J Miracle posted:

I don't know what's worse, the fact that the professor still solicits public-policy debate or the fact that there are still 3Ls with a gunner mentality that actually engage in it.

terrorist ambulance posted:

Yeah what classes are you taking where the public policy debate is not more interesting than the subject material being discussed?

J Miracle posted:

Jesus I wish they had separate classes for 3Ls that cut the bullshit...my professors in both Evidence and Decedents & Estates persist with this "let's take a slow pass through the ENTIRE case" poo poo and its just painful.

sigmachiev posted:

FINALLY got a callback, V20 firm. Lets keep this ball rolling, we were doing relly good in this thread with jobs a few weeks ago.

Napoleon I posted:

Grats! Ours has been a mixed bag; I know people with between 0 and 9 more or less inclusive, but a TON of 0s and 1s.

I managed to swing 2 of my top 3 choices, but only have 4 total so I'm a little worried. Our last interviews were Friday, do more come out after this?

terrorist ambulance posted:

Yeah what classes are you taking where the public policy debate is not more interesting than the subject material being discussed?

Napoleon I posted:

Grats! Ours has been a mixed bag; I know people with between 0 and 9 more or less inclusive, but a TON of 0s and 1s.

I managed to swing 2 of my top 3 choices, but only have 4 total so I'm a little worried. Our last interviews were Friday, do more come out after this?

Red Bean Juice posted:

this is pretty much my oci experience so far

Red Bean Juice posted:

Roger_Mudd posted:

The only thing worse than the "thinking like a lawyer" meme is the idea that it will just "click" sometime during your first year.

JudicialRestraints posted:

Where are you going again?

Red Bean Juice posted:

Click here for the full 500x743 image.

diospadre posted:

You'll flip to the Posner one once you start thinking like a lawyer.

Red Bean Juice posted:

i drew them

Incredulous Red posted:

Do this instead of lawschool

Submit them to the ABA journal and see if they get run

diospadre posted:

You'll flip to the Posner one once you start thinking like a lawyer.

CaptainScraps posted:

Seriously. I lost it when I saw that one and then felt guilty for laughing at lawyer humor.

Incredulous Red posted:

Basically this is the litmus test to see if you've lost your soul yet

:thinkinglikealawyer:

Elotana posted:

So I thought I was starting at my firm after Labor Day and got a very nice call from the office manager explaining that it was actually the first of the month. How to avoid an awkward first day at work: don't show up!

entris posted:

Oh wow.

I knew a guy in law school who lost his summer associate position because of exactly that sort of thing - he thought he started on May X but it was really May Y, which was only like a few days later or something.

Dr. Mantis Toboggan posted:

Haha, I know what you meant, but it would be the cruelest of employers who would actually fire someone for showing up to start a few days early.

quote:

I’m reading a law review article: Scott L. Cummings, “Community Economic Development as Progressive Politics: Toward a Grassroots Movement for Economic Justice,” 54 Stan. L. Rev. 399. It’s a perfectly fine article; I have no complaint with the substance.

As some people know, law reviews are fanatical about footnotes. First of all, the typical article has more text in the footnotes than in the body. Second, there is a rigid, detailed system for citation format that is controlled by a few of the top law reviews and published in the Bluebook.

On page 424, there is this sentence: “As a result, the 1980s witnessed a significant decrease in the real wages of the poor [121], rising unemployment [122], and increased poverty and inequality [123].” The numbers in brackets are the footnotes.

Now, in most academic disciplines, if unemployment actually was rising in the 1980s, you don’t need a citation. That is, if it’s a well-known, easily verifiable fact, you don’t need to cite it, just like you don’t need to cite the fact that the population of the United States is bigger than it was two hundred years ago. But this is a law review article, so here’s the citation:

See Robert Pollin & Stephanie Luce, The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy 33-35 (1998); Robert Pollin, Anatomy of Clintonomics, 3 New Left Rev. (n.s.) 17, 29 (2000) (showing an unemployment rate of 7.1% under the Reagan and Bush Administrations).”

What’s wrong with this? Robert Pollin is a leading scholar on issues of labor economics and inequality, after all.

Well, if I were making a statement about changes in unemployment and I felt the need for a citation, I would cite one source, not two, and that one source would be the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the official unemployment figures. It seems strange that you would cite three passages in two pieces of academic research for a number that came from the U.S. government. That’s like citing two different published physics papers for Planck’s constant.

And if you actually go and look at the BLS statistics, you see that unemployment was not obviously increasing in the 1980s. Here is unemployment in the 1980s:



Pollin was right; unemployment did average 7.1 percent over the Reagan and Bush administrations. But Cummings was wrong; unemployment was not rising in the 1980s (except in the sophistic sense that unemployment went up during the 1981-82 recession, and hence the 1980s “witnessed . . . rising unemployment”). You can say a lot about unemployment in the 1980s. It was worse to be unemployed; not even the Reaganites would debate that, as that was the whole point. It was higher on average in the 1980s than in the 1970s (7.3% vs. 6.2%), but that’s because the economy shifted to a higher unemployment level in the second half of the 1970s, and stayed there until the late 1980s.

But at many law reviews, they only check the format of the citations, not the content. At the top law reviews, like Stanford, I believe they check the original sources to make sure the sources say what the author says that they say. But no one checks that what the author is saying is actually true. And that’s what matters.

Actually, this problem is endemic to the entire legal profession, including thousands of federal court opinions, where cases are routinely cited to support propositions that they don’t support. When you read a case and try to follow the citations, you get the feeling that it’s turtles all the way down . . . until you realize that some of the turtles aren’t even there, and the case is resting on nothing at all. But that will have to wait for another blog post, because I have to finish my reading.

Petey posted:

Loved this:

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/09/02/the-problem-with-footnotes/


Thought anyone involved in law review would love this. Reminds me of someone - I think it was Johnson or Krugman - commenting on a law and economics judge (want to say Easterbrook) who had this whole rational actor edifice cited to something that cited to something that cited to something that asserted it without offering evidence.

Citations are like the most wonderful shell game in the entire world if you are a duplicitous and/or lazy legal academic.

Petey posted:

Loved this:

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/09/02/the-problem-with-footnotes/

Dallan Invictus posted:

It's deliciously ironic that your citation points to a blog post that's no longer there (so thanks for quoting it.)

Petey posted:

Thought anyone involved in law review would love this.

Linguica posted:

A law review article could have nothing but citations to timecube.com

Linguica posted:

Yeah when I was on law review I quickly grew disillusioned when I realized that the citechecking bitch work entirely consisted of "is this in the proper Bluebook format / does the cited article say what the citation says it says?" and nothing about "is the cited article actually correct or verifiable?" A law review article could have nothing but citations to timecube.com and as long as it followed BB 11.1(f)(ii) or whatever it would be completely above board as far as any law review is concerned.

Baruch Obamawitz posted:

I was on ACLR at Georgetown, working on an article about immigrant cultural mores as a mitigating defense using the example of some custom among the southeast-Asian Hmong and using a particular criminal trial in America, except the author never cited anything saying that the defendant in that trial was himself Hmong only that he was Laotian, and I, of course, raised this as a concern to the editorial board and they fixed it so deal with it you baby.