Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli

Christopher came into my and my ex-wife’s life from our favorite taco restaurant in 1991 or 1992. Eberly and I were eating at the now-gone Happy Taco in St. Louis, when one of the owners came up to us. “You seem like such nice people. Would you like to adopt a cat?” He was a tiny flea-ridden kitten with frizzy orange fur, found by the owners in the alley, but he was very cute, and of course we took him home.

For the first week or two Eberly brushed and combed him constantly, until finally he was rid of fleas. Our other cat, William, took to him right away. William had a bad habit of chasing and attacking Eberly’s bare feet as she walked around the apartment; clearly he needed a playmate. William and Christopher became fast friends, and they would often be found curled up together.

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Yesterday I posted on Facebook a simple question:

What law schools have undertaken serious consideration of the permanent restructuring of the legal market in their mission & strategic plan?

Reasonable people may differ on whether the current recession and the last few years of poor hiring by law firms necessarily mean we are undergoing a permanent, fundamental change rather than a simple economic cycle. The evidence is mounting, however, that reasonable people cannot take the latter conclusion as a given. If numerous scholars and practitioners who have examined the trends closely have concluded that the legal market is undergoing basic, long-term change, it is foolish to ignore their conclusions and act as if everything is going to go back shortly to the fat times and eternally growing legal market we all know and love.

The New York Times chart showing the state-by-state surplus of lawyers in the U.S. is only the latest indication that the market for lawyers is changing. Brian Tamanaha notes some of the likely effects on law schools:

The 2010 acceptance numbers suggest that many law schools are already in a worrisome spot. That year, twenty schools accepted between 45% and 49% of the students who applied; twenty-two schools accepted between 50% and 59% of applicants; and seven schools has an acceptance rate of 60% or higher (Cooley was the highest at 83.3%). Added together, nearly a quarter of law schools in the country accepted close to half or more of their applicants—and this was before the latest decline in the number of applicants.

Law schools have enjoyed flush times for more than a decade. Tough times are ahead.

Stephen Bainbridge adds:

The point should be obvious. Unless law schools voluntarily start consolidating and downsizing, which seems about as likely as yours truly winning the Miss America pageant, we face a long-term prospect of ever increasing competition for fewer and fewer applicants. Long before the day comes that there are fewer applicants than available seats, we will be in very big trouble. Budgets will have to be slashed to pay financial aid to attract students. Admission standards will have to go down. Relations between deans, faculty, and students will be increasingly fraught.

What we have here is a classic collective action problem. Unfortunately, what we don’t have is a market in which to develop solutions to that problem.

For many traditional critics of legal education, the response is simple: law schools should quit teaching all that theory and focus on practical skills so new graduates can hit the ground running (as minimally skilled servants to entrenched capital interests). Larry Ribstein suggests that such solutions are shortsighted:

The problem isn’t that we have too many law trained people and so should train fewer.  In fact, in our increasingly regulated economy, there is probably a gross undersupply of law-trained people.

The problem is that regulation has fixed the nature of the product so it hasn’t adequately responded to shifts in demand.  The downward demand shifts have been produced by, most importantly, technology.  But demand is increasing for new kinds of law-trained people both at the low-cost end of service to the poor and middle class and the potentially high-profit end of producing new kinds of products and services (see Law’s Information Revolution).  Yet regulation has locked law schools into models that don’t serve these new needs.

The best short analysis I’ve read was just published in the ABA Journal, “Law Job Stagnation May Have Started Before the Recession—And It May Be a Sign of Lasting Change,” which concludes:

Whether the changes affecting the legal profession are indeed a reflection of market cycles or a complete paradigm shift will become evident in coming years. But for those betting substantive change has not happened, they are betting their practices against the future.

The answers thus far on my Facebook post suggest that there aren’t many law schools taking this seriously. One colleague comments “I think that depends on what ‘permanent restructuring of the legal market’ means–is there enough agreement on that to have taken it into consideration?”

How much agreement do we need to begin taking the future seriously?

Interesting and important news. Some deans appear to understand the 1996
ABA antitrust consent decree to mean that ABA accreditation is an empty formality. With increasing demands for accountability throughout higher education, and the scandalous misrepresentation of employment figures by many law schools, it seems more likely that the accreditation process will only lead to more intensive scrutiny of law schools, not less.

TaxProf Blog: ABA Reforms Law School Placement Data Reporting,

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2011/06/aba-reforms-.html

The story of Ashley Paine, the 24-year-old high school teacher in Georgia who was fired in August 2009 for drinking a Guinness on a vacation in Dublin, is making the rounds again. It is typically told as a story of the risks of Facebook and the Internet’s destruction of privacy, but this framing misses the larger and more dangerous issues in the Paine story.

The pictures were exactly what you’d expect from a European summer vacation: Cafes in Italy and Spain, the Guinness brewery in Ireland. So 24-year-old Ashley Payne, a public high school English teacher in Georgia, was not prepared for what happened when her principal asked to see her in August 2009.

“He just asked me, ‘Do you have a Facebook page?’” Payne said. “And you know, I’m confused as to why I am being asked this, but I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Do you have any pictures of yourself up there with alcohol?’”

In fact, the picture that concerned the principal – showing Payne holding a glass of wine and a mug of beer - was on her Facebook page. There was also a reference to a local trivia contest with a profanity in its title.

Payne was told a parent of one of her students called to complain. And then, Payne says, she was given a choice: resign or be suspended.

“He told me that I needed to make a decision before I left, or he was going to go ahead and suspend me,” she said.

She resigned. Attorney Richard Storrs is fighting to get Payne’s job back.

“It would be like I went to a restaurant and I saw my daughter’s teacher sitting there with her husband having a glass of some kind of liquid,” Storr said. “You know, is that frowned upon by the school board? Is that illegal? Is that improper? Of course not. It’s the same situation in this case.”

But here’s the really troubling part: Payne had used the privacy settings on Facebook. She thought that only her closest friends could see her vacation photos or her use of the “B” word.

“I wouldn’t use it in a classroom, no,” she said. “But Facebook is not the classroom. And it’s not open to the students of my classroom. They are not supposed to see it. I have privacy in place so they don’t see it.”

Privacy?

What Ashley Payne or anyone of us who uses the Internet has to realize is this: Today our private lives are no longer so private.

In fact, the Facebook issue is, to me, largely irrelevant. Storrs is correct: it is exactly like witnessing a 24-year-old adult drinking a glass of beer or wine in a restaurant. The link to Facebook and privacy issues accomplishes three purposes: (1) fitting into the dominant framework that the openness of communication on the Internet is something to be feared, (2) directing attention away from the gender-based and economic issues that made it so easy for the school board to fire an adult for drinking a glass of beer on her own time, and (3) infantilizing all of us by prohibiting adults from engaging in behavior seen as inappropriate for children.

It is hard to imagine that a 24-year-old male teacher in Georgia would have been fired for the “offense” of drinking a beer in Dublin. A male high school teachers would be less likely to be viewed as a role model for high school teens (that’s what high school football is for). As an adult woman, Ms. Paine must be forced into a patriarchal model of young femininity.

The problem with the privacy framing is this: there is no reason that Ms. Paine’s consumption of Ireland’s favorite beverage should be considered private or shameful. It is only because the principal and school board chose to use it as a reason to fire her that privacy became an issue. Of course, employers in Georgia are free to fire employees for no cause; such is the freedom our system provides us. Ms. Paine, of course, is equally free to choose between employment and behaving like an adult.

I may be wrong about the gender issue; perhaps a male teacher would have been fired for the same cause. If so, that only strengthens the case for my third claim. Just as some calls for censorship of adult materials would restrict access by everyone to reading books and viewing films that would not cause discomfort to parents of minor children, so the privacy framing of an adult’s firing for drinking a beer posits that adult’s activity as shameful, as something to be hidden. Privacy framing in this way serves to diminish the scope of the public sphere by expanding the sphere of the shameful.

(Cross-posted from ClassCrits.)