigorous enough to prepare students for the exam or that law schools aren't weeding out the students who aren't cutting it (and won't cut it).

Over at Doug Berman's Sentencing Law and Policy, you can see firsthand the disconnect between the academy and the practice of law in the trenches. Richard Frase, a law prof at the University of Minnesota Law School, has just published a book called Just Sentencing: Principles and Procedures for a Workable System.

In a series of guest posts on Mr. Berman's blawg, Mr. Frase summarizes the arguments in his book. He likes to talk about sentencing theories. Such things as retributive justice, crime control and "just desserts." That is all well and good. It makes for a thick book and a heavily annotated law review article. But it bears little of no relevance to what goes on in the trenches.

No one in the criminal courthouse walks around espousing their sentencing theory. A prosecutor writes a number on the cover of the file and expects our client to accept it and thank him profusely. Now that number is generally just a starting point - and the defense attorney counters with a different number - or idea.

If we can't get the case dismissed we want the lowest number possible or a way of keeping our client out of prison. The prosecutor is bound by "office policy" and what the judge will accept. The negotiations are governed by which side has more to lose by going to trial. Instead of a book on sentencing theories, criminal defense lawyers would be much better off reading books on poker theory.

While sentencing theory might make for nice conversation at a cocktail party or a reception, it's application in real life is pretty much non-existent. Instead of being able to argue the finer points of restorative justice theory, a young attorney would be better served had he been taught how to investigate a case and how to spot weaknesses in them.

Scholarship is good, but law schools mustn't lose sight on the most important part of their mission - to teach a classroom of young men and women how to be a lawyer.

In defense of learning

About two weeks ago, Scott Greenfield penned a wonderful essay in defense of algebra. His post was in response to an op/ed in the New York Times proclaiming there was no longer any reason to teach school children higher level math.

Now I wasn't the biggest fan of algebra, trigonometry and calculus when I was in high school. I got off on the wrong foot with algebra in middle school and struggled to catch up. I was quite happy at UT when I finished the one and only calculus class I had to take.

Of course now I lament my lack of knowledge about higher level math. After reading about chaos theory and economic theory I wish I had a more solid background in math. But, such is life.

Just the other day I saw a piece on NPR's website that seemed quite appropriate given the subject matter in Simple Justice. The thrust of the article was whether the piss poor job we're doing teaching our children proper grammar is ruining the English language.

The article seemed to take the side of the squishy academics who preach the whole word method and other ways of teaching language that don't require the rigid adherence to rules. And, in the long run, the lack of fundamental grammar knowledge isn't the death knell of the language - we can still understand what our children are saying even when they are too young to know the rules of construction. But there is a more fundamental issue at stake - and it's an issue that spans the gap between language and math.

Algebra and calculus teach us different ways to look at numbers and at the world around us. They take our concept of numbers as concrete objects and force us to think of numbers as concepts. We are taught various theorems and postulates that we piece together as syllogisms. It's a language all its own.

But learning that language teaches us how to analyze other concepts critically and logically. We learn how to put together arguments to support our hypotheses.

I think we would all agree that it takes a certain level of intelligence to be able to work through differential equations and conduct a regression analysis - but those topics don't usually come up during an ordinary day. The way a person speaks, however, does make an impression.

When someone makes a glaring grammatical error it just grates on the ears. When someone says "myself" instead of "me" it makes me want to scream. When I go back and reread a brief or a motion I end up trying to get rid of all the split infinitives.

How ironic it is that non-native English speakers can actually speak the language better than those of us who grew up in these United States.

These arguments against teaching higher level math and good grammar are emblematic of a deeper theoretical war. What is the purpose of education? Do our schools and universities exist to train people to earn a living as adults or do they exist to teach us how to learn and how to think critically? And what on earth is the problem of learning solely for the sake of learning? Does everything we do have to be with some end in mind?

Which brings me to one of Mr. Greenfield's pet peeves - the world of the lawprof. Yes, our law schools don't prepare students for the day-to-day reality of the practice of law. Yes, the tuition charged at most schools is beyond ridiculous. But the purpose of law school is to teach aspiring young lawyers how to think like lawyers, to provide young lawyers with a theoretical framework with which to view the world.

In the old days aspiring lawyers read the law under the tutelage of an experienced lawyer. They read treatises on evidence and property and whatever else was in the law library. They learned the theory so they could sit for the bar. At the same time they learned what a lawyer does and how to do it from their tutor.

That is the failing with our system of legal education today. But let's not get all utilitarian and turn law schools into vocational schools. And let's not turn our elementary and secondary schools into programs that do nothing more than train young people to sit behind a desk and do what they're told to do.

A valuable life lesson

Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University in Houston requires first year students to maintain a 2.0 grade point average to remain in law school. That's a C. It's average. According to the bell curve, about 70% of students should be in that range.

If you can't maintain a 2.0 it doesn't mean you're an idiot or incompetent. It just means you might not be cut out to be a lawyer. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. There are more lawyers out there right now than our society can digest and law schools keep pumping them out left and right.

No one has the right to be an attorney. We are all free to choose what we want to do to earn a living - but we aren't all free to do what we want. Sometimes our lives don't work out the way we planned. That's one of life's lessons. It's a lesson we should learn as children.

My daughters (especially my youngest) hates to be told she can't do something. She'll pout. She might go back to her room, hop on her bed and cry. But, even though she doesn't handle it well now, she's learning a valuable lesson.

A lesson that Jonathan Chan and Karla Ford either didn't learn or chose to ignore. Mr. Chan and Ms. Ford were unceremoniously dumped from Thurgood Marshall because they couldn't maintain a 2.0 GPA in their first year. Both Mr. Chan and Ms. Ford received D's in Contracts II. A D is worth one grade point. The article doesn't tell us what their grades were in any of their other classes, but a random D shouldn't have knocked them below the magical line. All it would have taken was a B in another class to offset that D. But I'm guessing there were a lot more C's and D's than A's and B's on their transcripts.

Rather than take their setback as adults and chalk it up to a learning experience, Mr. Chan and Ms. Ford filed suit in federal court arguing that the D's they received in their contracts course were arbitrary because the professor, Shelley Smith, had to fit the grade distribution into a rigid curve.

"When you believe that you are doing fairly well and you get a grade you feel you don't deserve, it's devastating," said Ford, 27, who has bachelor's and master's degrees in administration of justice from TSU. "There is a lot of embarrassment and shame. It took a toll."

According to the law school, grades in first-year courses are determined by combining a student's in-class performance with the result of a multiple choice exam. Let me digress if I may. A multiple choice exam? Whatever happened to the good ol' blue book and issue spotting? Class participation? How much of a gimme is that?

"Coming from an Asian family, failing is a tough thing to bring up," said Chan, who has a bachelor's degree in administration and marketing from the University of Houston. "The only words I can think of are shameful and disgraceful."

Okay, I understand that Mr. Chan and Ms. Ford are disappointed. They spent some good money to attend school and they probably spent a good deal of time studying (though maybe not enough). I'm sure no one in the admission office told them that there was a possibility they could wash out after their first year. I'm sure no one told them that those high paying BigLaw jobs are scarce and that they were more likely to scratch and claw to eke out a living.

No one wants to hurt anyone's feelings so nobody tells you what should be obvious. Not everyone who enrolls in school walks out the back door with a diploma. Part of the rationale of law school is to weed out folks who aren't willing to put in the hours to make it through school.

No. Life didn't work out the way either Mr. Chan or Ms. Ford planned. But they can either accept it and more on or wallow in self pity and blame someone else for their woes.

Law schools doing a disservice by inflating grades

According to this article in today's New York Times, law schools are happily leading us down the path of academic fraud and dishonesty. As a result of the tight job market in BigLaw, law schools across the country are easing up on their grading standards or, as is the case with Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, arbitrarily adding to students' grade point averages.

In the last couple of days both Brian Tannebaum and Scott Greenfield have touched on the malaise some new lawyers are stewing in as a result of life not living up to their dreams, now we have law schools practicing a modern form of puffery to get their students hired by BigLaw so that the school can benefit by marketing themselves as the gateway to BigLaw.

The path to success, in any field or endeavor, is not to "dumb down" the task at hand -- the true path to success is to encounter obstacles, work your way through or around them and fight your way to the end. Juries don't care what your GPA was in law school, whether you were on law review, what your scored on your bar exam or for whom you work -- they care about the facts, your client and how hard you are willing to work on your client's behalf (and whether or not they like your client).

If you're a criminal defense attorney, you're expected to lose. The deck is stacked against you and you have to be willing to pick yourself up off the floor time and time again if you hope to be successful. How is grade inflation going to help you do that?