Evidently, he’s “being the change” he wants to see. (What does that even mean anyway? I want my law school to do more to get me a job so I’ll starve myself? If law schools are really as negligent and out of touch as Ethan appears to believe, would they really care if he starves himself to death?)

Go get em, Ethan. In the meantime, I’ll eat the food you would have. Seriously. Can you pass that month-old cookie over here?

While I sincerely hope that Ethan’s protest has some impact, I doubt it will.

I’m glad for the attention Ethan’s effort is focusing on the shortcomings of law school career counseling offices. I wonder what more they can do though? The travesty that is employment data reporting and commercial rankings formulations have been well-documented. But the law school career office has not gotten as much attention.

Our career office manages fall recruiting, hosts a job board, schedules mock interviews, runs lectures, maintains an alumni database, helps with resume and writing sample review, publicizes and co-hosts job fairs and networking events. At some point, isn’t up to the graduate students to do some legwork too?

Obviously, it’s not that simple. And in many ways it’s not the career office’s fault that the economy has tanked and they have very little control over the size of their budget. However, when I think of my interactions with our career office, I wonder what value they really add. Herein is what intrigues me about Ethan’s effort.

Despite all the “activity” the career office appears to be engaged in, I have a hard time knowing whether that activity is worth anything, or whether it really can be worth anything. The career office isn’t a placement service or a staffing agency. They help students put themselves in a position to find a good job by providing resources to connect with other alumni and notifying students of open, publicized opportunities. Beyond that, the career office is at the mercy of the law school’s budget (often just an allocation from the University and not a direct correlation to tuition payments) and the quality of students and education the law school produces – neither of which the career office has any control over.

So… there are a few of my thoughts. What do you want your career office to be doing that it’s not already?

Related posts:

1. The Sense of Impending Anything

Most don’t find it funny.

Frankly, I love it.

I crack myself every time I tell it. That’s probably because I’ve never been much of a joke teller and this one qualifies more as a witty rejoin than full on joke.

Anyway, goes something like this…

Someone: Wow! Entering your last year of law school. That must be a great feeling.

Me: Definitely.

Someone: Must be nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Me: It is. I just can’t tell whether it’s daylight or a train. Either way, it’ll all be over soon.

Someone: *Stares quizzically* (Unless they’re a lawyer or law student. In that case, I get a chuckle.)

Me: **Laughing uproariously** (mostly on the inside)

Some gallows humor never hurt anyone I suppose.

I think it’s the sense of impending… what exactly? doom? elation? freedom? crushing debt payments?…. what?….

It’s this sense of impending anything (and everything) that’s exhilarating and frightening at the same time.

Thousands of law students in classes past entered this last year with that future, at least in the short-term sense, determined. A job offer in hand, ready to be bored to death during their last year of school. The last few years have changed that, particularly at second tier schools like ours where even summer gigs have been hard to come by.

For my part, my summer has given me much more hope that the daylight I’ll at some point emerge into will in fact be what I’d hoped – a hard won, rewarding career.

Still, I’ll never let go of the truth to my joke that this economy and any long-term changes it has yielded may not make it easy or possible to emerge unscathed into a job that is relatively well-paid and stable as many of our predecessors have done.

Sure, that weighs on me, but not nearly as heavily as some assume when I tell the joke or talk about school or law or whatever.

It is after all really just a joke.

And I am after all generally optimistic about my last year in school and what comes next.

Related posts:

1. 11-week job interviews

Of course, one of my favorite law school traditions is followed closely by my least – exam preparation. Another concept that was almost completely missing from my undergraduate experience, yet one that I’ve come to begrudgingly respect.

This sequence from The Paper Chase depicts both the relief expressed through the applause and the stress that sets in following it…

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Since our school seems intent on obsessing about its ranking, I’ll add two more cents on the rankings question. By way of background, this week our law school’s dean is meeting with students to discuss the latest U.S. News Rankings:

The Student Bar Association has asked Dean Miles to meet with students to discuss the U.S. News and World Report rankings and answer any other questions students may have for her. We’ve scheduled this Conversation with the Dean on Thursday, April 22, at 5:30 pm. All students are invited to attend and should feel free to come in late or leave early as class schedules permit.

Our school is ranked #98 in the latest rankings. Last year it was #94. The year before it was #88. We’re going down. If we read into the dean’s letter of last week, we’re to believe that we’re staying roughly the same on key indicators while a handful of other schools are moving up. That’s shaky ground to stake when you’re graded on a curve. Perhaps this shaky defense of the school’s record is why the SBA is nervous about the decline. I give them credit for pushing the Dean on it and appreciate their work.

I’m not bitter about this. The bottom line is I have a fairly unsophisticated (shortsighted? juvenile?) view of rankings. I care about the rankings to the extent that I understand it’s a key factor in assessing job candidates, at least in the early stages of a lawyer’s career. I care about them to the extent that they, if at all, make schools focus on the actual quality of education and educational environment.

Frankly, I don’t think our school hires or keeps enough top-notch, Ivy-educated legal scholars who would power a move up in the rankings. We get strong faculty reputation marks. We have some genuinely excellent professors. And more than a few so-so ones. I think if we want to move up in rankings and quality of education, a good first step will be figuring out how to attract and, more importantly, keep professors who can cultivate a more rigorous academic environment.* There have been several good hires in this regard in recent years. We’ll see if it continues.

But here’s my take… So what?

So your school’s ranked 242nd. So? You can’t control that. The question is what are you going to do about it?

You’re in law school. Now work your ass off and prove to whoever will listen that the rankings are nearly meaningless when you have someone who’s talented, smart, aggressive, diligent, thorough, and conscientious. The qualities that make a good lawyer graduating from Yale are the same as those for one graduating from Catholic University. Likewise, a lazy, entitled person graduating from Yale will get exposed just like the same person graduating from Catholic, it just might happen on a different timeline (and, frankly, different payscale).

Prestige is important. And rankings provide a nice way of measuring your school against others. But at some point you need to prove that you can do the job. And many lower ranked schools are damn good at preparing people to be damn good lawyers. It may be more work to get a shot at proving it at a big firm (particularly in today’s economic climate), but you can only control so much.

If you don’t like that, get good grades and transfer. You knew where your school measured up when you started. If you ignored that or didn’t come to terms with it, it’s not worth whining about now.

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* A great example of this is a few (maybe more than a few) years back, Justice Scalia was at school for a panel discussion. An illustrious panel. Not a single faculty member showed up. Not one. In discussing the event with organizers in our law school’s atrium and how excellent the quality of its dialogue and focus, Justice Scalia is said to have thundered, “This law school’s faculty stands indicted.” Or something like that. The point isn’t that Scalia is a blow-hard, but that it suggests a lack of interest among our faculty in this sort of academic exchange and dialogue.

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The health bill is a big deal. No doubt about it. Sure, I think it’s misguided and unfunded. But it sets up a huge new government program that, it’s easy to say fairly, is one giant leap towards a single-payer health care system in the United States. That’s a big deal.¹

Anyway, to this law student trying to write a blog, the bigger f—ing deal is the pending constitutional challenge to the law. Most of the media coverage is worthless, but I AM really f—ing grateful for some pretty f—ing serious dialogue about what a constitutional challenge looks like and what the f—ing issues are.  This one in particular is well worth the lengthy read.

I’ll poorly paraphrase the main arguments, which really focus on a discreet issue: does the Constitution anywhere authorize an individual mandate to purchase health insurance through either the commerce, taxation, or spending powers?

Challengers argue that Congress lacks the authority under the Constitution to tax people for not engaging in a commercial transaction (purchasing insurance). In other words, you can’t regulate person’s “inactivity.”  The Commerce Clause does not warrant such intrusion because of not buying something is not commerce and a person’s decision to not buy health insurance is not vital to the overarching regulation.  The taxing power does not support such an action because it’s an excise tax on existing, rather than a tax on income or consumption. This makes the tax (although revenue raising) a purely regulatory or punitive measure, which courts may view as unconstitutional. And the spending power does not support it because the tax itself isn’t really spending.

The supporter of the bill (and opponent of the constitutional challenge), says, in essence, “I call bullocks on all that.” At its heart the mandate is simply an exercise of Congress’ authority to tax and spend for the general welfare. This authority is broad and, basically, unlimited. The tax in question here raises revenue and is part of a broader regulatory scheme, much like most, if not all, tax provisions. Plus, the health care bill is well within Congress’ power to set economic policy, which the courts have avoided invalidating since Lochner. Congress has broad, discretionary authority to enact economic regulations that is based on decades of both Supreme Court jurisprudence and lawmaking that covers areas as diverse as education, gun policy, crime, estate taxes, and environmental protections. Where there are overarching areas of public concern that transcend state boundaries, the federal government is the only body qualified or authorized to regulate. Plus to suggest that not participating in a national health plan is not an economic decision is as irrelevant as it is dumb.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be though. Some believe this challenge may place us on constitutional ground unexplored since Lochner.

If defenders of the bill in this constitutional dialogue are correct, the Constitution really places no structural constraints on Congress to enact any regulation or mandate. The only constraints which exist are those which protect fundamental rights and those are protected only if Congressional action fails to withstand the strict scrutiny of the courts. A citizen’s only recourse is through redressing the government with her concerns or the electoral process.

Opponents of the bill argue that the Constitution is meaningless without the structural constraints placed on the federal government. Logically, you might add to this argument that federalism is dead as any sort of mechanism for defining spheres of power within our system.

The Constitution is as much a structural document as one that defines “fundamental rights.”  The concepts are inextricably interrelated. To the extent structural constraints are eroded, our fundamental rights are imperiled as the federal legislature enacts economic legislation that courts refuse to second-guess. Yet, absent any meaningful constraints on legislative power, the courts are the sole arbiter of rights. I like judges and courts and lawyers, but not to tell me what to do. Asked in the form of a question: Can you have a “scheme of ordered liberty” without any real constraints, or order, imposed on government authorities other than periodic elections?

The concentration of power and authority in Washington (and, incidentally, in large corporations) is a direct threat to individual liberty. While such authority is often exercised for the good of people, it is far more difficult to hold accountable those who wield it when there are no discernible bounds to it.

I suspect the challenge will come to naught, colliding as it does with a host of precedents that grant Congress nearly unlimited authority to regulate even non-commercial, local activity through the Commerce Clause, ala Wickard. Since overturning Lochner, courts grant substantial deference to Congress when it comes to economic regulation.

But perhaps they shouldn’t.

Let’s return to Lochner. A court could defend a position that while there are no structural, constitutional constraints to enacting the health reform bill, the court does reserve the right to ensure that such regulations do not imperil individual liberties. Even if Congress has authority under the Constitution to enact an individual mandate to purchase health insurance with a fine for non-compliance, if such law places too heavy a burden on the individual right to contract or the right “to be let alone” by the government (to use the “right to privacy” reasoning), then courts can overturn that regulation. That would be the ONLY way to check congressional power, whichever party wielded it.

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¹ On a related note rant, we have a bunch of chicken-s*** leaders who refuse to level with us about our real choices are about taxes and spending. The CBO estimates for this bill are a joke; the CBO itself estimates their accuracy at “50/50.” Makes you wonder why the President can sound so certain about the bill’s budget impact. Perhaps that’s because, as a people (to the extent one can define that term), we refuse to believe trade offs will one day be necessary. Hands off my Medicare and unemployment, you socialist bastard! So long as we get ours and those taxes come after we’re dead, right? I guess the election will tell what the “people” think about this.

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