High Cost of Law School

A Mad Tea Party says "older" law students should look for information at NonTradLaw.com, which I did, because, I guess I'm "older" or something. It's appears to be a great site for the law school student/applicant who really would like to make him/herself more anxious by reading stories about other students' and applicants' anxiety. Of course, it's not all about anxiety-inducement; the links page points to the U of Richmond Pre-Law Handbook, which really does look like it contains a lot of sound advice for those applying or thinking about it. (Why didn't I find this last summer when I was still in the maybe phase?)

Anyway, NonTradLaw looks valuable primarily for its discussion boards, which feature tales of people getting notification of their acceptance to GULC through the back door. (I was denied access, so I'm either out out out or still on the "deferred" list. Whatever.) A little more digging leads to a post entitled Why is law school so expensive? The answer, according to libertarian George C. Leef, is that the ABA has created a cartel that artificially inflates the cost of a legal education. Leef writes:

Thanks to connivance between state legislatures and the American Bar Association, law school costs much more than it needs to. If we allowed a free market in legal education, the cost of preparing for a legal career would fall dramatically.

Leef makes a good case that the ABA's accreditation requirements, combined with states' bar requirements, forces law schools to spend more money on facilities and teachers than they might otherwise. However, his argument that the solution is a "free market" in which adjuncts and part-timers replace tenured faculty is not so convincing. I'm all for reducing the cost of law school, but the abuses of adjunct labor in academia—especially in the Humanities—are well known. Replacing tenured faculty with adjuncts comes at its own high costs.

Much of the rest of Leef's argument is that ABA-required 3-year law programs are a waste—lawyers learn little in law school and so should spend only one or two years there before going out for real "on the job" training. This certainly sounds good, since much of legal education seems to emphasize the importance of summer internships and clinical work while students are in school. However, is the time spent in class really so meaningless? Do we really want future lawyers to have even less familiarity with legal history and theory?

Leef's argument was occasioned by a Nov. 2002 report from Equal Justice Works: From Paper Chase to Money Chase: Law School Debt Diverts Road to Public Service. For anyone who's considered public interest/public service legal careers, the report's overall conclusion is not surprising:

Faced with staggering law school debt, many law school graduates must forgo the call to public service despite their interest and commitment to such a career. Public interest and government employers will increasingly lose in their efforts to recruit and retain talented and dedicated attorneys. With educational debt payments averaging close to $1,000 a month (approximately one-half of a typical public interest lawyer's salary), a graduate's ability to pay other necessary bills such as rent, utilities, gas, and food too often become very difficult, if not impossible.

However, the report contains good details about the situation that might persuade more schools to offer LRAPs, or perhaps even to take up some of Leef's criticisms in an attempt to reduce the cost of law school. Since I doubt we'll see tuition rates drop seriously any time soon (regardless of any changes made to accreditation or state bar requirements), the Equal Justice Works recommendations for improving and expanding LRAPs are probably the best hope the public has for ensuring it continues to be adequately represented. Of course, it's not surprising that the ABA and American Association of Law Schools would support reforms like these, since, as Leef rightly argues, both organizations certainly benefit from the high cost of law school.

What a mess. How ironic that a profession supposedly dedicated to equality and justice (hah!) suffers so much from those very ills. Can anyone tell me again why I want to go into this profession?

Posted 04:03 PM | Comments (1) | law school

Hydrogen and SOTU II

James Ridgeway's recap of the SOTU address includes a dismissal of what sounded like a good program to encourage Detroit to get hydrogen-fueled cars on the market. Ridgway writes:

aniel Becker, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program, had this to say about the present plan for government funding of the supposedly magic hydrogen fuel-cell car:

The program "funnels millions to Detroit without requiring that they produce a single fuel-cell vehicle for the public to purchase. The auto industry is using the promise of future fuel cells as a shield against using existing technology to dramatically cut our oil dependence, and pollution, today. This technology is sitting on the shelf while Detroit dithers. Honda and Toyota are producing hybrid vehicles today, the big three are not.

"The biggest single step we can take to curb global warming and cut our dependence on oil is to make our cars and light trucks go farther on a gallon of gas," Becker continued. "If the vehicles on the road today averaged 40 miles per gallon, we would save over 3 million barrels of oil a day, more than we currently import from the Persian Gulf."

So, ok, but if the hydrogen proposal is a big screen for a corporate giveaway, was there anything even remotely laudable (or believable) in Bush's big speech?

The Institute for Public Accuracy has compiled a lengthy deconstruction of Bush's speech which suggests that the answer to that question is "not really." The IPA asked a number of experts in different fields to give their opinions of many of Bush's claims, and those experts question or completely debunk nearly everything Bush said. As for the plan to help victims of HIV/AIDS, Raj Patel , policy analyst at Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, and a visiting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, claims that it is basically another corporate giveaway—this time to the pharmaceutical industry:

“This policy is disingenuous to its core. Under existing World Trade Organization legislation, countries can already ‘compulsorily license’ drugs, waiving the patent protection of pharmaceutical companies in the interests of public health. It is, in fact, U.S. sponsored legislation at the World Trade Organization that prevents those countries in the third world which lack the production capacities to produce generic retroviral drugs from importing them from other countries . This compassion for the third world doesn’t pan out either. In December, the United States was alone among members of the World Trade Organization in its opposition to an expanded list of diseases which waives reimportation rules . What looks like a moment of heartfelt generosity on the part of the Bush regime is, in fact, a hard-nosed recognition that pharmaceutical companies around the world aren’t winning the PR battle to justify their monopolies. To put it more simply, this is a $15 billion subsidy to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, in lieu of political battles lost at the WTO by U.S. negotiators. It remains to be seen quite how much of this new-found largesse will go to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which last year was on the verge of bankruptcy .”

The IPA's analysis of Bush's SOTU address contains many terrific links to back up its analysis, and is definitely worth a look (and perhaps a bookmark for future reference, since we'll probably be hearing much more about many of these issues in the coming months).

UPDATE: See also An Annotated Overview of the Foreign Policy Segments of President George W. Bush's State of the Union Address by Stephen Zunes.

Posted 06:27 PM | general politics

That Hydrogen Thing

I hope to say more later about Bush's State of the Union address, but for now I wanted to highlight one of the best things I thought he had to say: He "Proposed spending $1.2 billion over an unspecified period to speed the development of hydrogen-powered, zero-emission fuel cell vehicles." Like much of what Bush said last night, this vague statement could mean nothing more than "I want to give detroit $1.2 billion because they gave me a lot of money to get elected." However, I'm trying to be positive here and I hope that this proposal really will speed hydrogen power technology along.

According to Jeremy Rifkin, hydrogen power has great potential to improve our world by giving us nearly limitless and very inexpensive power. But how would that work? Here's how Rifkin explains it:

Hydrogen must be extracted from natural sources. Today, nearly half the hydrogen produced in the world is derived from natural gas via a steam-reforming process. The natural gas reacts with steam in a catalytic converter. The process strips away the hydrogen atoms, leaving carbon dioxide as the byproduct.

There is, however, another way to produce hydrogen without using fossil fuels in the process. Renewable sources of energy--wind, photovoltaic, hydro, geothermal and biomass--can be harnessed to produce electricity. The electricity, in turn, can be used, in a process called electrolysis, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored and used, when needed, in a fuel cell to generate electricity for power, heat and light.

Why generate electricity twice, first to produce electricity for the process of electrolysis and then to produce power, heat and light by way of a fuel cell? The reason is that electricity doesn't store. So, if the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing or the water isn't flowing, electricity can't be generated and economic activity grinds to a halt. Hydrogen provides a way to store renewable sources of energy and insure an ongoing and continuous supply of power.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Plus it provides a good strategy for countering the overwhelming sense of despair that descends when I think about just about everything else Little Ceasar said last night. Did you see how juvenile and smugly self-satisfied he was as he bragged about the "terrorists" U.S. forces have killed in the last year? What the hell kind of example is that to set for our country and the world!? Oh, but wait, he wants to increase spending to fight HIV and AIDS, especially in Africa. Yeah, that's good.

Must … stay … focused … on the … positives …

Posted 08:15 AM | general politics

Mondo Washington

James Ridgeway's Village Voice column, Mondo Washington is a stellar weekly (and sometimes more frequent) unspinning of stories that the mainstream press cover only in mainstream ways, i.e., by giving us only the "official" story rather than what that official story is attempting to hide. The latest installment is no exception, covering several little gems, including the current plan to fire more missiles on Baghdad than were used in the entirety of Gulf War I.

"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," one Pentagon official told CBS. There are 4 million civilians in Baghdad, of whom 2 million are children.

The Pentagon likes A-Day because it supposedly concentrates on the psychological destruction of the enemy's will to fight, rather than on the physical destruction of his military forces. They won't admit it, but this is another horrible policy shift. This is what Hitler did to London in World War II. What Bush proposes is not collateral damage, but a level of civilian destruction not seen since the Second World War, with tens of thousands of intended civilian casualties.

Ridgeway also covers the frightening fact that the Bush Administration seems to have fewer qualms than any previous administration about using nuclear weapons. William Arkin provided some good detail on this in the LA Times a couple of days ago. After detailing the many ways in which the Administration has moved nukes out of their "special" place as weapons that were really too awful to use, and onto the shelf with conventional weapons, Arkin concludes:

What worries many senior officials in the armed forces is not that the United States has a vast array of weapons or contingency plans for using them. The danger is that nuclear weapons -- locked away in a Pandora's box for more than half a century -- are being taken out of that lockbox and put on the shelf with everything else. While Pentagon leaders insist that does not mean they take nuclear weapons lightly, critics fear that removing the firewall and adding nuclear weapons to the normal option ladder makes their use more likely -- especially under a policy of preemption that says Washington alone will decide when to strike.

To make such a doctrine encompass nuclear weapons is to embrace a view that, sooner or later, will spread beyond the moral capitals of Washington and London to New Delhi and Islamabad, to Pyongyang and Baghdad, Beijing, Tel Aviv and to every nuclear nation of the future.

If that happens, the world will have become infinitely more dangerous than it was two years ago, when George W. Bush took the presidential oath of office.

No kidding. But, as Ridgeway reminds us:

As [Bush] told Bob Woodward in Bush at War , the president sees no reason to explain his actions: "I'm the commander—see, I don't need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Gee, that's right, Mr. President: Why would you possibly need to explain any of your statements or actions to the American people? You're not a public servant or anything, are you? You don't serve at the behest of millions of voters, do you? Shall we take this as an admission that Bush thinks of himself as an appointed President (thanks to the Supreme Court), rather than an elected one?

Come to think of it, why even bother with a State of the Union address tonight? It's not like Bush has any responsibility to tell any of us anything, right? *grrrr*

Posted 02:24 PM | general politics

We're Waaaiiiting!

As I wait to hear if any law school is going to let me in, I've got to say it's not a lot of fun watching JCA go through a similar apply-and-hope-and-wait process trying to line up a good job for the summer after her first year as a law student. Is this what every spring is going to be like for the next three or four years (until I get a "real" legal job)? Probably. But then, a lot of law is probably like that—aren't you always filing papers of some kind, then waiting to see what people (i.e.: judges, juries, other lawyers) think of them? If so, I guess I should just get used to it. And anyway, here's where a desire to do something outside the mainstream of law might come in handy—perhaps when it comes time to look for jobs, I'll like the sound of the kinds of things that other people dread, which would, maybe, increase my chances of actually getting those jobs. Maybe.

Anyway, this latest chapter in JCA's law school odyssey attracted this comment from Sue, who appears to be in the same boat as me right now—just wishin', and hopin', and thinkin', plannin', dreamin', and prayin' ... that we get into law school. Good luck, Sue! Perhaps we should start some sort of blog-ring of our own—the lawyers and law students have their "blawgs," so maybe we should call ours "p-blawgs," for "pre-law-blogs"? Yeah, I'll get right on that. ;-)

(But seriously, if there's anyone else out there like Sue and myself who is currently waiting to hear from law schools and blogging about it, I'd love to hear from you. And good luck to you, too!)

Posted 10:08 AM | Comments (2) | life generally

LOTR Luddism?

Here's a morsel for the casual LOTR fans out there. I know there are countless Lord of the Rings fans, and I know from a few of my friends that a lot of you have spent obscene amounts of time amassing almost unfathomable amounts of information about Tolkien, Middle Earth, hobbits, etc. If you have read the Silmarillion, this probably won't be news to you so please don't flame my ignorance, but... For those of you who, like me, read the books years ago and have been enjoying the movies in a pretty casual way—as in, so casual you're never really sure when the films depart from the books and your ignorance doesn't really bother you—you might enjoy The Engineer Guy's short discussion of the role of technology in the books. Now why would a trilogy that demonizes technology and celebrates the simple agrarian life have so much appeal in a world of smart bombs and modern bureaucratic systems of surveillance and control (hello TIA)? Hmm... I wonder. (Note: The TIA program has a new logo. What a shame! The logo was the best part of the whole concept! Oh well. You can still see the old one here.)

Posted 09:39 AM | ai movies

Smilies

Just because it's there: Japanese Emoticons and the Dubya Bot. Oh, and Whitehouse.org has an Onion-esque scoop on that whole Michigan/affirmative action case.

Posted 12:03 PM | life generally