A nice night at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium in Louisville, Kentucky:
Video and game report courtesy of ESPN.com.
Danny Riley On The Income Tax
YouTube Video Link for Danny Riley on The Income Tax
If you are still in denial, watch the below Documentaries.
Monopoly Men (Federal Reserve Fraud) (1999)
America: From Freedom to Fascism by the late Aaron Russo
The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control
Feds try to buy their way in to Brown’s
This morning we received a head's up call from a friend, letting us know about the feds' latest games:
Last week we ordered a few loads of fill for our yard. The driver brought up 3 loads, but never came back to deliver the last 2; we heard no word from him. Today we learned why.
Apparently the feds stopped him and wanted him to allow them to hide inside his truck when he came here, and they would then jump out and tazer Ed when he went over to the truck to pay the man. The driver refused to do this. The feds then proceeded to go to his house several times, trying to get him to agree. They asked him how much money it would take for him to agree. God bless this man - he refused to have any part in this deception. It's good to know there are still many good and brave patriots.
These are the extremes the unlawful 'federal' agents will go to achieve their ends. By agreeing to participate in this action, this man would be drawn into an unlawful act, and would have been part to a conspiracy.
Yahweh intends for us to remain here for awhile yet, while conferring upon us His protection. He has a plan, in which we each have a part. The plan has not yet been revealed to us, but He will not allow evil to prevail.
Yahweh continues bless and protect us.
Edward Lewis and Elaine Alice
And speaking of empirical data...
By now, almost everyone in legal academia has become aware of the United States Civil Rights Commission's call for law schools to report data on the success (or failure) of students of color at their schools and on the bar exam. (As usual, Paul Caron was one of the first to the scene.) Coupled with the Commission's urging that the ABA drop its accreditation requirement that a law school develop a plan to achieve diversity, the Commission's 220 page report seems like a very thinly veiled attack on affirmative action in law schools.We may have very different views about the role of affirmative action in higher education. Personally, I am in favor it. However, given this blog's emphasis on making decisions based on empirical, verifiable, testable information, it's hard to reject out of hand the Commission's call for law schools to disclose information about the performance of ALL students (including students of color) that they have admitted. Of course there is the possibility that such information will be used (or misused) by those who want to dismantle affirmative action. But if affirmative action is worth defending, it should be worth defending on the facts and not just in principle.
The dissent of the Commission's two Democratic members certainly permits an inference that the Commission was more interested in reaching a particular result than in finding out the truth about the impact of affirmative action. (I couldn't find a direct link, but here's an excerpt: "No attempt was made by the Commission to assess the consensus positions of the scientific or legal community on these issues. No independent research was done by the Commission on these issues, nor did they perform a comprehensive review of others' research.") Defenders of affirmative action should not follow the Commission's lead. We shouldn't presume that we know what effect affirmative action has on the career chances of those we admit and educate in our schools. We may not like the heavy-handed way the Commission went about calling for this information to be disseminated, but nor should we fear providing our consumers with more information about exactly what it is we are doing.
More on Numbers
In recent posts, Sam and Jim raise the issue of the important of empirical evidence as the basis for all sorts of decisions law schools, law students and law professors make. The unwillingness to think in terms of actual data seems pervasive and I can think of specific examples where use of empirical studies would be useful. My impression it is that is rarely used in at least 4 instances:
1. Bar passage: Many schools, but not all, are concerned with bar passage rates but I wonder how many have undertaken a study to see if bar passage is related to LSAT, entering GPA, first year GPA, bar courses taken, pass/fail courses taken, transfer/non transfer status and a host of other variables with an eye to diagnosis? I know there are data like this around but how many schools have actually analyzed there own graduates to see where there might be improvement.
2. Teaching evaluations: I recently participated in University grievance process in which part of the reason for a tenure denial was poor student evaluations. I wonder if any law school has made an effort to determine whether their students’ evaluations of professors are correlated with teaching effectiveness?
3. Hiring: This is the time of year when the top schools go after the graduates at the top of the class at elite schools. Mid level schools go after people at the bottom of the top third of the same schools and largely ignore the top ranked graduates of non elite schools. (or so it seem so me.) I am not sure I have seen any empirical evidence that shows that the second tier students from elite schools out perform the top tier from non elite schools. In fact, I have seen none that shows that even the top students from elite schools out perform top students from non elite schools. Instead of attempting to discover who the best teachers and scholars will be, the practice of self-referential hiring persists.
4. Scholarship. The dearth of empirical scholarship is well known but that does not seem to stop anyone. One case that comes to mind in the current attack on “predatory” lending. I am not a fan of advantage takers and would probably be on this bandwagon myself. But then I ran across a discussion of a study of by Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman – reported in the August 4th 2007 issue of The Economist. The gist is that so-called victims of this type of lending are better off than they would have been had their loans been denied. If one assumes that those who borrow from predatory lenders do so because it is the only alternative, then the empirical evidence suggests we may be too quick to be paternalistic in this area. I choose only this one because I had just read the Economist article but my hunch is that it is representative of a great deal of legal “scholarship.”
1. Bar passage: Many schools, but not all, are concerned with bar passage rates but I wonder how many have undertaken a study to see if bar passage is related to LSAT, entering GPA, first year GPA, bar courses taken, pass/fail courses taken, transfer/non transfer status and a host of other variables with an eye to diagnosis? I know there are data like this around but how many schools have actually analyzed there own graduates to see where there might be improvement.
2. Teaching evaluations: I recently participated in University grievance process in which part of the reason for a tenure denial was poor student evaluations. I wonder if any law school has made an effort to determine whether their students’ evaluations of professors are correlated with teaching effectiveness?
3. Hiring: This is the time of year when the top schools go after the graduates at the top of the class at elite schools. Mid level schools go after people at the bottom of the top third of the same schools and largely ignore the top ranked graduates of non elite schools. (or so it seem so me.) I am not sure I have seen any empirical evidence that shows that the second tier students from elite schools out perform the top tier from non elite schools. In fact, I have seen none that shows that even the top students from elite schools out perform top students from non elite schools. Instead of attempting to discover who the best teachers and scholars will be, the practice of self-referential hiring persists.
4. Scholarship. The dearth of empirical scholarship is well known but that does not seem to stop anyone. One case that comes to mind in the current attack on “predatory” lending. I am not a fan of advantage takers and would probably be on this bandwagon myself. But then I ran across a discussion of a study of by Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman – reported in the August 4th 2007 issue of The Economist. The gist is that so-called victims of this type of lending are better off than they would have been had their loans been denied. If one assumes that those who borrow from predatory lenders do so because it is the only alternative, then the empirical evidence suggests we may be too quick to be paternalistic in this area. I choose only this one because I had just read the Economist article but my hunch is that it is representative of a great deal of legal “scholarship.”
Vote For Freedom on September 15th!
Vote For Freedom on September 15th!
Casey Lee Cobb | Show The Law | August 31st 2007
This year’s Fall Freedom Fest is looking like it’s going to be one of the biggest gatherings yet! We all need to make the stand for what is Righteous; we all need to support Ed and Elaine Brown at this historic time.
After your activities in promoting 911 truth on this important six year anniversary have been fulfilled, then do your part in joining Ed & Elaine Brown at the “Fall Freedom Fest” where you get to cast your vote for Freedom by simply showing up.
Now I know not everyone is in the financial position to travel, So I would very much encourage you to purchase a raffle ticket for the festival so that you can get your chance in winning one of the many great prizes to be awarded.
Address and Time of the Freedom Festival
September 15th 2007
12 Noon Until 10pm
401 Center of Town RD
Plainfield NH 03781
At the Festival you can purchase raffle tickets to help support Sherry Peel Jackson with her legal defense fund, after she was wrongfully targeted by the IRS for appearing in the movie America: From Freedom to Fascism and telling the truth.
Here you can also get info on how to purchase your raffle tickets in advance!
We are very sorry that the free helicopter rides at the "Summer of Freedom" gathering did not work out as planned, apparently there was some difficulty with the landing gear. Hopefully Dee Aitch Es comes back this year, and is more aptly prepared to make a productive contribution in support of liberty.
Breaking News: Times Reports...
Main Entry: pro•per•gan•daPronunciation: "prah-PER-'Gan-duH’
Function: noun
Etymology: Neo Latin, from the movement(s)
1: Information based on fact, deliberately fused with creative satire, and accompanied with honorable ideals spread widely to help further the cause of truth via shaming the wrongful party into changing lanes to the narrow path of righteousness.
2: the spreading of ideas, or information, for the purpose of helping the cause, of a truth.
Introducing the Docket Passer
Download the August 29, 2007, edition of The Docket Passer
. Or simply mash the "play" button above.Welcome to another season of University of Louisville football. I'm not just the dean of the law school here at the UofL; I'm also one of the Cardinals' most enthusiastic fans. I hope to bring you this webcast throughout the season. I call it "The Docket Passer." I'll offer some observations about football, our Cardinals, and my school, Louisville Law.
The Cardinals are coming off a phenomenal 2006 campaign. We're the defending champions of the Big East Conference, and we vanquished Wake Forest in the 2007 FedEx Orange Bowl. Starting quarterback Brian Brohm is a Heisman trophy contender. Under the leadership of our new head coach, Steve Kragthorpe, the Cardinals have a single goal in sight: to top the fantastic year we had in 2006 and to bring the national college football championship home to Louisville.
So let's talk a little about John Heisman. His is a name that we hope will soon be linked forever with that of Brian Brohm. Whether we work in athletics or elsewhere at the University of Louisville, we have a great deal to learn from John Heisman the innovator.
John Heisman, the namesake of college football's highest award for individual achievement, excelled in multiple sports. His love of basketball and baseball would have put him right at home here at the University of Louisville. And though he is best known as a coach and an innovator, he was a star player in his own right.What is less known about John Heisman (except among legal writers quick to point out this connection) is what he studied. John Heisman went to law school. He received his LL.B. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1892. Like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Heisman was a polymathic genius who happened to study law. Like Scott Boras, Heisman bypassed the legal profession in favor of a daring career in sports.
So what exactly did Heisman do in football? A profile in the New York Times summarized his accomplishments:
Among those innovations, of course, Heisman's signature contribution to the sport was the forward pass. As Wiley Lee Umphlett documented at great length in Creating the Big Game: John W. Heisman and the Invention of American Football (1992), the forward pass probably saved the sport from extinction. From 1904 to 1905, according to the Times, "44 players [were] reported killed in football games, with hundreds sustaining serious injuries." Heisman advocated the forward pass as a way of "scatter[ing] the mob."Aside from leading the fight for the legalization of the pass in the early 1900s, Heisman pushed to divide the game into quarters and created the center snap. The ball had previously been rolled on the ground. Heisman introduced the ''hike'' vocal signal and the first audible at the line. He invented the hidden ball trick and what would now be called the fumblerooski. Because he wanted fans to understand play-calling, he made it easier for them to follow the downs and yardage needed by erecting something else new at games: a scoreboard.
The forward pass utterly revolutionized football. The threat of a quick-strike, "vertical" game -- one in which a thrown football could move a team the length of the field if the quarterback hits an eligible receiver in stride -- neutralizes defenses based on size and brute strength. You can't stack eight men in the box when the offense forces you to respect the pass. The forward pass guarantees that fast, thin players can compete on roughly equal footing with strong, heavy players. The threat of the forward pass animates deceptive plays such as the draw and the play-action pass. Those plays, after all, are mirror images of each other: the draw is a run that looks like a pass, and play-action lets the quarterback pass after tricking the defense into stuffing the run.
Everything since Heisman, truth be told, has been a variation on the theme of integrating the forward pass into a sport that would otherwise be a stop-and-go version of rugby. Offensive strategies such as the spread offense, the option offense, and the West Coast offense represent different strategic ways of exploiting a team's strengths and an opponent's weaknesses vis-à-vis the forward pass. The no-huddle offense and the audible are tactical innovations that enable a team to respond to highly variable conditions during the game.So what does all this have to do with legal education and, in particular, innovation in legal education? These points come immediately to mind:
- There are significant differences between structural, strategic, and tactical innovations. The forward pass is foundational and structural; its emergence changes the sport. The choice between offensive game plans -- say, an option offense versus the Fun 'n' Gun -- enables a coach to plan at a highly abstract, strategic level. Innovative formations, individual plays, and the shrewd use of audibles all belong to the tactical level of the game.
- No single set of strategies and tactics works for every game, let alone every play. Defenses can be just as innovative as offenses. It similarly behooves a law school to retain its options across a wide range of pedagogical and scholarly tools. Clinical education? Intense skills training? Empirical research? Externships? Joint degree opportunities? International programs? Sure. All of that and more should be found in every law school's operational arsenal.
- Both football and legal education are profoundly conservative. With very few exceptions, football coaches continue to treat the forward pass as a deviant play, as though John Heisman had not existed. Similarly, the Langdellian model of legal education continues to hold sway, despite a grumbling, grudging consensus that the case-based, Socratic classroom falls far short of providing contemporary law students with comprehensive training.
A few final points bear notice. John Heisman never confined himself to one thing. He coached other sports, loved opera, and wrote prolifically. And most of all, Heisman understood that football was a team sport. He opposed an award honoring the most talented collegiate player, and only by his death did his name come to be associated with a trophy honoring individual excellence. Law schools and legal education at large should be so fortunate to have the foresight, the daring, and the basic decency of John Heisman.
Super-Crunching
Apropos of Sam Kamin's post on Ian Ayres's new book, here is the video in question:
For my part, I am happy to embrace the notion of empirically, statistically, quantitatively informed management. As I said but a few days ago on this forum:
For my part, I am happy to embrace the notion of empirically, statistically, quantitatively informed management. As I said but a few days ago on this forum:
The world is filled with problems that can be expressed in numbers. If the law harbors any hope of solving them, it cannot afford to discard so basic a tool as mathematics. As undergraduates approach the LSAT, as 1Ls matriculate, as professors end their collective estivation, I offer this wish for the coming academic year. Would it be that our profession no longer confessed -- no longer cherished -- its rampant innumeracy. Would it be that the law, reunited with the tools of quantitative analysis and reinvigorated with an appreciation of mathematical beauty, might cease to be the mathematical waste land of the social sciences.
Crunching the Numbers
Over at Balkinization, Ian Ayres has posted about his new book, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Think Smart. (You've got to like any book that was named by a randomized experiment. I'm definitely going that way for my next article.) If you follow the link to the YouTube interview with Ayres, you'll see that the book is about how statistical analysis is (or should be) replacing intuition as a means of corporate decision-making.
I thought MoneyLaw readers would be particularly interested in this development and in this book. What role do statistics play in decision-making at your law school? Are your colleagues (or other relevant decision-makers) receptive to empirical studies that don't comport with their intuitions?
More on this to come.
I thought MoneyLaw readers would be particularly interested in this development and in this book. What role do statistics play in decision-making at your law school? Are your colleagues (or other relevant decision-makers) receptive to empirical studies that don't comport with their intuitions?
More on this to come.
A New Hampshire Couple peacefully await to be presented with the law that makes them liable for an income tax.
(Photo Courtesy of Danny Riley)
Do you remember the day that Aaron Russo killed the IRS?
The End of The IRS
Do you remember the day that Aaron Russo killed the IRS?
Sheldon Cohen, former commissioner, was indeed very well dressed.
Yet haughty and ill prepared for Russo’s questions piercing like a sword.
Cohen, at first star-struck, later begins to question, ‘Is this an interview I can afford?’
He breaks into a cold sweat realizing what he had done
Was it the alcohol, I thought this interview was just for fun?
Things are starting to get serious, I’m talking myself into a hole.
Frantic now Cohen realizes that he has lost any and all self-control.
Eureka! Let’s pretend that I have won and declare the Supreme Court frivolous!
With my lawyer-like mind the delusions of grandeur have become simply limitless.
The plebs will buy it--they’ll eat it right up,
Now wait just one minute………
on second thought, I had better shut the hell up.
The End....
of the IRS
by Casey Lee Cobb
The harmonious university
Having shared official prose that I have written as the dean at Louisville Law, I figured I might as well make it a regular habit. MoneyLaw will host items I write in my official capacity as dean, as well as occasional pieces that draw upon my experiences at the University of Louisville. After all, if MoneyLaw's readership can put up with posts such as Comfortably Metrotextual, Crossing the River, and Common Wealth, in some cases weeks after these items' initial publication in our local bar association's monthly newspaper, then surely it will tolerate posts written specifically for an online audience.
It is a true joy to work at a law school that is backed by an entire university community. This claim embraces the entirety of the university experience, and not simply the fragments that are most readily imagined as partners for interdisciplinary work affecting law. Certain things -- athletics, performing arts, campus life -- enhance professional education in ways that law professors too often tend to forget.
Tonight's case in point: I just returned from the University of Louisville School of Music's fifteenth annual faculty gala, which coincides with the school's 75th anniversary. Our music faculty staged a spectacular concert. They covered an immense range of musical instruments and idioms. I left full of Cardinal pride, thoroughly pleased that the talented members of the School of Music let me share their campus.The MoneyLaw point is simple: Why would any division of a university, especially one whose "product" is as esoteric as that of a law school, ever dream of isolating itself from its fellow colleges and departments? The School of Music, Cardinal Athletics, and the UofL's Department of Theatre Arts all do something that law schools rarely if ever do: They perform. Their work touches the broader public, in some cases so deeply that artistic and athletic performances are what members of our Commonwealth understand to be the University of Louisville.
To be sure, our university does many, many things, and I will be the first to emphasize the vital importance of activities not seen by the public at large. Much of the teaching, research, and service that we do takes place in quiet settings. Many of the books and articles produced by our professors are directed at specialized audiences. There does come a time, however, when the academy must make its case directly to the public. Law school outreach takes many forms: conferences, moot courts, public service by students. Don't overlook the law library. The imperative to connect with the public drives what I consider Louisville Law's most important innovation in a generation, and perhaps even deeper in its history: the opening of the University of Louisville Law Clinic.Finally, this much bears remembering. Rarely if ever can a single department or college approach the accomplishments of an entire university. Superlative performances -- in the arts, in athletics, and in every academic endeavor -- lift all of us. The School of Music's triumph this evening casts a warm glow over the law school and every other corner here at the University of Louisville. Quite simply, and quite humbly, the Cardinal Nation thanks you.
Postscript: So that MoneyLaw's readers might have a taste of the concert I enjoyed, I have coded a musical selection drawn from the University of Louisville School of Music's storehouse of recordings. I hope you enjoy trumpeter Michael Tunnell of the Louisville Brass as much as I enjoyed Professor Tunnell and his colleagues at our faculty gala.
Michael Tunnell plays
Gloria 'N Cielo. More recordings are available from Professor Tunnell's archive and the University of Louisville School of Music.A Great American Patriot has Fallen…
Rest In Peace, Aaron Russo.February 14, 1943 - August 24, 2007
I want you all to email AFFTF to everyone you know.
He considered this to be one of his greatest achievements, share it with the world!
Russo fatally wounded the IRS, Now it is our responsibility to finish the job.
WE LOVE YOU AARON!
Marginal MoneyLaw: What law schools can learn from bad baseball teams
Jeff Harrison's most recent post, Law schools and competitive markets, hints that law schools differ in their ability to compete, particularly during times of financial hardship. Jeff also suggests that the extent to which a law school is being operated for its shareholders -- and the magnitude of the success attained in that enterprise -- can be measured. These observations form the basis for a meaningful exercise in MoneyLaw.
As writers in this forum so often do, I turn to baseball. The late Doug Pappas developed a brilliant metric for assessing the efficiency of Major League baseball teams. As Doug explained in 2004:
The easiest way to measure front office efficiency is simply to divide a club's payroll by its wins to come up with "dollars per win." However, neither side of this equation reflects reality. The worst team a club can field won't go 0-162, and despite some owners' best efforts, it's impossible to spend $0 on a major league roster. It's then necessary to look at marginal wins and marginal payroll.All that it takes to translate Doug Pappas's marginal payroll/marginal wins formula for use in legal education is to develop analogous metrics for payroll and wins.The Marginal Payroll/Marginal Wins (MP/MW) system evaluates the efficiency of a club's front office by comparing its payroll and record to the performance it could expect to attain by fielding a roster of replacement-level players, all of whom are paid the major league minimum salary. The formula is:
(club payroll - (28 x major league minimum) / ((winning percentage - .300) x 162)The left side of this formula assumes that a replacement-level club would play .300 ball. That translates to 48.6 wins in a 162-game season, which before the 2003 Tigers was worse than any actual major league club since the institution of the amateur draft. [Editors' note: The 2003 Tigers went 43-119, good for a .265 record.] The previous low was the 52-110 (.321) record of the NL's two 1969 expansion clubs, the Expos and Padres, who began play with no minor league system, no way to sign free agents, and no players any other NL club really wanted to keep. After subtracting the replacement-level .300 winning percentage from the club's actual winning percentage, the resulting number is multiplied by 162 to calculate the number of marginal wins over a full 162-game season. This adjusts the formula for strike-shortened seasons and clubs which fail to make up a postponed game or two.
The next two posts in this series will undertake these tasks. First, I will ask what it would cost to run the most threadbare law school that would manage to secure and retain ABA accreditation. That figure would represent legal education's equivalent of the Major Leagues' minimum payroll.
I will then tackle the more difficult task of defining "wins" in legal education. No matter how many law professors imagine themselves as the primary stakeholders in the existing university rankings game, students and their eventual employers are the true primary consumers of academic rankings. Since any effort to define academic "wins" is tantamount to proposing a different set of rankings, for purposes of this exercise, we might as well have the rankings we want. I propose student metrics mark the threshold of ABA accreditation: true employment rates (preferably at graduation), bar passage rates, and the like. A school performing at that level, and no better, would be legal education's equivalent of the 1969 Expos, the 1969 Padres, or the 2003 Tigers.
Establishing those two baselines will enable us to gauge individual law schools' performance by some sort of marginal budget/marginal performance metric. How much does each school spend, relative to the absolute minimum needed to secure ABA accreditation, to move its outcomes by some measurable margin beyond that threshold?
Ours, after all, is an unfair academic game. Some schools are simply richer than others. It is equally true that some schools make more of their wealth, however limited or extensive it might be, than comparably situated counterparts. In legal education as in baseball, wins count. In a world of scarcity, though, how a school attains those wins, and how much it spends getting there, are pivotal questions.
Law Schools and Competitive Markets
I think there is an analogy here but, if not, the message and the question for moneylaw advocates is the same. One of the issues that came up in airline and trucking deregulation was whether competition would lead to lower safety. The idea was that lower prices would mean cost cutting. The neoclassical economist's answer was to discount this by noting that the profit motive -- in the interest of shareholders -- would have already led to cutting costs as much as possible.Now switch to law schools or any school in the middle of a budget crunch. The argument similar to the less airline safety argument is that the budget crunch will affect the quality of the law school. Less revenue means lower "safety." This, however, requires one to assume that before the crunch spending would have been cut to the lowest possible level consistent with the interests of shareholders.
I do not know the outcome as an empirical matter when it comes to transportation deregulation but everyone who is at a school that is going, has or will go through a budget crunch has a chance to test the theory about whether the school was operated in the interest of shareholders before the cuts. Let's say the snacks in the lounge are less lavish, the travel budgets a bit smaller, there are fewer "free lunches," not as many luncheon speakers, a couple of unfilled faculty positions and that faculty are asked to teach a few more students or a few more hours, and so on. Are shareholders worse off? Maybe there are some connections between luxuries for the faculty and the welfare to stakeholders but a budget crunch can also reveal how tenuous that connection may be and how cavalier schools can be when spending the money of others.
So, the moneylaw question is how much the operation of a public law school can, as far as cost cutting, resemble a firm in a competitive industry?
Let us now praise Alex Johnson
Now that Brian Leiter has publicized the University of Virginia's press release on Alex Johnson's return to Charlottesville, I thought I would say a few words about my former boss.
No person in legal academia has taught me more, or been more generous with his time and political capital, than Alex Johnson. He earned -- and deserved -- the fierce loyalty of his lieutenants. The name of this forum, MoneyLaw, owes its origins to long discussions we had about the careful stewardship and effective deployment of our law school's resources. Our shared passion for legal education, baseball, and the University of Minnesota defined the four years I was privileged to serve on a law faculty led by Alex Johnson.
Alex served all too briefly as dean at Minnesota. During those hundred fortnights in which he presided, however, Minnesota accomplished extraordinary things. As detailed in Virginia's press release, Alex "recruited and hired 19 faculty members to 'reinvigorate the faculty and the enterprise.'"
Even more remarkably, Alex posted this phenomenal record during a period of brutal budget cuts. The University of Minnesota slashed the law school budget on his arrival. The University and the state continued slashing, each year Alex served as dean. Alex responded by "revamp[ing] the alumni relations office" and "ramp[ing] up on our annual giving campaign." The bottom line? "We were actually able to not only cover the shortfalls, we were able to increase the budget and hire all those faculty members."
What once was allegory must now be stated explicitly:
No person in legal academia has taught me more, or been more generous with his time and political capital, than Alex Johnson. He earned -- and deserved -- the fierce loyalty of his lieutenants. The name of this forum, MoneyLaw, owes its origins to long discussions we had about the careful stewardship and effective deployment of our law school's resources. Our shared passion for legal education, baseball, and the University of Minnesota defined the four years I was privileged to serve on a law faculty led by Alex Johnson.Alex served all too briefly as dean at Minnesota. During those hundred fortnights in which he presided, however, Minnesota accomplished extraordinary things. As detailed in Virginia's press release, Alex "recruited and hired 19 faculty members to 'reinvigorate the faculty and the enterprise.'"
Even more remarkably, Alex posted this phenomenal record during a period of brutal budget cuts. The University of Minnesota slashed the law school budget on his arrival. The University and the state continued slashing, each year Alex served as dean. Alex responded by "revamp[ing] the alumni relations office" and "ramp[ing] up on our annual giving campaign." The bottom line? "We were actually able to not only cover the shortfalls, we were able to increase the budget and hire all those faculty members."What once was allegory must now be stated explicitly:
There was a . . . dean . . . whose effective tenure was devoted to making the school's stakeholders brave and dignified and good . . . . When he left the people burst into tears in the halls and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?"And if your literary taste runs far afield from John Steinbeck, then I'll offer another allegorical source of inspiration:
סלה -- Selah, y'all.And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho: and the Lord showed him all the land of Gil'e-ad, unto Dan, and all Naph'tali, and the land of E'phra-im, and Manas'seh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zo'ar.
Academic Employment of Law School Graduates
In February, 2007, law schools recorded what sort of work their alums had found nine months after graduation. In the fall of 2007, law schools reported that data to the American Bar Association. Which law schools do you think reported the highest percentages of employed grads working in academia? Not Yale. Not Chicago. Not any of the law schools you would probably expect. The ABA data [Excel format] tells this story:
What explains these results? First off, note that "academic employment" does not here equate to teaching the law. It refers simply to working at an educational institution. Second, note that it does not equate to full-time work. Working part-time as a professor's research assistant or even as an envelope-stuffer in a law school's development office would thus qualify as "academic employment." Third, note that a school's Emp9 score counts for 14% of its score for purposes of U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings.
Together, those observations suggest a possible cause of the relatively high "academic employment" figures reported above: law schools hiring their own grads. I concede that other explanations might apply too, though. Perhaps the ABA data contains errors, for instance, or perhaps a great many graduates from, say, McGeorge got fed up with the law and became elementary school teachers. I also concede that I can imagine very good arguments for why law schools should hire their own grads for part-time work. It probably beats out-and-out unemployment.
Still, though, we might well wonder if those same graduates were sorely disappointed when they failed to find the sort of full-time legal work that they had expected to get after three years of law school. And we might well wonder how much the somewhat misleading Emp9 figures used in USN&WR's law school rankings contributed to that unpleasant surprise. Why doesn't USN&WR instead measure full-time employment for which a J.D. is required or preferred? The National Association of Legal Professionals' form [PDF], which defines the categories of employment data collected by both the ABA and USN&WR, already asks schools for that data (see question II.A.) It remains only for USN&WR to abandon the present Emp9 measure, which has proven alarmingly fallible, for something more likely to tell would-be law students what they really want to know.
[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]
Earlier posts about Emp9 measure:
What explains these results? First off, note that "academic employment" does not here equate to teaching the law. It refers simply to working at an educational institution. Second, note that it does not equate to full-time work. Working part-time as a professor's research assistant or even as an envelope-stuffer in a law school's development office would thus qualify as "academic employment." Third, note that a school's Emp9 score counts for 14% of its score for purposes of U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings.
Together, those observations suggest a possible cause of the relatively high "academic employment" figures reported above: law schools hiring their own grads. I concede that other explanations might apply too, though. Perhaps the ABA data contains errors, for instance, or perhaps a great many graduates from, say, McGeorge got fed up with the law and became elementary school teachers. I also concede that I can imagine very good arguments for why law schools should hire their own grads for part-time work. It probably beats out-and-out unemployment.
Still, though, we might well wonder if those same graduates were sorely disappointed when they failed to find the sort of full-time legal work that they had expected to get after three years of law school. And we might well wonder how much the somewhat misleading Emp9 figures used in USN&WR's law school rankings contributed to that unpleasant surprise. Why doesn't USN&WR instead measure full-time employment for which a J.D. is required or preferred? The National Association of Legal Professionals' form [PDF], which defines the categories of employment data collected by both the ABA and USN&WR, already asks schools for that data (see question II.A.) It remains only for USN&WR to abandon the present Emp9 measure, which has proven alarmingly fallible, for something more likely to tell would-be law students what they really want to know.
[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]
Earlier posts about Emp9 measure:
- Change to U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology
- How U.S. News Calculates "Employment at 9 Months"
- The How, Who, and Why of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
- USN&WR to Change Employment Measure
- ABA v. USN&WR on "Employment at 9 Months" Data
- The Ethics of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
- 2008 USN&WR Law School Rankings Under New Emp9 Formula
- The Emp9 Puzzle: Answers and Questions
- Rankings Hack Hot Potato
- Hacking the New "Employment at Nine Months" Formula
How To Write and Avoid Not-Writing
It came from the comments over at my blog:
"Dude" asks:
I agree with you, Dude. Apart from the special topic LL.Ms (e.g. NYU's in tax, international law), academic-track LL.M programs vary widely in structure and rigorousness. I would say that Harvard is probably the most structured (all LL.Ms are required to write a thesis, and the S.J.D. program is relatively structured) while others, like Georgetown's, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Boalt Hall's are the least structured, allowing you to design your own course list and concentrate on independent writing. Most domestic LL.Ms will probably be either "research-track" or "thesis-track." And these are almost entirely unstructured programs, because the point is to not get a concentration in some subject--the point is to write.
The thing to do is actually write and avoid not-writing. While these programs are unstructured, they do have requirements and certain parameters. Most writing-track programs require academic aspirant LL.Ms to take a certain number of course units. They are about half the units required for general or special-topic LL.Ms, but they are still courses that will take time away from writing your monograph. So what to take for those courses?
Again, it probably depends on the structuredness of your program. At most schools there are no special courses just for academic-track LL.Ms and S.J.Ds. You will be choosing from the standard 2L/3L fare--and at this point, after your three-year J.D., what's there left to take? Whatever serves the monograph. At this point, you'll have most of the foundational courses taken cared of (this is why they're foundational). If you haven't taken Statutory Interpretation yet, I guess this that the do-over 4L year is as good as any to remedy that. And I'm not entirely opposed to exam courses--if they're useful for your monograph, then there's no reason not to take them. And the quick Vulcan-death-grip blow of the final frees you up for spending your writing energy on your monograph.
The thing to do is to make sure your courses serve your monograph. Depending on the program, there's lots of ways of going about this. Most schools will assign you/let you pick a faculty advisor to supervise your written work if they require a thesis/monograph. Depending on how much feedback you need/want, this can be a very interactive or completely detached relationship. Choose your advisor carefully, and don't be afraid to change advisors (but try not to change half-way--try to pick wisely and quickly in the first three weeks of school). But that faculty advisor will be the one supervising your independent study units (for which you will receive a grade upon completion of the monograph, most likely, so you'll get an "In-Progress" one semester and a final retroactive grade at the very end). Because your monograph is already graded, and you are already taking independent study units, your course units have to be efficient uses of your time.
Again, if you need some background knowledge, take those courses. For instance, since I never took it before and because I'm doing a project on the FMLA, I'm taking Employee Benefits this semester. But in general, my approach is to take courses that serve the monograph as much as possible. Depending on your school, you may be able to take courses from other departments. I'm taking a Research Methods Design course from a graduate department, and that will be useful for helping me design my management questionnaires and will give me feedback in the early stages my dissertation project design. I also plan on taking Organizations and Institutions from another department here on campus. I also take seminar courses from the law school that either 1) become a chapter of my monograph or 2) work as an independent paper in my field that I can publish while I'm working on the Big Project Monograph.
I don't mind spending 5-6 months writing a smaller article on a very particular topic in my field as I'm working on my 200 page monograph. Because I'm spending the first year of the S.J.D. doing field work, collecting data, and analyzing the data, I want to write as much as possible and workshop those articles on the conference circuit. Carefully chosen seminar topics/papers are ideal for this. Ever had a professor tell you that if you cleaned up a paper you could publish it? Well, at this stage, you definitely should. I would caution you to stick to your intended hedgehog specialization field though, so that when you do go on the market you have 2-3 articles (in addition to your dissertation) that look like a good package displaying your particular toolkit. As of now, I'm interdisciplinary but getting more focused: sociological perspectives on employment discrimination law.
I would write as much as possible, but by that I mean spend the bulk of your time writing 1-2 good articles. Try to get your coursework and writing projects to overlap and dovetail as much as possible. Make sure the things you write are good and publishable--so don't sweat it taking so many paper requirements that you end up writing 4 things badly. If you talk to the professor, most seminars will let you write research proposals in lieu of an independent paper. That's what I did last spring for one course--I wrote my dissertation proposal as I was finishing my independent study thesis, and with my third being an exam course, I got everything done. And now I have a dissertation proposal ready to go for this Fall (which I have spent the past week cleaning up for my new faculty advisor and other members of my dissertation committee, which is why I've been such a bad guest-blogger).
Try to write and avoid not-writing---so just keep writing. Of course it sucks. It always sucks. But you might be able to clean it up in the end. You might toss a lot, but at least some of what you write will be publishable. So just keep writing. If you're going to go on the market after the LL.M/VAP/Fellowship, you'd better write something publishable. If you're already on the market, then you probably have a few things under your belt. But if you are intending to go on the market very soon, you'd better be shopping your articles and getting a lot of eyes on those drafts. If you only have one year to do all of this, make it a productive year. I hate to say this, but don't sweat it trying to get too much balance. You'll fail at both--your productivity will suffer and your fun will not be all that fun if you feel guilt over not-working and are trying to cram fun into your busy schedule. Maybe you'll come back to this city as a tourist one day, but for now, work hard and play later.
I have more time to stretch now with three years to file my dissertation, but I'm still spending a fair amount of time reading and typing. As my advisor said, I have to hit the ground running with the amount of field work and data analysis I have to do--not to mention waiting for IRB approval. So the work started last year, and it's already raging right now. I know I've campaigned for balance before--but that doesn't mean I am slacking off of work or thinking of these years as party years.
"Balance" means that I am adding exercise to my regimen, but I definitely have a regimen. I get to do things that serve my mental, physical, and emotional health, but I don't get to slack off or over-commit myself to things that are inefficient uses of time. You're not a J.D. anymore. Don't join a law journal or law school organization. Don't decide that your do-over LL.M or S.J.D. years are the time to learn everything you didn't in law school. Write the monograph. And then spend whatever free time you have on things that make you happy so that you can have the energy to write when you plunk yourself down for a 8-10 hour day (and yes, you should create such a work/writing schedule on the weekdays even if you have class), as if you had a "real job").
In my personal quest for balance, I'm just trying to travel less (there was a time when I traveled almost every month for work or personal reasons), which means I get to spend weekends catching up on sleep, work, and the people in my life. Balance doesn't mean hitting the bars or being a tourist every weekend or going to every party--it means spending time more productively and healthily. I am making sure I get sleep. I get to cook, run, and have a hobby (choose your own adventure). I see a movie every couple of weeks or so, and try to find something to do one day (or both) a weekend that makes me happy and diverted. When I have such off-time, I spend it with loved ones, and that's the best balance to me. The rest of the time, yeah, I'm working. It's easy to forget this when you go back to the "student" life. Don't go to the bars every night with those crazy J.D.s! Set that alarm! You're not in college (or law school proper) anymore.
It's easy to forget your purpose as a domestic LL.M surrounded by J.D.s who are just barely out of college. Worse yet, you're surrounded by international LL.Ms who are here to get their American credential (sometimes on their firm's dime, their parents' dime, or a Fulbright dime) and lots of touring and partying before they go back to a salary bonus. You are not one of them. You are here to work. You are not 22 years old anymore (thank goodness). It sucks to be you.
But it will be awesome to be you in a few years (or so I hope), when you (and I) get that tenure track job--the best job in the world! Teaching a great subject to a new generation of law students.
Just make sure you write and avoid not-writing. It's easier said than done.
"Dude" asks:
Honestly, if you're a domestic LLM, chances are good you're mostly there to write - not to take more exam courses. Talking about how to do that (independant study options, thesis rules) would probably be extremely helpful.
I agree with you, Dude. Apart from the special topic LL.Ms (e.g. NYU's in tax, international law), academic-track LL.M programs vary widely in structure and rigorousness. I would say that Harvard is probably the most structured (all LL.Ms are required to write a thesis, and the S.J.D. program is relatively structured) while others, like Georgetown's, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Boalt Hall's are the least structured, allowing you to design your own course list and concentrate on independent writing. Most domestic LL.Ms will probably be either "research-track" or "thesis-track." And these are almost entirely unstructured programs, because the point is to not get a concentration in some subject--the point is to write.
The thing to do is actually write and avoid not-writing. While these programs are unstructured, they do have requirements and certain parameters. Most writing-track programs require academic aspirant LL.Ms to take a certain number of course units. They are about half the units required for general or special-topic LL.Ms, but they are still courses that will take time away from writing your monograph. So what to take for those courses?
Again, it probably depends on the structuredness of your program. At most schools there are no special courses just for academic-track LL.Ms and S.J.Ds. You will be choosing from the standard 2L/3L fare--and at this point, after your three-year J.D., what's there left to take? Whatever serves the monograph. At this point, you'll have most of the foundational courses taken cared of (this is why they're foundational). If you haven't taken Statutory Interpretation yet, I guess this that the do-over 4L year is as good as any to remedy that. And I'm not entirely opposed to exam courses--if they're useful for your monograph, then there's no reason not to take them. And the quick Vulcan-death-grip blow of the final frees you up for spending your writing energy on your monograph.
The thing to do is to make sure your courses serve your monograph. Depending on the program, there's lots of ways of going about this. Most schools will assign you/let you pick a faculty advisor to supervise your written work if they require a thesis/monograph. Depending on how much feedback you need/want, this can be a very interactive or completely detached relationship. Choose your advisor carefully, and don't be afraid to change advisors (but try not to change half-way--try to pick wisely and quickly in the first three weeks of school). But that faculty advisor will be the one supervising your independent study units (for which you will receive a grade upon completion of the monograph, most likely, so you'll get an "In-Progress" one semester and a final retroactive grade at the very end). Because your monograph is already graded, and you are already taking independent study units, your course units have to be efficient uses of your time.
Again, if you need some background knowledge, take those courses. For instance, since I never took it before and because I'm doing a project on the FMLA, I'm taking Employee Benefits this semester. But in general, my approach is to take courses that serve the monograph as much as possible. Depending on your school, you may be able to take courses from other departments. I'm taking a Research Methods Design course from a graduate department, and that will be useful for helping me design my management questionnaires and will give me feedback in the early stages my dissertation project design. I also plan on taking Organizations and Institutions from another department here on campus. I also take seminar courses from the law school that either 1) become a chapter of my monograph or 2) work as an independent paper in my field that I can publish while I'm working on the Big Project Monograph.
I don't mind spending 5-6 months writing a smaller article on a very particular topic in my field as I'm working on my 200 page monograph. Because I'm spending the first year of the S.J.D. doing field work, collecting data, and analyzing the data, I want to write as much as possible and workshop those articles on the conference circuit. Carefully chosen seminar topics/papers are ideal for this. Ever had a professor tell you that if you cleaned up a paper you could publish it? Well, at this stage, you definitely should. I would caution you to stick to your intended hedgehog specialization field though, so that when you do go on the market you have 2-3 articles (in addition to your dissertation) that look like a good package displaying your particular toolkit. As of now, I'm interdisciplinary but getting more focused: sociological perspectives on employment discrimination law.
I would write as much as possible, but by that I mean spend the bulk of your time writing 1-2 good articles. Try to get your coursework and writing projects to overlap and dovetail as much as possible. Make sure the things you write are good and publishable--so don't sweat it taking so many paper requirements that you end up writing 4 things badly. If you talk to the professor, most seminars will let you write research proposals in lieu of an independent paper. That's what I did last spring for one course--I wrote my dissertation proposal as I was finishing my independent study thesis, and with my third being an exam course, I got everything done. And now I have a dissertation proposal ready to go for this Fall (which I have spent the past week cleaning up for my new faculty advisor and other members of my dissertation committee, which is why I've been such a bad guest-blogger).
Try to write and avoid not-writing---so just keep writing. Of course it sucks. It always sucks. But you might be able to clean it up in the end. You might toss a lot, but at least some of what you write will be publishable. So just keep writing. If you're going to go on the market after the LL.M/VAP/Fellowship, you'd better write something publishable. If you're already on the market, then you probably have a few things under your belt. But if you are intending to go on the market very soon, you'd better be shopping your articles and getting a lot of eyes on those drafts. If you only have one year to do all of this, make it a productive year. I hate to say this, but don't sweat it trying to get too much balance. You'll fail at both--your productivity will suffer and your fun will not be all that fun if you feel guilt over not-working and are trying to cram fun into your busy schedule. Maybe you'll come back to this city as a tourist one day, but for now, work hard and play later.
I have more time to stretch now with three years to file my dissertation, but I'm still spending a fair amount of time reading and typing. As my advisor said, I have to hit the ground running with the amount of field work and data analysis I have to do--not to mention waiting for IRB approval. So the work started last year, and it's already raging right now. I know I've campaigned for balance before--but that doesn't mean I am slacking off of work or thinking of these years as party years.
"Balance" means that I am adding exercise to my regimen, but I definitely have a regimen. I get to do things that serve my mental, physical, and emotional health, but I don't get to slack off or over-commit myself to things that are inefficient uses of time. You're not a J.D. anymore. Don't join a law journal or law school organization. Don't decide that your do-over LL.M or S.J.D. years are the time to learn everything you didn't in law school. Write the monograph. And then spend whatever free time you have on things that make you happy so that you can have the energy to write when you plunk yourself down for a 8-10 hour day (and yes, you should create such a work/writing schedule on the weekdays even if you have class), as if you had a "real job").
In my personal quest for balance, I'm just trying to travel less (there was a time when I traveled almost every month for work or personal reasons), which means I get to spend weekends catching up on sleep, work, and the people in my life. Balance doesn't mean hitting the bars or being a tourist every weekend or going to every party--it means spending time more productively and healthily. I am making sure I get sleep. I get to cook, run, and have a hobby (choose your own adventure). I see a movie every couple of weeks or so, and try to find something to do one day (or both) a weekend that makes me happy and diverted. When I have such off-time, I spend it with loved ones, and that's the best balance to me. The rest of the time, yeah, I'm working. It's easy to forget this when you go back to the "student" life. Don't go to the bars every night with those crazy J.D.s! Set that alarm! You're not in college (or law school proper) anymore.
It's easy to forget your purpose as a domestic LL.M surrounded by J.D.s who are just barely out of college. Worse yet, you're surrounded by international LL.Ms who are here to get their American credential (sometimes on their firm's dime, their parents' dime, or a Fulbright dime) and lots of touring and partying before they go back to a salary bonus. You are not one of them. You are here to work. You are not 22 years old anymore (thank goodness). It sucks to be you.
But it will be awesome to be you in a few years (or so I hope), when you (and I) get that tenure track job--the best job in the world! Teaching a great subject to a new generation of law students.
Just make sure you write and avoid not-writing. It's easier said than done.
Does being a Freemason protect you from government persecution?
Cryer balked at Brown's suggestion that he won his case because he's a Freemason. "There is no national or world organization of Masons," he said.
"How in the world are we going to have a conspiracy to take over the world?"
"All the Masons do is pass on values that I think Ed and Elaine would approve of, if not applaud, if they knew about it," he said.
Source Union Leader: "Louisiana lawyer beats tax charges; worries for Browns"
Special Note: "Freemasonry is, by definition, a fraternity that aims to promote Brotherly Love and Friendship among its members. It is a worldwide organization that draws together men from every country, race, religion, ethnicity, opinion, and background, and helps cultivate and promote better relationships and bonds of friendships among them."
The above quote was taken from askafreemason.org, Now my question to the reader is this, what is the price that one pays for unquestioned loyalty? Would you be willing to advance a strangers agenda without questioning their motives, knowing full well that their agenda may be to harm an innocent? Mind you, I am not a close-minded person; I realize there are potentially many masons that do not have ill intent; however how would a mason protect one’s self from vouching for their “brother” who may be considered a fellow craft member, when their brother’s intent is to cause harm to an innocent?
It is well known among studied people that there are a large majority of masons in the legal field, lawyers judges etc, many masons are also in positions of power, however if you are taking part in this “brotherly love” by advancing a fellow masons agenda, would you not need to question the motives of such an agenda prior to submitting to the compulsory cooperation?
Therein lies the hitch, the cooperation is compulsory masons are binded by oath to this “brotherly love”. Now when you have secret ways of identifying one another via special handshakes, hand-signs, or by using abstract questions and answers, special pins or insignia that represent your status it normally goes unseen to the untrained eye.
The untrained eye has been conditioned to just accept such things as part of the landscape or scenery, yet many of us are aware of Freemasons unquestioned loyalty to one another, their susceptibility to infiltration by morally unscrupulous persons, many of us are also aware that some people in the advanced levels of masonry have been corrupted to the core, and the consequences of such cooperation or “brotherly love”, can prove to be very harmful to innocent people whom are morally righteous.
The blatant cooperative abuses that happen within the fraternity of Freemasons is the main reason that people in the know will cry of conspiracy which is by definition: “an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.” So in summation the evil of masonry is the conspiracy of “brotherly love” when it’s intent is to advance an agenda that harms an innocent by defrauding someone who is not a mason. This evil that I speak of cannot be avoided, when someone takes an oath that binds them to such unquestionable cooperation. This is the problem that I recognize with Freemasonry.
-Casey Lee Cobb
P.S. The occult practice of Freemasonry in the court system is a conflict of interest, potentially treasonous, and very unscrupulous. It does not necessarily allow for a fair trial. Fortunately for Tom Cryer, the law was upheld in his case, yet many times people in the tax honesty movement are persecuted in the courts, and are unable to rely on “brotherly love” for the magistrate to uphold the law and allow for a fair trial.
I’m not implying that the Judge in Tom Cryer’s case is a freemason; I’m merely stating that the number of Freemasons that have infiltrated the US legal system, has reached epidemic proportions, This is one of the biggest reasons why justice does not always prevail when pitted against “Brotherly Love”.
Hypotheticals to consider:
[Freemason Judge & Prosecutor] = How can justice prevail?
by comparison to:
[Freemason Judge & Defendant.] = Will justice prevail?
The mathematics of TrueColor (and what it has to do with legal education)
August is the cruelest month, bringing students back to the law schools, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull thoughts with fall pain.This I remember, and this I love. Imparting visual power to an entire blog network has rekindled an old passion of mine: mathematics in motion. The mathematics of TrueColor arose in connection with website maintenance. And now footfalls echo in my memory down a passage I did not take, towards the door I now will open into the rose-garden.
I needed to redo the background in a .jpg file. "What color?" asked Microsoft Paint. "Ochre," I replied. But the oracle of Redmond understood me not. She demanded values in red, green, blue.
In despair, I asked Dr. Peter Jones, purveyor of the Web's easiest color calculator. "DDDD99," I muttered. "221 221 153," he replied.
And thus the hex was broken.
The six-digit codes designating TrueColor values represent the culmination of longstanding efforts to master the fascinating mathematics of color perception by humans in order to direct color production by machines. The graphic at the top of this post depicts the first step. The CIE (Commission International d'Éclairage) mapped human color perception onto the two-dimensional chart depicted here. Using the CIE chart, as French as the metric system but as intuitive as fathoms and furlongs, proved as easy as charting great circle routes on a flat map.
The CIE color chart gave way to the more geometrically satisfying HSV system for expressing color as a function of hue, saturation, and value. The HSV model resembles a cone, and slicing it generates conic sections that express some portion of the universe of visible color in a useful way. The whole enterprise is vaguely reminiscent of navigating according to spherical coordinates.
So much for modeling how the human eye perceives color. How can a machine produce the 10 million different colors that the sharpest human eye can see? Coding the visible spectrum as different portions of red, green, and blue -- with each constituent color assigned eight bits of information -- yields 256 x 256 x 256 colors, or 16,777,216 in all.The unwieldy decimal number 16,777,216 is more elegantly described as 224, or, if you insist, a binary septillion. The exponent, 24, reveals an important truth: 24 bits suffice for the expression of TrueColor. More powerful 32-bit and 48-bit systems enable transparency and sophisticated overlays that are less prone to rounding errors that would otherwise accumulate with each iteration of image filtering.
The familiar RGB (red green blue) color scheme, traceable to the awful days of the four-bit, 16-color palette of IBM's color graphics adapter, is even more helpfully expressed in hexadecimal format. Since 16 x 16 equals 256, base 16 mathematics allow us to express any value from 0 to 255 with exactly two digits. Digits 1 and 2 represent red, digits 3 and 4 represent green, and digits 5 and 6 represent blue. DDDD99 -- quite a bit of red and green, with considerably less blue -- produces MoneyLaw's background color, casually described as "ochre."
Very well then. What does all this have to do with legal education?
Long ago I ran out of digits to tally the number of legally trained professionals who have confessed bewilderment at the idea that law might -- and indeed should -- be quantified to the very limits of the power of numbers to describe the world and to prescribe how best to fix its flaws. Law school, so these individuals confessed, was the refuge from numbers, equations, graphs. Check your probability distributions at the door. We went to the law school because we bombed the GMAT, much less the MCAT.
Ah, but there lies the rose-garden. The world is filled with problems that can be expressed in numbers. If the law harbors any hope of solving them, it cannot afford to discard so basic a tool as mathematics. As undergraduates approach the LSAT, as 1Ls matriculate, as professors end their collective estivation, I offer this wish for the coming academic year. Would it be that our profession no longer confessed -- no longer cherished -- its rampant innumeracy. Would it be that the law, reunited with the tools of quantitative analysis and reinvigorated with an appreciation of mathematical beauty, might cease to be the mathematical waste land of the social sciences.
Hacking the New "Employment at Nine Months" Formula
The people have spoken—or, rather, 30 readers have voted. I earlier polled you for advice about what to do with a rankings hack I've thought up. Specifically, I have in mind a way for law schools to game the new "employment at 9 months" formula that U.S. News & World Report will start using in next year's law school rankings. "What should I do with the new Emp9 hack?" I asked. Most of you replied, "Tell everybody, to level the playing field." (And nobody ponied up the money to make, "Don't be a chump! Sell it to the highest bidder," an attractive option.) I'm happy to oblige.
In brief, some law schools might improve their Emp9 scores next year by remaining willfully ignorant of whether alums likely to be studying full time for the Bar nine months after graduation have found paying work. That strategy would allow a school to classify those graduates as "Employment Status Unknown." Why do that? Because USN&WR counts each such grad as 25% employed.
Consider an example. If we take the average of all law schools covered by the most recent ABA-LSAC Official Guide [Excel format] we get these numbers:
Plug those numbers into the old Emp9 formula, and you get:
[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / (222 – 5) = 92.6%.
If our hypothetical average school were willing to play the classification game I described earlier (classifying graduates studying full-time for the Bar as "Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment,") its Emp9 calculation would run thusly:
[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / (222 – 5 - 5) = 94.8%.
The new Emp9 formula, because its denominator does not subtract out grads "Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment," will no longer respond to that classification trick. Under the new formula, our hypothetical school's Emp9 score will suffer accordingly:
[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / 222 = 90.5%.
A law school could still game even that new and improved Emp9 formula, however. How? By classifying as "Employment Status Unknown" grads who would otherwise qualify as "Unemployed, Studying Full-Time for the Bar." Such grads would then count as 25% employed in the Emp9 formula. Consider the result for our hypothetical law school:
[194 + ([8 + 5] *.25) + 5] / 222 = 91.1%.
That's not a huge effect, granted, but a law school with the right numbers could gain a lot of grounds from the hack. Suppose that 10 of our hypothetical law school's grads had failed the Bar the first time around, for instance. It might then trick the Emp9 formula into spitting out "92.2%."
How could a law school implement the hack? An outright lie would suffice, of course. Importantly, however, law school administrators need not resort to anything so crude as that. They might instead remain deliberately ignorant of whether alums who failed the summer Bar exam had found work nine months after graduation. That strategy would, however, put at risk the opportunity to claim as "Employed" grads who'd found jobs that don't require Bar membership. An especially daring and clever administrator might thus devise mechanisms to carefully control how much she learns about graduates who failed the summer Bar exam, keeping close tabs on those who find work while ignoring those who don't. Suffice it to say that a subtle mind could find that "Unknown" includes many shades.
For all I know, experienced law school administrators might regard these observations as old hat. Judging from the ABA data, however, I don't think that many schools have exploited the hack I've described. (For evidence of that, I calculated for each school the ratio, "number of first-time takers to fail the summer Bar exam/number of alums with 'Employment Status Unknown' nine months after graduation." The median ratio for all schools was 17%; the average 32%. Only 11 schools had ratios above 100%, 17 above 75%, and 28 above 50%.) Until now, after all, schools eager to pump up their Emp9 numbers have typically found other strategies more fruitful. It will prove interesting to review the ABA data next year, to see if this new rankings hack attracts new rankings hackers.
[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]
Earlier posts about Emp9 measure:
In brief, some law schools might improve their Emp9 scores next year by remaining willfully ignorant of whether alums likely to be studying full time for the Bar nine months after graduation have found paying work. That strategy would allow a school to classify those graduates as "Employment Status Unknown." Why do that? Because USN&WR counts each such grad as 25% employed.
Consider an example. If we take the average of all law schools covered by the most recent ABA-LSAC Official Guide [Excel format] we get these numbers:
- # of Graduates: 222
- Employment Status Known: 214
- Employment Status Unknown: 8
- Employed: 194
- Pursuing Grad Degree: 5
- Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment: 5
- Unemployed, Studying Full-Time for Bar: 5
Plug those numbers into the old Emp9 formula, and you get:
[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / (222 – 5) = 92.6%.
If our hypothetical average school were willing to play the classification game I described earlier (classifying graduates studying full-time for the Bar as "Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment,") its Emp9 calculation would run thusly:
[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / (222 – 5 - 5) = 94.8%.
The new Emp9 formula, because its denominator does not subtract out grads "Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment," will no longer respond to that classification trick. Under the new formula, our hypothetical school's Emp9 score will suffer accordingly:
[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / 222 = 90.5%.
A law school could still game even that new and improved Emp9 formula, however. How? By classifying as "Employment Status Unknown" grads who would otherwise qualify as "Unemployed, Studying Full-Time for the Bar." Such grads would then count as 25% employed in the Emp9 formula. Consider the result for our hypothetical law school:
[194 + ([8 + 5] *.25) + 5] / 222 = 91.1%.
That's not a huge effect, granted, but a law school with the right numbers could gain a lot of grounds from the hack. Suppose that 10 of our hypothetical law school's grads had failed the Bar the first time around, for instance. It might then trick the Emp9 formula into spitting out "92.2%."
How could a law school implement the hack? An outright lie would suffice, of course. Importantly, however, law school administrators need not resort to anything so crude as that. They might instead remain deliberately ignorant of whether alums who failed the summer Bar exam had found work nine months after graduation. That strategy would, however, put at risk the opportunity to claim as "Employed" grads who'd found jobs that don't require Bar membership. An especially daring and clever administrator might thus devise mechanisms to carefully control how much she learns about graduates who failed the summer Bar exam, keeping close tabs on those who find work while ignoring those who don't. Suffice it to say that a subtle mind could find that "Unknown" includes many shades.
For all I know, experienced law school administrators might regard these observations as old hat. Judging from the ABA data, however, I don't think that many schools have exploited the hack I've described. (For evidence of that, I calculated for each school the ratio, "number of first-time takers to fail the summer Bar exam/number of alums with 'Employment Status Unknown' nine months after graduation." The median ratio for all schools was 17%; the average 32%. Only 11 schools had ratios above 100%, 17 above 75%, and 28 above 50%.) Until now, after all, schools eager to pump up their Emp9 numbers have typically found other strategies more fruitful. It will prove interesting to review the ABA data next year, to see if this new rankings hack attracts new rankings hackers.
[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]
Earlier posts about Emp9 measure:
- Change to U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology
- How U.S. News Calculates "Employment at 9 Months"
- The How, Who, and Why of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
- USN&WR to Change Employment Measure
- ABA v. USN&WR on "Employment at 9 Months" Data
- The Ethics of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
- 2008 USN&WR Law School Rankings Under New Emp9 Formula
- The Emp9 Puzzle: Answers and Questions
- Rankings Hack Hot Potato
Is the Tail Wagging the Dog Always Bad? Or The Rub
Taking the USN&WR rankings seriously is a little like thinking fans vote for the best players when determining the baseball and basketball All Star teams. The connection between the voting and the actual merits is far from clear. Still law schools behave like teams that just want players in the All Star game even if it means finishing well down in the division.There are at least three areas of controversy:
Mehr Musik!
Okay, so Goethe might not have said "Mehr Licht!" on his deathbed. (Alles wird auf dieser deutschsprechenden Webseite für die Neugierigen erklärt.) But on all the days between birth and death, "Mehr Musik!" is the worthier sentiment. If you're ever forced to choose between sight and hearing, do the smart thing: Donate your corneas, and keep your eardrums intact. As it happens, I'm in the mood for a concert.I'm also making up for lost time. Paul Horwitz posted an item on the Dixie Chicks, and it took me six months to notice. Ye gods.
Paul ultimately pans the Chicks' most recent album, Taking the Long Way. "The righteousness and angry defiance," he concludes, "wear thin pretty quickly over the course of the album."
Although I do like Taking the Long Way, I sympathize with Paul. What Faulkner said of literature applies with equal force to music: The "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself . . . alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."In other words, dump the politics and write or sing about human passions. "Ich bin lieber Dichter als Richter" summarizes, again in German, the wisdom I've derived from intensely hating the Mets. Not that I am any closer to being a poet than a judge, but the message is clear. Laws die; Lieder, never.
This is admittedly a huge windup for what is ultimately a very simple blog post. Sometimes you gotta dance, and sometimes you just want to listen to music that speaks to you. For me, right now, I could use some vintage Dixie Chicks. Herewith two videos sandwiched around a sound clip from the Chicks' breakthrough album, Wide Open Spaces:- There's Your Trouble:
- Am I the Only One (Who's Ever Felt This Way?):
- Wide Open Spaces:
The Dixie Chicks cover Maria McKee's "Am I the Only One (Who's Ever Felt This Way)?" (.mp3 file available via Chicks Rock! Chicks Rule!)
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