Erwin Chemerinsky, hired then fired last week as Dean for the new law school at UC-Irvine, has accepted a renewed offer from the school to be its inaugural leader. The new dean has these words for his colleagues at Duke:

It is with excitement and sadness that I am writing to tell you that I have accepted the position to be the founding dean of the Donald Bren School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. After meeting with Chancellor Michael Drake at length this weekend, I accepted his renewed offer. He provided me the greatest possible assurance of academic freedom for the dean and all faculty.

It has been one of the strangest and most difficult weeks of my life. I cannot possibly express my thanks for all of the support that I received from the law school’s faculty, administrators, and students. I am sad to be leaving this wonderful supportive community, though excited about the new challenges ahead.

Given the uproar surrounding Drake's withdrawal of the original offer, this was just about the only way the University could save face and open on time.

[WSJ Law Blog] Breaking News: Chemerinsky Accepts Irvine’s Renewed Offer

From Brian Leiter's Law School Reports:

About a week ago, Erwin Chemerinsky, the well-known constitutional law scholar at Duke, signed a contract to be the inaugural Dean of the new law school at the University of California at Irvine.

Yesterday, the Chancellor of the University of Cailfornia at Irvine flew to Durham and fired Chemerinsky, saying that he had not been aware of how Chemerinsky's political views would make him a target for criticism from conservatives.

Inappropriate political influences aside, how on earth does a university chancellor get all the way through an interview process with Erwin Chemerinsky and not know that he'd be criticized by conservatives? Seriously.

[Brian Leiter's Law School Reports] New UC Irvine Law School Hires Chemerinsky as Dean, Then Fires Him for Political Reasons

The newest issue of the online magazine The Complete Lawyer poses the question, "What Can Law Schools Do Better?" In the magazine's lead article, Roy Stuckey, Professor of Clinical Legal Education at the University of South Carolina School of Law, sums up one of the biggest problem facing law schools:

In March, 2007, two reports on U.S. legal education were published, each following five years of study and employing very different methodologies. Yet their recommendations were essentially identical. Both concluded that law schools overemphasize teaching legal analysis and doctrinal knowledge, and virtually ignore teaching professional skills and values. Law schools, the reports advocated, should broaden their educational objectives and make greater use of experiential and context-based learning in order to improve the preparation of students for practice.

Stuckey should know: he was the lead author of one of the reports.

The theme of experiential and context-based learning spills over into the other articles, each authored by a law school dean or program director, which summarize the efforts of several law schools to improve their student's education. For example, Larry Kramer, Dean of Stanford Law School, speaks on his institution's initiatives:

Our first initiative is to begin teaching law students how to solve problems. How should we do that? After all, problem solving isn’t a generic skill: there’s not one set of techniques applicable to everything. It depends on the problem, and the problems differ depending on the client or kind of client. So that’s the first initiative: teaching students to think like clients as well as like lawyers. And this takes us to interdisciplinary education. Because what does the rest of the University do other than train the clients? What are they doing at the business school and the medical school and the engineering school and in economics and so forth? These schools and departments are training the people our graduates will work with and for, and we need to teach our students to understand what they do and to be able to work with them.

Dean Kramer mentions three other initiatives currently being undertaken at Stanford: international law, experiential learning and a focus on values.

The magazine includes similar articles by Lisa A. Kloppenberg (Dean of the University of Dayton School of Law), Donald J. Polden (Dean of the Santa Clara University School of Law), Daisy Hurst Floyd (Dean of Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law) and Kenneth R. Margolis (Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law)

University of Virginia law librarian Michelle Morris made an interesting proposal recently in the Yale Law Journal Pocket Part:

Our law students are more tech-savvy than ever. Unfortunately, they occasionally lack sense. Some of them simply fail to realize that we—professors, bar examiners, and law firms—see material they post online. Others make a game out of being intentionally, but anonymously, offensive. To avoid further injury to the reputation of our law schools and the legal profession, we must create incentives for the former students to consider consequences, and a reasonable chance that the latter students can be “caught”—i.e., tied to their online personas. To accomplish both ends, I propose that we request, in law school and bar applications, a three-year history of online aliases and related information.

In developing her argument, Morris refers to an incident involving AutoAdmit.com in which a UC Berkeley law student posted comments about plans for a Virginia Tech copycat shooting spree at Hastings College of Law. Hastings canceled classes and evacuated the law school as a result of this threat. UC Berkeley recommended expulsion for the student involved.

In the spring of 2006 I wrote about the potential problems law students might encounter due to "anonymous" online behavior, albeit in a far less dangerous context:

A time is coming when no employer will hire someone without first searching for that person on MySpace. A student can be professional and likable throughout the entire interview process, but if her MySpace profile is filled with "loud comments, loud music, and all around bluster," a managing partner might very well think twice about hiring her. If a student brags about his excessive drinking, an HR director may not want to take a risk on him in a profession already riddled with substance abuse problems. Everyone knows that people are usually on their best behavior in job interviews. By searching out a candidate's MySpace profile, a law firm administrator can see what that person might be like when her guard is down. And that can often be far more important than her GPA.

In another post I linked to a news story about the University of South Florida's attempts to educate incoming students about the possible unintended consequences of their online personas:

During orientation and in the University's code of conduct, school officials remind students just how a not-so-positive website could affect life after college.

"In the future, when they're looking for a job, and the employer has seen whatever kind of picture and statements are available, you can hurt yourself, people need to be aware, whatever they put up will be available."

Morris's proposal is the next logical consequence. In the case of bar admissions, where a thorough background check is sometimes necessary, the proliferation of online pseudonyms makes true thoroughness a challenge. I'm not sure how quickly state bars will implement required disclosure of online aliases, but it's definitely a matter of "When," not "If."

[Yale L.J. Pocket Part] The Legal Profession, Personal Responsibility, and the Internet

The 2008 edition of the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools is now online. The detailed data and search functionality allows users to "search for the right law school for you using criteria that you select (e.g., employment rates after graduation, bar passage rate, size of faculty, student body breakdown, tuition, etc.)."

(via Law Librarian Blog)

Some great sessions at the CALI conference. Personally I didn't get to Tom's presentation but did see a couple today that are worth commenting on.

Logfiles 101: Lies, Dammed Lies, and Statistics was interesting and had some good new ideas. Overall one impression I came away with is a dislike for Google Analytics. Certainly there are plenty of things to be not terribly thrilled about with Analytics but it seems this point of view overlooks one of the most important elements of web analysis in general. If you don't do it, all the log files in the world aren't worth much. So many times the perfect becomes the enemy of the good and this is completely true of analytics. I've written elsewhere about the benefits I see in using Google Analytics.

CALI for Undergraduates and for Transition to Law School by professors Pollman, Shoben and Hays, all of UNLV, presents some excellent ideas for helping undergraduates in preparing for law school. Schools can license CALI for other departments (in this case Political Science) for very reasonable rates (i.e. $250).

A new organization of students from the nation's law schools are asking large firms to change the conditions under which new associates work. Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession, which consists of about 125 students from around the country, recently sent out an email articulating its Principles. That message went to representatives at firms in the AmLaw 100, a ranking of the nation's largest law firms based on gross revenue. An excerpt...

We are all familiar with the escalation of associate salaries and billable hours, as well as
the problems it causes. We intend to bring this escalation to a close. We will use the Principles
for a Renewed Legal Profession, enclosed, to determine our employment decisions as we enter
the legal profession. We recognize that changes in work structures come with an economic cost:
we are willing to be paid less in exchange for a better working life. Our Principles revolve
around these core themes:

• Making concrete steps towards a transactional billing system
• Reducing maximum billable hour expectations for partnership
• Implementing balanced hours policies that work
• Making work expectations clear

I'm curious to see if this effort has any substantial impact. After all, there are already plenty of jobs available for attorneys who want to work fewer hours and make less money. Those jobs just don't happen to exist at the nation's largest law firms. Is there any real economic incentive for these firms to comply with the groups principles? I suspect that the high demand for these prestigious if backbreaking jobs will ensure that few firms take the group's letter seriously. Until ALL top graduates refuse to take these jobs, conditions won't improve.

[WSJ.com Law Blog] You Say You Want a Big-Law Revolution (via Law School Innovation)

Today's Washington Post includes a profile of Kiwi Camara, an aspiring law professor who enrolled in Harvard Law School at age 16. Now 22, Camara recently withdrew his application to teach at George Mason University following the revelation that he used a racist phrase in a law school paper...

During Camara's first year at Harvard Law School in 2002, he fueled a controversy when he wrote racist remarks in a voluminous summary of a 1948 Supreme Court decision that barred restrictive covenants based on race. He then posted the writing on a Web site designed to help other law students.

In the five years since he wrote the racist phrase, it has surfaced from campus to campus, job interview to job interview -- a predicament that raises a broader question perfectly fit for these Google times: What's the appropriate standard for judging a teenager years later?

A tough question, particularly in light of the fact that Camara was already enrolled in an Ivy League law school at the time. Should he be held to a higher standard than other 16 year olds? Or should all 16 year olds be held equally accountable several years down the road. Tough call.

[Washington Post] Racist Writing as a Teen Haunted GMU Candidate

Washington nonprofit organization Equal Justice Works has created an interactive guide to public service opportunities at U.S. law schools...

The E-Guide to Public Service at America's Law Schools is a free
interactive online resource that provides a broad range of information
about public interest programs and curricula at 116 law schools.[...]

The E-Guide details how the nation's law schools are preparing the next
generation of lawyers. It provides comparable information on a range of key factors such as:

-- Availability of clinical and externship programs

-- Number of staff dedicated to administering public service programs

-- Loan repayment assistance for graduates who enter public service.

Newsweek.com hosts the guide on its website.

Appellate litigator Howard J. Bashman shares his experience working with the University of Virginia's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic in a column for Law.com...

I recently had the opportunity to consult with several law school U.S. Supreme Court clinics on behalf of a pro bono client of mine who had received an unfavorable ruling from the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in a case involving an issue that had a reasonable prospect of U.S. Supreme Court review.[...]

The UVA clinic drafted very persuasive papers to be filed in the case, and I was provided with the proposed filings sufficiently in advance of the deadlines to allow me to offer meaningful substantive comments and suggestions. The case presented the U.S. Supreme Court with a 13 to 12 division among state courts of last resort over whether a grandparent had to prove harm or potential harm to the child before a court could order grandparent visitation over the objection of a fit parent.

The Supreme Court eventually denied certiorari on Bashman's case and never actually heard the appeal.

[Law.com] A User's Guide to Law School Supreme Court Clinics