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- The Two Recent Law School Graduates Who Ran This Place

A proposed partnership with the University of California could pipeline local students to their brand-new innovative law school and increase the chances that graduates move here to practice law.

Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and District Court of Guam Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood said they were both excited about forming a partnership that could benefit students on either side of the Pacific.

“Nothing has been thought through or decided so I’m just suggesting possibilities,” Chemerinsky said yesterday. “Guam doesn’t have a law school itself, but we could create a program to admit students from Guam to our law school.”

Tydingco-Gatewood said the University of California could allow its students to earn credits by working at the District Court of Guam.

Students who worked in Guam for a semester would be more likely to return here after they graduated, she said.

Chemerinsky was the keynote speaker at the District Court of Guam Annual District Conference yesterday. About two hundred members of Guam’s legal community packed into a ballroom to hear him speak.

[Guam PDN]

On the night of June 9-10 in 2006, three prisoners held at the Guantánamo prison’s Camp Delta died under mysterious circumstances. Military authorities responded by quickly ordering media representatives off the island and blocking lawyers from meeting with their clients. The first official military statements declared the deaths not just suicides — but actually went so far as to describe them as acts of “asymmetrical warfare” against the United States.

Now a 58-page study prepared by law faculty and students at Seton Hall University in New Jersey starkly challenges the Pentagon’s claims. It notes serious and unresolved contradictions within a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) report — which was publicly released only in fragmentary form, two years after the fact — and declares the military’s internal investigation an obvious cover-up. The only question is: of what?

Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, who directed the study, said in an interview that “there are two possibilities here. Either the investigation is a cover-up of gross dereliction of duty, or it is a cover-up of something far more chilling. More than three years later we do not know what really happened.” (Read a Q&A with Denbeaux: “‘The Most Innocent Explanation Is That This Is Gitmo Meets Lord Of The Flies’”.)

[Huffington Post]

One of the nation’s most out-spoken advocates for health care reform brought her message to Raleigh on Saturday.

Elizabeth Edwards says Americans are suffering because of a broken system, Edwards spoke at Campbell Law School, telling the crowd there that people who are sick should be able to get treatment.

She also went on to blame insurance companies who have high administrative costs and exclude pre-existing conditions.

She says that her battle with cancer now puts her in the pre-existing condition category but that she is doing better than expected.

“I am. I’m doing very well, just went to the doctor this week and things, ah, look good. So all those doomsayers from two and half years ago, I hope that they’re going to have to erase some of the words that they wrote,“ Edwards said.

Edwards says she is confident that lawmakers will pass some sort of health care reform.

She just wants it to give good coverage to everyone.

[WNCT]

Faculty dissent is bubbling up across Suffolk University, weeks after the furor over its president’s $1.5 million compensation – more than four times the national average for top college administrators – thrust the school into the national spotlight.

More than 70 percent of the law school faculty approved a motion during Thursday’s faculty meeting raising questions about the way the university is governed. The motion, relayed to the college’s board of trustees, expressed concern that President David Sargent’s “excessive’’ compensation has demoralized students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

The negative publicity over the pay package, they said, had harmed the Beacon Hill school’s reputation and its ability to raise money and attract strong applicants, criticism that the board chairman says is unfair and has dealt “a hell of a blow to Sargent.’’

Professors in Suffolk’s business school, the college of arts and sciences, and school of art and design have also begun to complain, according to several faculty members. Law professors say they would like better communication from trustees about key decisions and believe there should be term limits for board members.

[Boston Globe]

A University of Connecticut School of Law moot courtroom was a fitting setting last month, as consumer activist, politician and lawyer Ralph Nader sought to put the legal profession on trial.

Warrantless eavesdropping, the war in Iraq, corporate wrongdoing — Nader is a man with quite a few bones to pick. But his chief complaint was that America’s lawyers have done too little to stand in the way of government policies he labeled unconstitutional. He noted the strong reaction of Pakistan’s lawyers last year when that country’s leader threatened the integrity of its justice system.

“Did you see our beloved profession up in arms here?” Nader asked. “Lawyers in Pakistan were marching. Where were our lawyers?”

The UConn law school chapters of the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild brought Nader, a Winsted native, to Hartford. The event drew roughly 100 law students, as Nader urged future jurists to observe a duty beyond zealous representation of their clients. “A lawyer’s role is to look out for the administration of justice,” he said.

Nader placed much of the blame on America’s system of legal education, which he said has spent too much time teaching substantive law and too little encouraging students to think critically about why the law is what it is.

Nader attended law school in the 1950s at Harvard — an institution with which one law student in attendance said Nader seems to have “a love-hate relationship.”

“We were told we were being taught by the best and brightest law professors the world could produce,” Nader said. “And if you doubted [they were the best and brightest], you could just ask them.”

But Nader said his legal education failed to address deeper issues behind substantive law. His Corporations Law professor assigned case upon case from Delaware, Nader recalled, without explaining so many companies incorporate in that state because of its corporate-friendly laws. Law students must be made aware of corporate influences on the legal system, he said.

[Law.com]

Brooklyn Law School, which has over a hundred years of proud history as a local institution in Downtown Brooklyn, is enjoying new prestige in recent years among American law schools. To Dean Joan Gottesman Wexler, it’s long overdue.

“We think that our reputation is beginning to catch up with reality, which is that we have fabulous students and a faculty that’s as good as any in the country,” Dean Wexler said during a recent interview.

However, Brooklyn Law School (BLS) has a somewhat precarious position in the world of law schools. Its alumni have a reputation around the city of being highly capable attorneys, and many members of the Brooklyn judiciary studied there. But it’s not always the first choice for undergraduate students at the nation’s top colleges.

“Sometimes it’s difficult for us because people look at our name and think what is this, it’s a local school,” Wexler acknowledged. “We don’t have a basketball team. Schools that do well in basketball — their ranking goes up.”

Dean Wexler was of course referring to the well-known U.S. News & World Reports rankings of the best law schools in the country. BLS had risen in recent years to 58, but was most recently ranked at 61 out of the 200 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association that are listed. It’s never cracked the first-tier top 50.

One third-year student who had recently chosen to study at Tulane Law School over Brooklyn Law spoke to the Eagle about the process:

[Brooklyn Eagle]

Given the state of the legal economy, I don’t have a problem with grade inflation at top law schools. The job market is terrible enough as it is. If an extra (inflated and totally BS) third of a grade helps a student get a job right now, I think that is fine. Whatever, sometimes you have to “juke the stats,” and I understand that.

But it’s not cool when schools institute grade inflation secretly and hope nobody will notice. It’s not cool when schools try to pass off grade inflation as something other than grade inflation. Law schools have to do what they have to do, but there is no reason to pretend that everybody is stupid.

At Harvard Law School and at Georgetown University Law Center, the administrations have decided that their students need things to be a little easier. But neither law school seems willing to admit that the economy played a role in their sudden embrace of grade reform.

[Above the Law]

After a feasibility study and an external evaluation, Binghamton University is one step closer to having a law school affiliated with the institution.

“We are waiting for a written report from the external evaluators,” said Mary Ann Swain, provost and vice president for academic affairs at BU. “Both the State University of New York system administration and State Department of Education require this external evaluation.”

According to Swain, once this written report is received, it will be included with a formal proposal and sent to the system administration and Department of Education.

“Reviewers have not given us an exact date [for when the written report will be complete], but we are hoping for later this month,” she said.

According to Gail Glover, spokeswoman for BU, in their exit interview, the evaluators indicated they support BU’s efforts in creating a law school.

There are many steps for approval that the law school must go through before it can become a part of the University.

“The law school was a big plan [since before 2000],” said James Van Voorst, vice president for administration at BU. “It’s not like somebody woke up one morning and went, ‘Hey, lets have a law school.’ We’ve had consultants in, we’ve looked at the need, we’ve looked at the program and budget from all different angles, and that’s the way we’ve worked it.”

Last year, the planning started as a campus-based initiative and was approved by the provost’s office and the campus administrators.

[BU Pipe Dream]

It’s been 18 months in the mapping, measuring, color coding and other planning, but moving day for the University of Memphis Law Library is finally here.

Gary Thomas and Oscar Martineztake shelves of books into the new University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law on Front Street on Tuesday.
Actually, that would be “moving days” since it involves relocating some 200,000 books — nearly 5 miles of books and materials in all — to the law school’s new Downtown building on Front Street.

“The physical move is really just the tip of the iceberg,” said law library director D. R. Jones, an associate dean for Information Resources and assistant law professor. “It’s really just the culmination of the planning that we’ve done and hiring a company that specializes in the moving of libraries. It’s going very well and very quickly.”

Movers began Tuesday and aim to have the job completed by next Saturday, well before Jan. 11. That’s the date when the school’s 400-plus students and 50 faculty members move into what was once home of the U.S. Customs House, Court House and Post Office.

A $42-million renovation has turned the aging building into a state-of-the art law school that, at 140,000 square feet, is more than twice the size of the old school.

The plan has been to coordinate the

library move with the schedules of both the construction crews and the law students.

“We’re in exams now, so they’re not really using the library materials,” said Jones, who spearheaded a similar move when she was at Case Western Reserve School of Law in Cleveland. “We have isolated one area of the library and I’m sending out e-mails every day to let them know what’s moving and when: This is the area that’s noisy; this is the good area to go study. So far, we’re doing fine.”

[Commercial Appeal]