Posts Tagged ‘Harvard’

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]

A quirk in Google’s Gmail system that identifies heavy loads of mail from one source as spam again afflicted Harvard users over Thanksgiving weekend, according to Jason Fuller, Harvard Law School’s Manager of Technology Support Services. For the second time this year, the Google spam flag appeared to cause significant delays in email delivery for users on the Harvard Law School and Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) networks whose Harvard email accounts forward to the Google email service, and for Gmail users waiting for emails from the Harvard network.

The nature of the problem meant that HLS technicians could not send an email to the HLS community, for fear of making the problem worse. News of the issue spread through social networks like Twitter and Facebook before it was resolved on Sunday afternoon. The same problem afflicted Harvard for a much longer period of time during the first week of October.

“This is indeed a frustrating situation because we have no direct control” over Google’s software, Fuller wrote in an email. “We want our students email infrastructure to work reliably.” The issue requires the HLS’ Information Technology Services department to work directly with Google to ensure that emails sent from its system are not really spam.

According to Fuller, this second slowdown has ITS looking for a permanent solution, but he said that the lack of transparency at Google meant that ITS lacked “any way to get further insight or visibility into Google’s policies/procedures surrounding forwarded email.”

[Harvard Law Record]

The latest round of financial readjustments hit Harvard Law School yesterday when Law School Dean Martha Minow announced a mix of cuts and expansions to programs that assist students interested in pursuing public interest careers.

In an e-mail to the student body, Minow announced the suspension of the Public Service Initiative, a program launched in 2008 that waives third-year tuition for students if they commit to five years of public service after graduation. The school also plans to decrease the amount of per-student funding for summer public interest work but will further expand loan repayment assistance for graduates.

In her e-mail, Minow wrote that all current students will be able to participate in the Public Service Initiative. However, it is unlikely that the program will be offered to future incoming classes, including students admitted this fall, Minow wrote.

Despite Minow’s announcement, Alexa Shabecoff, the Law School’s assistant dean for public service, said yesterday that the school is committed to having a program that incentivizes public service work. A committee has been formed to review the Public Service Initiative and will suggest a successor to the program in March of next year.

When the program was launched last fall, administrators were unsure how much student interest to expect. Yet, last year, over 110 first-year students indicated their interest in the program—50 percent more than the targeted number—according to then-Law School Dean Elena Kagan.

[Harvard Crimson]

The legal job market is dismal for third-year law students — even those at Harvard Law School. And so administrators at the school have created something of a job safety net in the form of a fellowship program for students who have exhausted other job options.

The Holmes Public Service Fellowship program, named for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., will provide as many as one dozen 2010 graduates with stipends of up to $35,000 to work in public interest law for one year. The fellowships will be available only to students who have proven that their attempts to land a job or fellowship have failed, said assistant dean for public service Alexa Shabecoff. Students who have offers from firms but have deferred start dates will not qualify.

“This targets those students who have tried and tried and tried to get a job or fellowship and just weren’t able to,” Shabecoff said. “In the past year, the job market has been particularly difficult.”

Applicants will have to document their attempts to land a job, and the fellowships won’t be awarded until April or May to allow them plenty of time to exhaust their options, Shabecoff said.

The law school will contribute as much as $400,000 to the program. The fellowships will be available both to students on the public interest law track and to those who intend to work at law firms but have been unable to secure an offer. Law firm-track students must demonstrate that they have experience in the public interest area in which they intend to work.

[NLJ]

The Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Team took first place at a national competition held in Puerto Rico by triumphing in the six-hour final round.

Only eight teams qualified for the invitation-only event, held between Oct. 31 and Nov. 1. All had won another national competition in recent years.

As in other trial advocacy competitions, team members simulated criminal trials by playing lawyers and witnesses. In two preliminary rounds, HLS beat law schools well-known for their trial advocacy programs. The team went undefeated by winning against Stetson University in the semifinal round, and against Barry University in the final.

The four-member team consisted of second-year law student Nneka I. Ukpai and third-year students Dominique D. Winters, Julian B. Thompson and John C. Quinn, who is a teaching fellow for Historical Study B-61, “The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice.”

The team was coached by Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Institute Deputy Director J. Soffiyah Elijah and Clinical Instructor Dehlia I. Umunna.

The team members credited their advisors for helping them win with just four weeks of preparation. “The coaches are beyond unbelievable,” Quinn said. “They were really good at creating this team environment and team atmosphere.”

Thompson said that the team succeeded because the members complemented one another. “Our team has four different people in the courtroom with distinctive styles and talents,” he said.

[Harvard Crimson]

Ralph Nader, the left-wing activist and frequent presidential contender, promoted his new book—“‘Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!’”—to an audience of mostly Harvard Law School students last Friday at HLS, his alma mater.

A prolific author of non-fiction works such as “Unsafe at Any Speed,” Nader attempts the genre of fiction for the first time in “‘Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!’” which was released in September.

The aim of the book—which Nader describes as being “practical utopian fiction” rather than a novel—is to describe a future that he sees as both bright and possible.

“I decided to write fiction because if I wrote it as non-fiction no one would believe me,” he said.

Nader’s protagonist is famed investor Warren E. Buffet. The plot describes the imaginary efforts of Buffet and a small coterie of other real-life elites to “take on the corporate goliaths” and “redirect the country toward long overdue changes,” Nader wrote in a recent piece on OpEdNews.com.

But Nader’s speech was not only a promotion for his new book. He used “‘Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!’” as both a call to today’s law students and as a means of discussing some of the larger leftist ideas with which he has long been associated.

While reminiscing about his own experience at the Law School—from which he graduated in 1958—Nader rejected what he called a commercial bias in the curriculum, which he connected with the recent bailouts on Wall Street.

[Harvard Crimson]

Acting on a dare, a drunk Harvard Law School grad allegedly set fire to a chapel yesterday that houses the remains of unidentified victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The perp — identified as 26-year-old Brian Schroeder — broke into Memorial Park near the corner of First Avenue and East 30th Street and set the blaze at around 9 am. The fire did not get to the remains, which are kept in climate-controlled containers awaiting advances in DNA technology that might allow them to be identified, but notes, photos, flowers, and other mementos inside the white-tented sanctuary were either stolen or burned. Schroeder turned himself in to police last night.

The facility is typically closed to everyone except for the families of 9/11 victims, so it’s unclear exactly how the suspect even got into the shrine. One of Schroeder’s relatives said the suspect — who moved to New York to pursue a job with a law firm — didn’t set the blaze because of political motives. “With all my experiences with [him], he didn’t have any radical agenda. Nothing but a good person,” the source told the Post. “It’s clearly out of his character and I’m sure he feels for the victims’ families.”

The bodies will eventually be moved to the World Trade Center Memorial, which is scheduled to be completed by Sept. 11, 2011 — that is, if it isn’t delayed again.

[Gothamist]