This year the average passage rate for the public schools in Texas is 87.4%. (Houston, Texas Tech, Texas, and Texas Southern). The average bar passage rate for private schools was 90.1%.

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Examinees who passed the July 2009 Texas Bar Exam

1. Be sure to select someone knows you well and is familiar with your work.
2. Ask the potential recommender if they are willing, and have time, to complete a letter of recommendation for you. Understand that your potential recommender is busy, so be sure to approach the potential recommender as early as possible.
3. Follow up with the initial conversation to provide the recommender with specific information about the requested letter, including who the letter should be addressed to, when the letter is due, and what qualities the selection committee or recipient is looking for.
4. Provide the recommender with a copy of your resume.
5. Let the recommender know, in a couple of sentences, why you are an ideal candidate for the position or award you are applying for. You need to be able to articulate this before you expect your recommender to.
6. Include a list of items that you have worked on that the recommender has reviewed so the recommender can comment on specific tasks that you have completed.
7. Consider providing the recommender a copy of your transcript, especially if the recommender is a professor or will be addressing your potential for academic success.
8. If the letter needs to be mailed, provide the recommender with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. This ensures the letter will be mailed without delay. If the letter needs to be uploaded, faxed, or sent electronically, provide clear instructions to do so.
9. If the letter is not made out to a specific individual or group, consider asking for more than one undated, original copy of the letter. This allows you to have an original letter of recommendation on file that you can use at a future date. Be sure to get the recommender’s permission before you use any additional copies of the letter.
10. Finally, send a letter thanking your recommender for taking the time to write you the letter of recommendation. Let the recommender know if your application was successful so that they know their letter was beneficial to you.

The second candidate slated for an on-campus interview, Professor Richard Gershon, (Charleston School of Law; Tax, Estate Planning, Property) served for five years as the Dean for Texas Wesleyan School of Law. He went on to become the founding Dean of the Charleston School of Law from 2003 to 2007. Charleston has been provisionally approved by the ABA.

Professor Peter Rofes (Marquette School of Law; Constitutional Law) is the final candidate that is currently scheduled for an on-campus interview. Although Professor Rofes lacks ties to Texas, he has taken on leadership roles at Marquette, having served as the Director of Part-time Legal Education and currently serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

The on-campus interview schedule will be as follows:
Professor Brian Shannon October 6-7;
Professor Richard Gershon October 8-9;
Professor Peter Rofes October 13-14.

Letters of recommendation or support can be directed to the following members of the Dean Search Committee:

Search Committee Chair
Dean Fred Hartmeister (Dean of the Graduate School)
PO Box 41030
Lubbock, TX 79409-1030

Vice Chair
Professor Jorge Ramirez
1802 Hartford Avenue,
Lubbock, TX 79409

Members
Provost Bob Smith
PO Box 42019
Lubbock, TX 79409-2019

President, Guy Bailey
150 Administration Building
PO Box 42005
Lubbock, Texas 79409-2005

Chancellor Kent Hance
124 Administration Building
Mailstop 42013 Lubbock, TX 79409

Passage Rates:

• BAYLOR 97.06%
• UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON 89.19%
• TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY 88.57%
• ST. MARY’S 87.50%
• S.M.U. 83.61%
• TEXAS 83.33%
• SOUTH TEXAS 80.67%
• TEXAS WESLEYAN 77.36%
• TEXAS SOUTHERN 40.74%

.

State Average for February 2009: 81.52%

Donald J. Guter served as dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh between 2005 and 2008. Prior to his service there, he served as Judge Advocate General in the Navy, leading a group of 1,800 lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. By comparison, in 2007 South Texas College of Law had 1,252 students enrolled. The school, located in Houston, is known for its trial advocacy program.  The only other Texas law school currently searching for a dean is Texas Tech.  Dean Walter Huffman, who is currently the dean of the law school at Texas Tech, will be retiring at the end of the semester.

The locations for examinees using laptops are as follows:

Austin
Palmer Events Center
http://www.austinconventioncenter.com/PEC/index.asp
900 Barton Springs Rd
Austin, Texas 78704

DFW Area
Arlington Convention Center
http://www.arlingtoncc.com/
1200 Ballpark Way
Arlington, TX 76011

Houston
George R. Brown Convention Center
http://www.houstonconventionctr.com/
1001 Avenida de las Americas
Houston, Texas 77010

• Judge James E. Baker, from the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and served as Legal Advisor to the National Security Council and as Chief of Staff to Senator Moynihan;
• Mr. Charles Blanchard, a former O’Connor clerk who served as General Counsel to the U.S. Army;
• Retired Brigadier General John Cook, who is the Deputy Director for the Federal Judicial Center; and
  
• Judge Jeffery Sutton, Sixth Circuit judge who clerked for Justice Powell and Justice Scalia.

The panel discussed the very real threats facing our nation and the challenges faced by the legal community and national security lawyers who advise the President, the National Security Council, and the military. The question is not whether an attack will occur, it is instead when, how, where, and how prepared we will be.

One challenge faced by national security lawyers is that most intelligence that is gathered is piecemeal and indefinite. This challenge is heightened by the need not only to keep our citizens protected, but also to do so in a manner that is consistent with the values that our country was founded on.

The panel discussed how imminence of threats and recency of attacks affect the national security decision-making process. Highlighting the human element in the decision-making process, the panel observed that conclusions drawn in the light of imminent threats often differ from decisions aided by the luxuries of time and reflection. To draw an extreme example, attorneys who might find some liberties justifiably and legally stripped from a suspect who knows the location of a ticking dirty bomb in a large metropolitan area might come to different conclusions if viewing the threat retrospectively and as a single isolated event rather than an imminent threat or a potential series of attacks.

Guantanamo Bay highlights another challenge faced by our nation. While Guantanamo Bay may have been the best place in the world to hold enemy combatants who could neither be tried nor released, the mistakes made at Gitmo has made it a symbol for violation of civil liberties. Our country is now called upon to find a new location for these detainees and a process to handle these and future detainees who we may not want to bring on to American soil, thereby providing them with greater protections than they otherwise might have. While there is a need for process, what sort of process and to what extent the process should be extended is yet to be determined.

As the panel pointed out, while lawyers have the duty to advice the executive of what is legal, lawyers also have the duty to counsel when legally available options are not the right choices. Similarly, while more serious threats require a more expansive reading of the law, it also calls for greater oversight and broad appraisal from the legal community. It is by balancing the expansive reading of the law when the country is facing imminent threats with greater appraisal of these decisions by the legal community that our nation can gather actionable intelligence while protecting the values that our country stands for, proving that we do not have to make a choice between liberty and security.

A new website named AcademicEarth aims to provide just that. AcademicEarth has lectures from renowned professors from universities including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. There are courses from a wide array of subjects ranging from Economics and History, to Physics and Religion. There are even a few courses in the law section including a copyright lecture from MIT and a class on climate change law and policy from Berkeley. The videos are free to watch, and can be viewed without registering.

LectureFox, a site focused primarily on science lectures, does remarkable job of aggregating free lectures and organizing them so they are easy to access.

What other online lecture sites do you use?