What law do you want to teach?

Judicial vacancies restrict access to the federal courts, make litigation more expensive, and insidiously undermine the credibility of government. And a confirmation process that prevents qualified candidates of an elected president’s party from taking office sways the judiciary further to the right despite an election where voters said civil liberties, clean air, privacy, reproductive rights, social justice, and corporate accountability were important issues for our federal government to maintain and safeguard.

The Alliance for Justice has created a fantastic resource to help educate voters and civic leaders about the state of judicial nominations. The Judicial Selection Project has a running count of vacancies in the district and circuit courts, along with profiles of all of the current nominees. It’s a great lesson in the advise & consent function of the Senate, or at least what can go wrong with it.

John Payton’s Legacy: An Antidote to Cynicism

This morning NPR broadcast a report on the millionaire contributors to the various Super PACS which will only fuel the vitriol of this presidential election cycle. The list of contributors, those who have given a million or more and to which PAC, is available on line. Robert Smith, the NPR reporter, focused on Steven Lund, who had set up a phony corporation to hide the fact that he had given $1 million to Restore our Future, the Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. I could have easily slipped into cynicism, believing that Citizens United (2010) was indeed the death knell of our democracy. I could have slipped deeper into despair thinking that the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn Citizens United, but not before the Super PACS had done their damage and gotten Obama out of office. At first I tried to elicit Stephen Colbert’s satire, his Super PAC, Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. But even Stephen’s wicked humor didn’t help. That’s all I could conjure was a scene of depressed and disappointed would-be voters who might just sit out this election. I was recognizing the symptoms: cynicism, passivity, and victimhood. These are self-government’s deadly enemies.

In Response to David Segal in The New York Times

I think the major problem with David Segal’s November 19, 2011 article in The New York Times, like much of what has been written in the vein lately, is that the perspective is way too narrowly on the large law firms and the elite law schools. While many law schools follow the lead of the elites, many also do not, but most of the schools who do not follow the model as closely are the lower ranked schools. The large law firms could solve some of their problems by recruiting at law schools that actually do produce practice ready graduates. USNews is also a big factor and could change the ranking formula to account for practice ready curriculum and teaching excellence. I realize that there has been a trickle down effect in the legal job market so that all new graduates are likely to find themselves competing with more experienced lawyers for any openings, but that is likely a very short term effect, and many of the newly unemployed former associates from large firms will find that they actually did not get much useful transferable experience during the first couple of years at those firms.

Secret Handshakes and Other Unspoken Rules Revealed

Two weeks ago SALT collaborated with The John Marshall Law School and Northern Illinois University College of Law to bring to practitioners and recent graduates of color some of the ways to “break into” the legal academy from practice, public interest, and government service. During one of the panels, Rogelio Lasso, commented that back when he was first looking to get a job as a professor, Michael Olivas as the founder of Latino Law Professors, maintained his own list of qualified Latina/Latino attorney-scholars and recent graduates who were ripe to join a law school faculty. Whenever a dean or hiring chair complained that there were no qualified applicants, Michael would pull out his list. Now SALT’s programs, along with LatCrit and the various People of Color conferences, make those secret handshakes and unspoken rules more transparent. The consequence is a slow and steady push towards greater diversity within the faculty ranks of the legal academy.

This past weekend, SALT, along with Seattle University School of Law and its Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law & Equality and University of Washington School of Law, presented the third biennial “Promoting Diversity in Law School Leadership” workshop, hosted at Seattle University School of Law. An enormous thank you goes out to Robert S. Chang, associate dean for research and faculty development and executive director of the Korematsu Center for his extraordinary efforts to plan this workshop, recruit the panelists, and ensure that the discourse was subtle, complex, and helpful to candidates, new deans, and those serving on dean search committees.

In Defense of a Legal Education

Amidst the discouraging stream of newspaper articles and blogs this summer demonizing law school deans, accusing university presidents of raiding law school tuition revenues, and suggesting a giant conspiracy to cover up the fact that there are very few $160,000 a year jobs for recent law school graduates, it appears that only the oblivious might consider enrolling in law school this fall. I beg to disagree. Now is the right time to encourage students from diverse racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds to consider a legal education. We cannot allow the legal profession a detour from its mission to produce lawyers and leaders from all communities due to the economic downturn.