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Illinois Bar Ripoff
The February 2006 edition of the ABA's Student Lawyer Magazine features a directory of state bar exams. It's helpful, and it clarified something for me. Long ago I heard someone mention that Illinois law students often start their bar applications in their first year. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why. What could the application possibly require that would take three years to complete? The answer is: Nothing. It's not a question of time required to complete the application, it's a question of money: If you “register” by March 1 of your first year of law school, you're going to save $450. Awesome.
Jerks.
Oh, but Illinois doesn't stop there with its attempts to woo new lawyers to its bar: When you don't register in your first year, the fee is $700 if you register by Feb. 1 this year. If you miss that deadline, the late fee is $250 if you register by April 1. And if you miss that deadline, the late fee goes up to 750 freaking dollars if you register by May 31. After that, dude, you're outta luck.
Can you say cartel? I knew you could. My levels of resentment and animosity toward bar associations are rising.
Posted 12:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | 3L
Criminal Justice Web Imbalance
Searching for jobs I can't help but notice that no matter what city or county website I visit I can always find information about the prosecutor for that jurisdiction. The prosecutor may be called a “City Attorney” or a “County Attorney” or a “District Attorney,” but his or her office always has a website and it's always very easy to find.
On the other hand, if you want to find information about that jurisdiction's public defender or other system of indigent criminal defense, well, good freaking luck. Just another sign of Gideon's Broken Promise, I guess.
Ok, I understand that even where there's a healthy and well-funded public defender's office, most of the people who will benefit from its services are not going to go looking for its website. Yet public defenders are public servants every bit as much as prosecutors; if one needs a website, so does the other. And that's true whether the jurisdiction has an actual public defender or whether it fulfills its Constitutional obligation to provide indigent criminal defense services via some other means. In other words, it should be just as easy for a person to learn about a jurisdiction's prosecuting function as it is to learn about its defense function, yet there's virtually no information about that defense function available for most jurisdictions.
On a personal note, this stinks especially if you're trying to find a defense job somewhere other than one of the major PD markets!
Posted 09:13 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack | 3L crimlaw
Update: Montana's Public Defender System
Montana's new, “model,” statewide public defender system is still gearing up for a July 2006 start-date. I've been following the progress through the new State Public Defender webpage where the Public Defender Commission has kindly been posting the agendas and minutes of its monthly meetings. At the December meeting, the Board discussed a state attorney general's decision that their enabling legislation allows them to retain current state and county employees, but does not require them to do so. That means they could, theoretically, be replacing some attorneys or hiring new ones for whatever reason, and that would be good for me. Still, hiring new attorneys wasn't on the agenda of their meeting yesterday so if they plan to do that I guess it will be in the future.
One other tidbit I just noticed: The last sentence of this article about the appointment last October of Randi Hood as the new Chief Public Defender says “She is married to John Connor, the chief criminal prosecutor in the attorney general’s office.” Huh? Is there really no conflict of interest there for either of them?
