Unfortunately, it seems as though another law school is feeling the effects of the declining enrollment facing law schools across the country in recent years. George Kosko and Robert Carr, the owners of Charleston School of Law located in South Carolina, have recently announced that they might not enroll a new class of students this coming fall. The statement they put out read:

We cannot in good faith enroll another class when, like last year, the school is spending more money than is coming in; when we cannot assure the students that they will be able to use federal student loans for their full three years; and when we cannot be sure the school will be able to maintain its license and stay open

While this was not a formal announcement of closure, it does not look promising that the school is going to be able to turn things around.

Understandably, many of the students were shocked and confused by this news. The announcement came during the thick of finals season, a bizarre time to announce something that could rattle and greatly affect the futures of the school’s current students. Many students expressed that they were in disbelief that the administration would announce something of this magnitude during finals.

Other students expressed disappointment. Second-year law student Drew Waxler believed that he would finish his three years at Charleston School of Law and then head back home to Burlington, Vermont to start his career. However, it appears that his plans may have to change. He says that, “it is discouraging that you won’t have an alma mater to take pride in after graduation if they do decide to stop taking” new classes of students.

While many of the students were shocked by the news, the school has actually been in trouble since 2013 when its owners announced that a sale to the education company Infilaw was under consideration. At the time, many students and faculty members expressed their outrage with the sale. They explained how the three schools currently under Infilaw are of a lower caliber than Charleston. If the school were to become an Infilaw school, it would decrease the value of a Charleston Law degree. To the relief of many, the sale didn’t go through. However, it appears as though the process has done lasting damage to the school.

So, what does this mean for the students? According to the American Bar Association and state rules, a law school is not allowed to simply close its doors without doing anything for its students. If they decide to close, they will have to submit a “teach-out” plan that details how current students will finish their education programs. So, while certainly not ideal, at least the students can know that they won’t be left to figure things out for themselves.

The owners have stated that they expect to release a formal announcement at some point this week.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Will This Law School Shut Down for Good? appeared first on Law Street.

About once a week, I head to my local store to pick up some things that I’ll need for the week, including some milk. Milk is always one of those tricky purchases, because you have such a short amount of time to use all of it before it expires. Thats why, whenever I go to buy milk, the first thing I do is look at the “sell by” date printed on the carton. But if I were buying milk in Montana, this is something that I would not need to worry about. That’s because in Montana, there is a law stating that milk cannot be sold or donated 12 days after pasteurization. This unusually strict law has forced grocers across Montana to dump thousands of gallons of what most would consider perfectly good milk each week. It’s for this reason that a documentary film crew from Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic recently travelled to Missoula, Montana to get the inside scoop on the state’s milk law.

Montana has by far the stricted law in the United States governing the “sell by” date of milk, and is only one of two states to even have a law that has a requirement for the number of days that milk can sit on a retailer’s shelf. That other state is Pennsylvania, where milk is allowed to sit on shelves for 17 days. Other states either just require that a date is printed without actually specifying any guidelines for that date, or, do not have a law at all.

Harvard Food and Law Policy Clinic director Emily Broad Leib stated that “this has been part of a long-running interest of ours that’s around how we’re wasting so much of the food we produce in the U.S. We’re looking at how these laws–like the law we’re looking at in Montana–are the cause of that waste.” One of goals of the documentary crew to use this case to illustrate the issue of food waste and how food expiration and “sell by” dates contribute to that problem.

Emily Deddensm, a law student working on the documentary, explained that they “went through a bunch of big ideas throughout the semester and finally settled on this law in Montana, which requires milk to be thrown out 12 days after pasteurization” because they “just thought this is good because it’s such an extreme example of the bigger problem.” To them, this was a perfect example of food being thrown out and wasted far before it needs to be.

This Montana law was established in 1980 by the Montana Livestock Board, and despite people’s countless attempts to change it, has remained firmly in place since then. Since studies show that the milk is actually just as fresh after 28 days, the documentary team set out to try and figure out what consumers actually think that arbitrary “sell by” date means.

According to Broad Lieb:

This law makes no sense. It’s really bad for consumers. But even though Montana is the strictest on milk, other states are strict on other things. Again, it’s not just milk. With all of these foods, it’s a quality date. It’s when the manufacturer thinks you get the peak quality on that food. And yet, 90 percent of consumers think it’s about safety, and they throw perfectly good food away.

While being interviewed, Missoula grocer Jim Edwards explained that dairies are the ones that do not want this rule to change. That’s because it means that grocers like him have to buy more milk to fill up their shelves. In addition, it keeps milk prices higher in Montana than in surrounding states.

He also explained that this law makes no sense when actually considering how long it takes a gallon of milk to go bad. According to Edwards:

Little cartons of milk, they go bad quick. But they’re dated for 30 days or something like that. But the gallons never go bad. Half gallons go bad before gallons because anything in a bigger container will last longer. It’s just like wine. A great big huge bottle of wine will age better than a small bottle of wine.

Yet it is the larger gallons that have the sooner expiration dates while the smaller, half gallons have later dates.

According to the documentary crew, most people are unaware that they are throwing away perfectly good milk. Broad Lieb explained that “most people think that if they eat that food after the date, they are going to get sick.” From personal experience, I can say that this is something that I have thought–and have never chanced. I’ve always thrown away food or milk that has reached the date printed on the container.

This is why another goal of the documentary is to raise consumer awareness about the actual meanings of expiration and “sell by” dates. So far, they are already doing a decent job just by sharing information about the documentary. Next time I’ll think twice about throwing away my “spoiled” milk.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Harvard Law Documentary Uncovers the Truth About Expiration Dates appeared first on Law Street.

Many legal clinics have popped up in recent years in order to provide free, or inexpensive, legal advice to lower income people who need it. For example, just a few weeks ago, I wrote about the proposed requirements for law students in California to work for free in the many legal aid clinics throughout the state. So while these types of clinics are in no way novel, the idea to combine one with a medical clinic is. But that’s exactly what Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law is working on.

Dickinson School of Law has announced that it plans to partner up with a local medical facility to create a medical-legal clinic set to open in 2016. One possible partner for this project is the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, however, nothing has been decided officially.

The mastermind behind the new medical-legal clinic is Medha D. Makhlouf, a current attorney at the Central West Justice Center in Worchester, Massachusetts. She is slated to join the Dickinson School of Law faculty on July 1 as the medical-legal facilities founding director and a clinical professor of law. She will be in charge of supervising the planning of the new clinic.

Through her work in Worchester, Makhlouf has come to realize that low income clients’ medical issues are often related to their underlying legal issues. She hopes that this project will foster a collaborative environment amongst the medical and legal communities, allowing clients a place where they can improve both their medical and their legal situations at the same time. She said that “It’s not just about lawyers and health care providers using their respective skills — it’s more about the collaboration. Often health care and law are intertwined.”

Makhlouf explained that “many clients are referred to me for an isolated problem, like maybe their food stamps were terminated, then I’ll find that there’s two or three more underlying legal issues that have been negatively affecting their health.” Other examples of this problem are conditions in a home environment that exacerbate asthma or a client who doesn’t have health insurance because of their immigration status.

The medical facility will also benefit from this partnership, as “not all medical problems can be solved in an exam room or with a prescription.”

Dickinson Law Interim Dean Gary Gilden is enthusiastic about the benefits that the clinic could bring to both the community and the law students. He said that “from an educational standpoint, this puts law students in a medical environment. This opens them up to educational opportunities they wouldn’t normally have.”

Law students who participate in the clinic will have the opportunity to work with staff from both the law school and the partnering medical facility. Makhlouf has shared that this opportunity will allow students to engage in experimental learning, where they will be able to develop knowledge, skills, and values from experiences outside a traditional classroom environment.

In addition to the benefits of working directly in the clinic, Dickinson students will participate in joint classes with medical students and students studying in other health-related disciplines. Makhlouf will also be teaching classes such as immigration law and law and medicine to help students gain some context and background on the issues that they might deal with in the clinic.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Dickinson School of Law Plans Innovative Medical-Legal Clinic appeared first on Law Street.

Back in February, I brought you the news that William Mitchell College of Law and Hamline University School of Law had signed an agreement to merge together to create Mitchell | Hamline School of Law. The goal of the merger was to help alleviate competition in the region and mitigate the effects of declining law school enrollment over the last several years. Unfortunately, that merger has started to get a little messy, in light of a lawsuit filed by some of William Mitchell’s professors.

One thing that was still up in the air back in February was the fate of the faculty and staff from both of these schools. Officials stated that there would need to be cuts, but they had hoped that most of these cuts would be voluntary.

It seems however, that things did no go as they had hoped. Two William Mitchell professors, Carl Moy and John Radsan, are now accusing the school of proposing “unacceptable changes” to its tenure policy in order to accommodate the necessary cuts in staff to move forward with the merger.

The two professors are alleging that William Mitchell could not find enough faculty to voluntarily take part-time positions or retire altogether as the school had hoped. The complaint says that in response, the school is trying to change tenure code in order to allow the dismissal of more faculty.

In their complaint filed with the Ramsey County District Court, professors Moy and Radsan are asking the court to rule that the school’s attempt to change tenure rules breaches their contracts. They are also asking that the court award them with costs, disbursements, and “further relief as the court deems just.”

According to the suit, the “defendant’s proposed amendment would alter the tenure code so that it would deny otherwise-tenured faculty ‘tenure…defendant would be able to terminate a tenured faculty member without adequate cause …” Essentially, these faculty members could be let go regardless of whether or not they have tenure. This directly contradicts the entire purpose of tenure, which is designed to promote job security. While it’s standard practice at most institutions to let the non-tenured faculty go first, according to Radsan, the Board of Trustees is refusing to do so in this situation.

Currently, the school’s tenure code only allows tenured faculty to be let go if they can’t or don’t perform their job, or if there is a financial crisis. However, according to the complaint, the proposed changes would allow William Mitchell to “terminate tenured faculty, without adequate cause and without declaring a financial exigency, and without paying the terminated tenured faculty member at least one year’s salary and benefits beyond the effective date of the termination.”

They are also alleging that William Mitchell’s president and dean Eric Janus and Associate Dean Mary Pat Byrn had expressed that decisions about faculty cuts would be made with some “degree of favoritism.” The complaint states that “Janus would decide what faculty members would stay or go based on the member’s personal loyalty to Janus, their support for the administration’s policies and proposals, and whether the faculty member had a ‘poor attitude.'”

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out, what effects it will have on the impending merger, and whether it will affect the likelihood of any other schools getting involved in mergers like this moving forward.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post William Mitchell Law Professors File Lawsuit Over Possible Tenure Changes appeared first on Law Street.

There are a lot of factors that go into choosing the right law school. When considering where to apply, we look at things like prestige, specialty areas, and affordability to help us guide our decisions. But according to a study done at the University of Minnesota, another thing that we should be considering is a law school’s proximity to major law firms.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that a law school’s proximity to major law firms can affect its students’ future employment prospects. They found that students who are earning their law degrees in areas with many major legal firms are entering communities with better retention for young lawyers. This longevity is something uniquely found in these areas, as many of the firms are looking to hire students from the nearby law schools.

The study explored 33,000 law partners from the biggest and top-earning 115 law firms across the country. They then determined what law school each of those partners attended, and ranked the law schools. The official report with all of the numerical findings and rankings is set to be published this May. So, if working for a big firm after graduation is your goal, it may be a good idea to check out that report and aim for a law school in one of those locations.

Maggie Gloyeske, the director of lawyer and consultant recruiting at Faegre Baker Daniels, has stressed that her firm likes to hire from local law schools in Minnesota. She said: “lawyers who come to work for us, who have a connection to our community, tend to stay longer and think of this as a career move versus just a job.”

While this finding isn’t anything new or shocking, it is often something that is overlooked by students when they are considering where to apply. Many students rely heavily on the rankings put out each year by the U.S. News and World Report or other outlets. While these rankings are certainly a useful tool when first starting the law school search, as they give a broad overview of the law schools on the list, they omit several important factors like the number of graduates that go on to work in local law firms.

This may be because those rankings put significant weight on surveys completed by lawyers, law professors, and judges. According to Samuel Engel, one of the co-authors of the study, these professionals are likely to give law schools the same ranking each year, regardless of any changes that the schools may make. Engel stated that “it’s hard for [USNWR] to get these trends because they’re asking people who haven’t been in law school for a generation to rank law schools.”

While the USNWR rankings focused on a school’s reputation, immediate employment placement, and LSAT scores, the study done by the University of Minnesota based its evaluations on the school sizes and the number of graduates who went on to work at major law firms in their area. As a result, that list looked quite different.

This is not the first time that someone has taken a different approach to ranking  law schools. This past summer, we at Law Street Media put out a set of law school rankings by speciality area. These rankings took into account things such as class offerings, alumni relations, and extracurricular programs. Additionally, like the University of Minnersota’s rankings, our rankings included law school proximity to major law firms. The goal of these rankings was to offer a qualitative and more comprehnsive approach to something that is often quantitative.

While each of these sets of rankings has something unique to offer, none of them are exhaustive. When considering what law schools to apply to, my advice would be to do as much research as possible while using the rankings as a starting point. While law school rankings are a useful tool, law schools have so much more to offer than just a place on a list.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Choosing a Law School? Location Matters appeared first on Law Street.

Recently, some Stanford Law students realized that they could request access to their admissions records in accordance with the 1974 Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. Students around the country, including some at Yale Law, caught wind of this and requested to see their records as well. So, how did Yale respond? By deleting all of its admissions data, of course.

Now Yale Law School will continue to delete all of its admissions evaluation data after each annual admissions cycle. Included in this data are numerical evaluations made by Yale Law School officials and faculty and the identities of the deciding individuals. This decision was made by law school administrators without any sort of announcement, and the school had already received multiple FERPA requests before the records were deleted.

This practice is not completely new for Yale–before they had electronic applications starting in 2001, applications were submitted on paper and were discarded after each year.  In an email, Yale Law School Associate Dean Asha Rangappa said: “recent FERPA requests prompted us to look at our record-keeping practices, and the decision was made to revert to our previous practice, which was to discard evaluation records after they had fulfilled their intended purpose.”

According to Rangappa, this decision was made to protect the professors at the school. Giving students access to their admissions records would mean giving them access to the notes and numerical evaluations made by the professors throughout the admissions process. These professors are the ones that go on to ultimately decide who get accepted into the prestigious law school, and allowing students to see those decisions may lead to tensions between students and faculty.

Rangappa also stressed that, “candid evaluations provided by faculty members and others are a critical part of the law school admissions process, and if faculty reviewers knew that this information could be shared with admitted students, they might be reluctant to participate in the process.”

Professors like Akhil Amar, who is also faculty chair of Yale Law School, understands this decision despite that fact that it was made without the law professors’ knowledge or input. He acknowledges that the maintenance of school records is the responsibility of the administration, and does not necessarily involve the faculty.

In fact, Amar not only understands, but also agrees with the decision. He told the Yale Daily News that it’s important to preserve the unique quality of the admissions process, and deleting these records will help do just that. If every student has access to their admissions records, then it wouldn’t be long before information about the admissions process were to spread. According to Amar, the faculty who have participated in the admissions process were doing so assuming confidentiality and protection.

Additionally, Amar argues that FERPA does not actually allow students to examine their admissions records. According to Amar, the purpose of FERPA is to ensure that future employers or other schools receive the correct student record.  Students are allowed to see their academic records to ensure that all of the information contained in them is correct. However, no one else will ever need to see the students’ admissions records. Amar stated:

As I understand the basic purpose of the law, it is to allow students to have access to files that perhaps might be visible to various outsiders — employers and judges and the like — to correct their records. When it comes to admissions decisions, that is not part of their academic record; that is not shared with anyone. FERPA is about giving the student privacy and a certain control of the information so that the student can correct any mistakes, and none of that applies to admissions information.

Students, however, had mixed reviews of the decision. Some students, like a 3L named Matt Kemp, understood it. According to Kemp, he understands the desire of the faculty to maintain privacy and protection throughout the admissions process, but also believes that the purpose of FERPA is to allow students to see their admissions records.

Others, like 3L Dennis Owrutsky, considered the decision to be “irresponsible.” He believes that in deleting the records, the school lost valuable insight into the admissions process. He said that “[The law school] now lacks the resources to evaluate itself objectively.”

While there were a range of responses to the decision, most students do agree that Yale Law School did not have a legal obligation to preserve the data. It will be interesting to see the response to increased awareness about FERPA. Will more students across the country start asking to see their admissions records? And if so, will other schools follow in Yale’s footsteps and take action in order  to preserve the integrity of their admission processes?

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Yale Law School Deletes Admissions Records After Student Requests appeared first on Law Street.

The State Bar of California is considering a proposal requiring that law students provide 50 hours of legal work free or at very low rates to low income clients. The proposal is designed to use law students to combat the problem of a growing number of California residents who need legal advice but cannot afford to hire an attorney.

This trend started during the economic recession that began in 2007, when funding to provide legal aid to the poor plummeted just when many needed it the most. Many California residents were falling into poverty and needed help with matters such as evictions and foreclosures. With decreased funding came increased selectivity on the part of cheap legal resources, which meant that most of the people who needed it did not receive legal aid. Even though the economy has improved, the state bar still believes that over one million California residents seeking legal aid are turned away each year.

One California resident who has been able to take advantage of free legal services is Carlis Pegues, a 64-year-old woman who is claiming that her landlord is trying to evict her. Buried in paperwork and plagued with the thought of losing her home, Pegues found herself at the free legal clinic in Skid Row. Now, every Wednesday, she takes the bus from her home in the Baldwin Village area of South Los Angeles to the clinic. There she is greeted by a group of attorneys and law students who provide free legal advice for one hour per week to anyone who seeks it.

Pegues is certainly grateful for these weekly meetings. She told the Los Angeles Times:

It’s a traumatic, mind-boggling experience trying to get out of this situation when everything is closing in on me, If I have a problem, they don’t look down on me here. They just step up and help.

While one goal of the proposal is to help more people like Pegues, it is also aimed to give law students hands-on experience before they obtain their licenses to practice law. Supporters of the proposed 50-hour requirement say that they hope this experience would help prospective attorneys gain experience and gain a sense of appreciation for how important it is to provide legal aid to low-income residents in California.

However, not everyone is in support of this proposal. Many, particular those who currently work in legal aid, are concerned that the legal aid organizations don’t have the resources necessary to absorb the influx of a large number of volunteers wishing to fulfill their 50 hours. They claim that this is due to a lack of attorneys who can take the time to help these law students, as they are not allowed to represent these clients in court or offer them any legal advice without the supervision of a licensed attorney. On top of this, many organizations have stressed that they simply don’t have the space for these student volunteers to work.

For example, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles is one of the largest of its kind in the state, yet they only accept roughly 10 percent of the law students who apply to work there because they cannot accommodate any more. Phong Wong, the director of the foundation, said:

The need is definitely there. We turn away so many low-income clients because we don’t have the support, the resources to help them. At the same time, there are all these law students who can be put to use. We just need to figure out how to make it work for the clients that we serve.

If organizations such as the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles can find a way to successfully integrate more volunteer law students into their daily operations, then this proposed 50 hour requirement has the potential to benefit everyone involved. If not, a different sort of solution to California’s legal woes may need to be discussed.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post New California Proposal: Law Students Must Volunteer in Legal Aid appeared first on Law Street.

About four times a year, students across the country nervously sit for what could be the most important four hours of their lives up until that point. Sure, they’re prepared, but nothing can shake the inevitable nervous feelings that ensue on test day. That nerve-wracking test I’m talking about is the LSAT–the admissions exam for law schools in the United States. Law schools sift through thousands of applications every year. When initially considering an applicant, they mainly look at two things: their undergraduate GPA, and their LSAT score. But what if I were to tell you that one of those criteria was no longer considered?

Well if you were to apply to the State University of New York-Buffalo Law School or the University of Iowa College of Law, that would be the case. Both of these schools have decided to admit students who have not taken the LSAT. Instead, they have stated that they will admit some students based on their undergraduate GPAs and their scores on other standardized tests.

These are just the first two schools to implement such policies, taking advantage of a new ruling by the American Bar Association that now permits law schools to fill up to 10 percent of their law school classes with students who have not taken the LSAT. So long as that student has a strong GPA and strong additional standardized test scores, they can be admitted.

If you’re anything like I am, you’re probably asking yourself “what other standardized test could they possibly use?” Well, believe it or not, these schools will be considering ACT and SAT scores from at least four years earlier for undergraduate admissions. They will also be considering things such as the GRE, GMAT, or college aptitude tests.

The aim of this new policy is to combat declining law school enrollment. These schools believe that if potential applicants do not have to worry about preparing and paying for an additional exam, then they will be more likely to apply. James Gardner, the dean of SUNY Buffalo’s law school, stated that “taking the LSAT is a pain, and it is expensive.” Everyone who takes the test must pay a $170 fee, and that doesn’t take into account the steep costs of tutoring or an LSAT preparation course. According to Gardner, “this is just a way to identify strong-performing students based on perfectly rational criteria that don’t involve the LSAT.”

While this may sound like a great leveler, think about what it actually means. If law schools start to use college admissions exams, like the SAT, for law school admissions, it will only make sure those same obstacles come four years sooner. If a high school student has some sort of inclination that they want to go to law school after college, they have the added pressure of doing well on the SAT for that purpose, four years too soon. I always knew I wanted to go to law school, and let me tell you, I would not have been too excited to find out that my SAT scores counted not only for college, but for law school as well.

The unique thing about the LSAT is that it is a good indicator of how well students will perform in law school. Research shows that LSAT scores are a good predictor of not only how well students will perform in their first year of law school, but also how likely a student is to pass the bar exam. It’s unlikely that law schools will be able to discern the same things about applicants from other standardized tests.

Sure, this new policy may draw some people in that may have been deterred from considering law school if they needed to take the LSAT, diversifying the applicant pool. However, if we consider the research, don’t we want to have some indication that students will succeed in law school before investing three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in a legal education? Isn’t that the whole point of the LSAT?

While some law schools no longer require all students to take the LSAT for admissions, I for one, will still be one of those nervous students sitting for my exam come June.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Two U.S. Law Schools No Longer Require the LSAT for Admission appeared first on Law Street.

Qatar will be opening a brand-new law school this fall with the help of faculty members from Northwestern University’s law school. These faculty members will act as advisors to the development of this new law school, which will be a part of Hamad bin Khalifa University. It will be located in Education City, a 2,500 acre campus located in Doha.

The new law school will offer a three-year postgraduate degree similiar to what most law schools offer here in the United States. According to a statement, this law school will be the “first of its kind in the Middle East,” as most students who wish to study law in the region do so as undergraduates. The new law school will have a specific focus on international comparative law in order to target the specific and unique needs of Qatar and the gulf region.

Dr. Ahmad Hasnah, Executive Vice President and Provost of Hamad bin Khalifa University, has expressed his optimism and excitement about the new law school. He said:

By creating a Juris Doctor program, Hamad bin Khalifa University is demonstrating its commitment to help further raise the bar of intellectual inquiry in Qatar in an innovative way. We are very much looking forward to welcoming our first intake of JD students in fall 2015.

The university is part of the Qatar Foundation, which is focused on building human capacity and increasing education and research in Qatar. The aim of creating this law school is not only to benefit the individals seeking their JDs, but to benefit the country as a whole. According to Daniel Rodriguez, the dean of Northwestern Law:

Students in the program will benefit from developing key analytical skills necessary for attaining a very high level of understanding of complex legal concepts. In turn, Qatar’s society will benefit from having such a highly trained group of strategic thinkers within its workforce in the years to come.

Clinton Davis, a Northwestern Law professor, will act as the interim dean to the school. He, along with other Northwestern professors, will advise on issues such as curriculum development and hiring faculty and staff. Essentially, Northwesten Law is acting as a consultant.

This is not the first time that Northwestern has consulted on the development of international schools. According to Northwestern’s Vice President for University Relations, Al Cubbage, faculty from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management helped establish the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Additionally, Northwestern has been offering journalism and communications degrees in Qatar for a decade now.

However, the degrees offered by this new law school in Qatar will not be Northwestern Law degrees. Rather, students who graduate from this school will earn law degrees directly from Hamad bin Khalifa University.

Some believe that there is financial motivation to consult in Qatar, as Northwestern will recieve a conslting fee for as many years as they are working in the region. According to David Yellen, the dean of Loyola University Chicago’s School of Law, there might be a financial incentive because “gulf states have a lot of money.” However, while overall enrollment across the country is down and there has been an increase in the number of students seeking financial aid, Northwestern University as a whole is in an “unusually strong financial position.” According to Cubbage, this is not really a financially-motivated decision. Instead, it seems like an opportunity to expand global legal education in a ground-breaking way.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Northwestern Law to Consult on New Law School in Qatar appeared first on Law Street.

On February 12, 2015, Hamline University School of Law and William Mitchell College of Law signed an agreement that will merge them into one law school. The newly formed Minnesota school will be known as Mitchell | Hamline School of Law, and will be situated at William Mitchell’s Saint Paul campus. Both of these law schools will continue to operate separately until the merger is approved by the American Bar Association.

The merged law school will be staffed by faculty from both William Mitchell Law and Hamline law, and will encompass programs from both as well. The new combined law school will provide students with several programs to get their J.D., including full-time and part-time programs, as well as online and weekend options. William Mitchell actually just launched an innovative new online legal education program, so it seems they will be continuing that program under the new banner. According to William Mitchell Dean Eric Janus, these negotiations have been in the works for months.

According to the Dean of Hamline’s Law School, Jean Holloway, the two schools are combining because their missions are a good fit and the merger will help students gain a stronger legal education. She said, “certainly given the legal education market we can do it better than we can do it alone.”

In their joint statement, the schools announced that the president and dean of the new law school will be Mark C. Gordon, the newly appointed dean of William Mitchell. As of now, it’s unclear what role, if any, current Hamline Law School Dean Jean Halloway will have at the school once the merger is complete.

The impending merger will also have significant effects on the staffs of both of these schools. Officials report that cuts are going to need to be made to accomidate the merger, however, they hope that most of these will be voluntary.

However, one has to wonder if this merger has anything to do with the drastic decline in law school applicants over the recent years. According to the American Bar Association, law school enrollment in the United States is down nearly 30 percent from its peak in 2010, and is lower than it has been since 1973. The American Bar Association has also reported that Hamline’s 2014 entering class was only 90 students, making it one of just 25 law schools in the country to have an incoming class with fewer than 100 students.

In addition to the overall drop in law school applicants, the schools’ locations make it difficult to keep enrollment up. There are four law schools–University of St. Thomas Law, University of Minnesota Law, Hamline Law, and William Mitchell Law–all located in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota. With this much competition in one small region, it’s likely that all four of these schools have suffered. While, according to the president of the Minnesota State Bar Association, Richard Kyle, this merger is a “bold move,” it is one that makes sense given the high number of law schools in the Twin Cities.

It will be interesting to see the effects of the merger play out. Even with reduced competition in the region now, Mitchell | Hamline Law will still have an uphill battle in terms of enrollment. It will likely take the new school years to establish the reputation that will allow it to attract top students from across the country.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Hamline Law and William Mitchell Law Announce Plans for a Merger appeared first on Law Street.

Professor Jon Hanson of Harvard Law School has set out to change the way law is taught. This spring, the professor welcomed roughly 50 students into the inaugural Systemic Justice class at Harvard Law. The class will teach students to examine the common causes of injustice in history and explore ways to use law and activism to make positive changes.

From the first day of the term, it became clear to students that the new class was unique. Referring to the students in the class as a “community,” Professor Hanson came across lighthearted and funny, cracking jokes and even asking the class to come up with a name for said “community.” He said to students on the first day of class: “None of us really knows what ‘systemic justice’ is—yet you’re all here.”

Traditionally, law students enter law school expecting to master existing law and to learn how to apply those laws to jobs as attorneys. However, a survey revealed that students are actually most concerned with big, unsolved social issues–which is where this class comes in. Students believe that law is part of the issue when looking at social problems such as climate change, income inequality, and racial bias in policing. The goal of this class is to introduce a new approach to examining and dealing with these issues.

This class is just one facet of a new Systemic Justice Project at Harvard, which is led by Professor Hanson and recent law school graduate Jacob Lipton. The project arose out of a growing recognition that law students need to be trained to be problem solvers and policy makers. Another part of the program is a class called the Justice Lab, which is a think tank style class designed to ask students to analyze systemic societal problems and propose solutions from a legal perspective. In April, students from both classes will attend a conference alongside experts to discuss their findings.

In some ways, this project is part of a widespread effort to introduce a greater policy focus into law schools. For example, Stanford Law School recently launched a Law and Policy Lab that tasks students with finding policy solutions to real-world problems. After graduation, many former law students will go on to become policy makers, judges, politicians, and organizational leaders. According to Sergio Campos, a law professor at the University of Miami and a visiting professor at Harvard, those lawyers could be in trouble if they do not develop a background on policy during their time in law school. He worries that for those students,  “when you get to a position where you can change the law, you don’t have a background on policy and what it should be.”

The program has already gained popularity with students at Harvard who are, or desire to be, active in fighting for social causes. However, not all law students are interested in learning about policy–some just want to learn about existing law, and that’s fine too. This project is designed to be a way to extend a traditional legal education, not replace it. Even so, participating in a class such as the Systemic Justice class can give law students a new and valuable perspective that will strengthen their overall legal education.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Harvard Law School Launches New Systemic Justice Project appeared first on Law Street.

A record 125 convicts were absolved of wrongdoing in 2014, according to a project conducted by the University of Michigan Law School to create exoneration statistics in the United States. This project was recently published in an annual report released by the National Registry of Exonerations, which releases statistics of this nature each year. This is the first time since the registry began tracking exonerations in 1989 that they have reported over 100 in one year.

According to the registry, the states with the most exonerations last year were Texas, New York, and Illinois. Thirty-three of Texas’ exonerations involved drug cases in Harris County, and used crime lab analysis conducted by a Conviction Integrity Unit. The tests showed that in many of those cases the “drugs” that the defendants were accused of possessing actually contained no illegal substances, despite the fact that the defendants had pled guilty to the offenses. These cases not only contributed to the record number of cases where the defendant pled guilty and was exonerated, but also contributed to the increase in the number of exonerations for drug crimes. There were 39 exonerations for drug cases in 2014, which is significantly higher than the 11 from the year before.

What’s the cause of this sudden increase in exonerations? According to Samual Gross, a Michigan Law professor and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, there has been a steady change in the attitudes of prosecutors about wrongful convictions. He said:

I think prosecutors are much more willing to see identifying errors as a positive part of their job, rather than as a misfortune they have to endure.

Lake County State’s Attorney Michael Nerheim, who works in northern Chicago, started an independent panel made up of retired judges, defense, and civil rights attorneys to review cases. He believes that prosecutors should be leading the way to reduce the number of wrongful convictions. He said: “We’re all on the same side – no prosecutor wants to wrongfully convict somebody. We all want the truth.”

It’s no longer about just winning cases or solving them as quickly as possible. It’s about using all available resources to find out the truth. Of course, one of these resources is DNA testing. With increased technology, DNA testing can be used to show that the DNA of someone who was convicted does not match the DNA found at the crime scene.

More interestingly, many more of these exonerations are a result of finding evidence of perjury or coercion. For example, Ohio native Ricky Jackson spent 39 years in prison for murder, but was freed last November after a witness admitted that he hadn’t seen the crime. In another case, a Chicago judge dismissed charges against Alstory Simon, who had confessed, after 15 years in prison for double murder.

According to Gross, it’s likely that the number of exonerations could grow in 2015, with new districts following in the footsteps of Harris County and opening up their own Conviction Integrity Units. Despite the growing number of these units, exonerations are still extremely difficult to obtain. He said that “If we didn’t get it right the first time, it’s hard to be right the second time.” Even so, hopefully the new focus on past mistakes could help to prevent future errors.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post University of Michigan Law School Project Tracks Exonerations appeared first on Law Street.

In September of 2013, the American Bar Association Task Force on the Future of Legal Education called on law schools to embrace technology as a useful tool for educating future attorneys. Finally, someone has responded to that call. Just this month, William Mitchell College of Law launched a new and unique legal education experiment combining traditional classroom learning with online courses.

In December of 2013, school officials met with the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to request a variance from ABA accreditation standards, which state that no more than one-third of an accredited law school institution’s curriculum can take place outside of the traditional classroom setting. A variance was granted to the William Mitchell program, which it allows it to be more flexible and focus more on an online portion.

Under the terms of the variance set by the ABA, the school will be allowed to admit four entering classes of students to this hybrid program, and each class size must be limited to 96 students. Additionally, the school must provide detailed reports to the council that include information pertaining to applications, admissions, attrition, course evaluations, and skills training.

The ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education, Barry Currier, considered several factors before granting the variance to William Mitchell. These factors include the school’s 113-year history and its vast experience with part-time law students. According to Currier, the school’s application for the variance was detailed and well thought-out. It was clear to him that the school was determined to making this program succeed.

Currier stated that:

It’s fair to say that this is most substantial variance that’s been granted, and it’s not an exclusive agreement between the ABA and William Mitchell. Any school that submits a variance application as carefully thought out and researched, and demonstrates this level of commitment will get a serious listen from the council.

He encourages other schools to develop their own innovative programs as well-thought out as this one.

The program welcomed 85 students, who have an average age of 38, for its first year of operation. According to the law school’s press release, over one-third of the students already have graduate degrees in other fields. These students will participate in a four-year part-time JD degree program that requires approximately one to two weeks of classroom attendance per semester at the law school’s brick-and-mortar campus located in St. Paul, Minnesota. The rest of the time, students will take their law school courses online. Annual tuition will be $27,770, which is the same as the cost of the school’s traditional part-time program.

This unique program will give people who may not have have the time to travel and sit in class all day the opportunity to earn their law degree in a more convenient way. One of the students in this new hybrid program, 59-year-old Brian Kennedy, jumped at the opportunity to be a part of this program. He told Star Tribune,  “I was accepted to William Mitchell in 1981 and life got in the way.” After being sidetracked by an entertainment-industry career, he regretted not going to law school. Now, he’s looking forward to his second chance. He said, “I’m starting a new career. It just took me a while to get here.”

Others, like 41-year-old Vershawn Young, plan to keep their current carreers while attending law school. Young is a communications professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and said that he chose William Marshall because it was the only law school option that would allow him to keep his current job. He expects that the program will allow him “to experience something phenomenal.” It sounds like he’s probably right–the flexibility that this hybrid program allows is one of it’s truly unique aspects, and it is one that will likely lead to the program’s success.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post William Mitchell College of Law Launches Hybrid Online Legal Program appeared first on Law Street.

On January 12, 2015, the State Bar of California Commission on Access to Justice awarded UCLA School of Law, Southwestern Law School, and Pepperdine University School of Law a one-year grant to establish a modest means incubator. This pilot program will be designed to help new attorneys develop and launch viable practice models for serving modest means clients. This project was one of four chosen out of two dozen applications received by the commission. While the Commission awarded $185,000 total in grants to four projects throughout California, the grant given specifically to these three law school for the modest means incubator totals $45,000.

These three law schools have partnered with local legal aid organizations and the Los Angeles County Law Library in order to develop the Los Angeles County Incubator Consortium. This consortium will prepare 12-15 recent law school graduates–four or five from each of the schools–for working with and providing legal services to low and modest income populations through training in establishing law practices.

According to California Supreme Court Justice and Chairman of the Access Commission’s grant review committee  Goodwin Liu:

This is a wonderful first step in nurturing the next generation of lawyers providing legal services for everyday people with modest means. The unmet legal needs in our communities are well-documented, and this could serve as a model for incubator projects throughout California and nationwide.

The goal of this one-year program is to provide these graduates with the tools for effective solo practice management. These include client communication, case management, and business opportunity development. Additionally, program participants will receive training in various substantive areas of law in exchange for providing 200 hours of pro bono representation. In order to get the most out of this program, participants will receive guidance and mentorship from lawyers and retired judges on legal strategy.

Other members of the program, including Bet Tzedek, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Community Legal Services, Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, and Public Counsel, hope to develop a successful incubator program that can serve the legal needs of low and modest income populations throughout all of Los Angeles County in the long run.

Overall, this program will be beneficial to everyone involved. It will allow new law school graduates the opportunity to do meaningful work while learning from experienced members of the legal field, and it will give lower income families access to the legal services that they need, but would otherwise be unable to afford. Hopefully, the first year of this modest means incubator will be successful, and the program will continue to provide these services for years to come.

It would also be ideal to see this program used as a framework for incubator programs across the country, and not just in Los Angeles. Those everywhere earning low and modest incomes could benefit from pro bono legal services, as it is unlikely that they would be able to afford them otherwise. Other law schools can model programs after this one, while tailoring their individual programs to the specific needs of the city where they are located. While upfront these programs will cost a significant amount of money, the benefits that they will bring to everyone involved will make them worth it in the long run.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Los Angeles Law Schools Create Program to Help Low Income Clients appeared first on Law Street.

Every year, eager, bright-eyed students enter law school with the hopes that in about three years time, they’ll be able to call themselves lawyers. Going to law school seems like a natural and crucial step for anyone that hopes to have success in the legal field. However, this was not the path that Marcos Camacho took–he became a lawyer in 1986 without taking a single law school course.

Camacho earned entry to the bar in California, one of the only states that allows students to “read law” and study as an apprentice under a veteran attorney. The program is called the Law Office Study Program, which is a three-year program run by the State Bar of California. At its core, the program involves a great deal of reading and self-teaching. In addition, students gain valuable hands-on experience as paralegals working on real cases. Rather than sitting in class every day and taking exams, students in this program learn the law through practice. While this concept may seem unconventional, it is actually very similar to the way that Abraham Lincoln became a lawyer.

Now, I’m sure that many of you are thinking the same thing right now, “a way to become a lawyer without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for law school tuition? Sign me up!” However, it’s not that simple. This type of program requires extremely self-motivated individuals, because at the end of the day, you need to pass the bar exam whether you went to law school or not. There are no exams or deadlines–there is nothing to keep you on track or reinforce the material you are reading.

Camacho had the self-motivation to make the most out of this program, and passed the California bar exam on his first try. In 2002, he went on to become general counsel for the United Farm Workers Union, which at the time was headed by the late Cesar Chavez. Then in 2009, Camacho went into private practice in Bakersfield.

Just this past Christmas Eve, California Governor Jerry Brown called Camacho to inform him that he had been appointed to a judgeship on the Kern County Superior Court. Camacho considers this appointment to be a “tremendous honor,” and stated that he was “floored” when the governor called him and said that he had been appointed. According to the newly-appointed judge, he considered applying for a judgeship back in 2011 but decided against it when his wife of 20 years, Eva, was diagnosed with cancer. Unfortunately, Eva, who Camacho considered to be his biggest supporter, passed away the following year.

So while “reading law” worked for Camacho, how practical is this path? Are we likely to see people today foregoing law school and still becoming successful? At the moment, the only states to even offer such programs are Virginia, Vermont, Washington, and California. New York, Maine, and Wyoming offer programs that combine apprenticeships with law school. This is one of the several reasons that this path remains underpopulated. According to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, only 60 of the 83,986 people who took state or multi-state bar exams last year were law office readers.

In addition, finding someone that is willing to take responsibility for educating a new lawyer is no easy task. A major obstacle in choosing this path is that none of the states that offer this program provide any guidance or resources to help prospective law readers locate a supervising laywer that is willing to take someone on for an apprenticeship. All of the work must be done by the prospective student.

Additionally, bar passage rates for law readers are poor. Only 17 law readers passed last year, or 28 percent of the law readers that took the exam. When compared to the 73 percent of students that passed after graduating from institutions recognized by the American Bar Association, that does not scream success. Robert E. Glenn, who is the president of the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners describes these programs as “a cruel hoax.” He said of apprenticeships–“it’s such a waste of time for someone to spend three years in this program but not have anything at the end.”

However, there are upsides to these “law reader” programs. The first, and most obvious, is the lack of debt for students. While many law schools are making efforts to lower their tuition, law school is still a huge investment. Many today are questioning the value of a three-year legal education when considering the cost. An apprenticeship is an alternative that makes a legal education affordable and available to a more diverse population, which could be beneficial to underserved communities.

Without loans to pay back, lawyers won’t have to chase positions in big-name firms with big paychecks. Instead, they could focus on working in nonprofit, environmental, and community law. According to Janelle Orsi, the co-founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in California, “attorneys trained in this way will be able to be average people.”

While this may be appealing to some, it is not for everyone. Considering how competitive the legal field is today, passing the bar and securing a job at a top law firm seem to be on the forefronts of most future-lawyer’s minds. As a result, it is unlikely that we will see a rise in “legal readers” anytime soon.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Can You Become a Lawyer Without Going to Law School? appeared first on Law Street.

In an effort to boost enrollment and make tuition more affordable, Wayne State University’s Law School, located in Detroit, Michigan, will freeze their tuition and offer every incoming student a scholarship. In total, the tuition freeze and the additional scholarships will create about a 14 percent tuition cut for all incoming students. The tuition cut will keep the price tag at about $28,138 through at least the 2015-2016 school year.

Law school Dean Jocelyn Benson told the Free Press in an exclusive interview:

For us, it is really important to ensure that everyone has access to quality legal education. Not only do we want to make sure everyone has access to legal education, but also help with the rising student debt.

In addition to the tuition freeze, the school will offer about $1 million a year in new scholarships for current students, as well as a minimum scholarship of $4,000 a year to all incoming students. These scholarships will be awarded both by merit and by need. According to Benson, the scholarships are being funded by private donations from alumni and other supporters.

Along with increasing affordability, this tuition cut is also in response to Wayne State Law’s declining enrollment, a fate that many law schools are facing these days. This year, they saw their enrollment drop from 484 students down to 419. Hopefully this strategy will work in the way it has for law schools such as the University of Arizona Law and Penn State Law. These institutions were set to boost their first-year class sizes by 22% to 52% this fall compared with 2013 according to an analysis done by The Wall Street Journal.

Benson has also shared that the goals for lowering tuition go beyond simply increasing enrollment and affordability. She said:

Creating value for students goes beyond affordability. Our location in the heart of Detroit during such a transformative time offers students access to hands-on legal experience in areas ranging from corporate law and entrepreneurship to public interest and civil rights that you cannot get at any other law school.

The goal is that with prices lower, students will not need to work full time while completing law school. This will give them the opportunity to do more internships and gain valuable hands-on experience in the legal field without the worry of a huge debt they need to pay off. Benson has stated: “we want them to make these decisions (about where to work after graduation) without concerns about how much they have to pay back”.

Eric Lloyd, a current junior in Wayne State’s undergraduate business program, likes the idea of a tuition freeze. While studying on campus last week, he said, “It’s so expensive to go to law school and if you go, you almost have to get a corporate job to pay off all that debt anything to hold down cost is good.” He is considering going to Wayne State Law after he graduates.

If this drastic change in cost is successful, Wayne State Law will likely see major enrollment increases in the coming years.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Wayne State Law Freezes Tuition and Offers New Scholarships appeared first on Law Street.

The trend among law schools in recent years has been to move toward  lower tuition and shorter programs. The driving force in all of this? Significantly fewer people are sitting for the LSAT each year. According to recent statistics, there are fewer people sitting for the LSAT today than there were in 1987. This year, just 105,532 LSAT tests were administered. This is nine percent less than the 115,988 that were administered in 1987, which is fascinating given the increased focus on higher education these days.

This trend has been getting worse in the last four years. Since 2010, the number of students taking the LSAT each year has dropped a total of 38.5 percent. This is the worst decline that the legal field has seen in recent memory.

So, why is this the case? One possibility is that students no longer see law school as a guaranteed ticket to a six-figure salary. Jobs in the legal field have become increasingly competitive, so it’s likely that many worry that they will not be able to get a job when they graduate. Or, even if they think there is a good chance that they will get a job, they might not want to pile up hundreds-of-thousands of dollars of debt trying to get there.

All of these factors have led to decreased 1L enrollment, which is a result of the drop in the number of LSAT takers. According to the American Bar Association, 1L enrollment rates have declined by 13.5 percent since 2010.

The industry is now referring to this change as the “legal technology revolution.” This is because legal technology companies are changing the legal services landscape, making it more streamlined and efficient. In addition, many firms are expediting the transition to flat-fee legal services. With more efficient practice, less manpower is needed. This means that firms no longer have a need to hire new law graduates like they used to.

It is clear that law school is not as popular an option as it used to be, with declining enrollment every year. I thought it would be interesting to see if some of the other major fields, like business and medicine, were experiencing a similar fate. Curiously enough, I found that the number of people taking the GRE ever year, which is the admissions test for most graduate schools in the United States, has drastically increased over the last several years. According to the Educational Testing Service, there has been a 38% increase in the number of people taking the GRE in the 2012-2013 testing year. This increase is most likely a result of many of the top business schools now accepting the GRE as part of the application as opposed to only the GMAT.

Not only is the number of people taking the GRE increasing significantly, but the number of people taking the MCAT and applying to medical school is increasing as well. Within the last decade, the number of applicants has increased from about 33,600 a year to almost 45,000 last year. However, the number of available spots in medical school has not gone up, meaning that the percentage of applicants who actually matriculate has actually gone down. However, that does not seem to be stopping anyone from sitting for the MCAT and applying to medical school.

So what makes law school so different from other types of grad programs? Has it lost its appeal? It’s not as though this “technology revolution” is only happening in the legal field. In medicine, with the creations of things such as new testing machinery and robotic surgery, has become increasingly reliant on technology as opposed to manpower. In a similar vein, businesses now have the ability to do most of their work and business management online.

Perhaps it’s the fact that employment is no longer secure. Perhaps it’s the almost guaranteed debt that comes along with it.  Perhaps it’s because there are now hundreds of people on the internet saying that law school is a bad idea. In reality, it’s likely a combination of all of these factors. But, no one can really say for sure. Hopefully this major drop in applicants will be enough to cause law schools to lower their tuitions and provide more scholarships. We’ve already seen many schools, such as Elon Law and Wayne State Law, doing so. It is likely that if this trend of decreasing applicants continues, many more school will follow in their footsteps.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Shane S via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Law School Applicants at Record Low appeared first on Law Street.

Elon University School of Law, located in Greensboro, North Carolina, announced recently that it is revamping its legal program. In keeping with the school’s original vision to be a pioneering “law school with a difference,” the new program will be highly experimental, personalized, and professionally connected. These major changes to the program include a drastic tuition cut, reduced time needed to graduate, and a curriculum change that will provide students with more of a real-life legal experience. These changes are all designed to adapt to the fast-changing legal profession and will go into effect in the fall of 2015.

The first of these changes is a tuition cut. Elon Law is reducing tuition by $14,000, meaning that students will pay about $100,000 overall to attend law school. This is significantly less than the roughly $180,000 it costs to attend most top-tier law schools these days. In addition, Elon Law will also guarantee a fixed-tuition for each entering class, so you will never have to pay more even if tuition is increased while you’re a student.

The next component of the revamp is the adoption of a 7-trimester schedule. This means that instead of graduating after three years, students will be able to graduate in just 2.5. While this might not seem significant, graduating a half of a year early will save students money and allow them a head-start in the job market. Students who enter Elon Law next fall will graduate in December 2017 and will be able to take the bar exam in February.

In addition, there will also be major curricular changes designed to prepare students for real-world legal practice. According to Elon Law, they are the first law school in the country to require students to serve a full-time faculty-supervised residency during the academic year as opposed to during the summer. This gives Elon Law students an advantage because they do not need to fight for job placement during the highly-competitive summer months.

The first year will consist of an introductory program “focused on legal analysis, writing and communication, and leadership and professionalism.” The first year program also includes case-simulations run by skilled practicing attorneys. This is in addition to their nationally-competitive moot court and mock trial programs. Elon Law will also be incorporating experimental learning into their curriculum, which will account for over 20 percent of the program. This far exceeds the requirements that the ABA has set out for experimental learning.

Each student that attends Elon Law will also be assigned a four-person professional advising team, consisting of a faculty advisor, a working attorney mentor, an executive coach, and a career consultant. This four-person team is designed to make students as prepared and as knowledgeable as possible before they graduate. In particular, the career consultant will play a vital role in helping students secure post-graduation employment.

Many aspiring-lawyers today are choosing not to attend law school due to the extensive time and financial commitments. These major changes to Elon’s program are addressing these concerns and are adapting to the current needs of students. Hopefully their new program will be successful, and we will see more law schools following in Elon’s footsteps.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article cited total tuition as $115,000. Total tuition is roughly $100,000.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Elon Law Revamps Curriculum and Cuts Tuition appeared first on Law Street.

Did you know that you can get a scholarship to not go to law school? Last year, Matthew Willens, a Chicago attorney and part-time legal professor at Loyola Chicago Law School, created a $1,000 scholarship to be awarded to a winning undergraduate student who chooses to pursue any post-graduate path other than law school. This scholarship, which was just awarded for the first time in 2014, is offered as part of the “Anything but Law School” campaign started by Willens.

This may seem a bit odd, given that Willens is an attorney himself, but he firmly stands behind the belief that law school is no longer a smart post-graduate option due to the lack of available jobs. According to Willens, “too many of our best and brightest are pursuing a career where there just aren’t any more seats at the table.”

Willens announced his “Anything but Law School” program last year because he believes that too many people think that going to law school is their ticket to a secure job–they see it as a sure thing. Now, he says, the market is saturated and there are not enough jobs to go around. He says:

If part of your reason for going to law school is that, well, there’ll be a good job that you like and will pay well afterwards, then you’re maybe mistaken. There’s more than 90,000 lawyers in Illinois, and I’m not confident there’s enough jobs.

He also believes that the saturation of lawyers is having a negative effect on the growth of current attorneys, as well as a negative effect on the clients of these attorneys. He explained:

Lawyers don’t finish their education when they graduate. They need extensive training and mentoring to develop their skills. But when new graduates hang a shingle because they can’t find employment, their clients are wronged and their own growth is stunted. They never reach their potential and the profession suffers. Many will never be employed in the profession at all.

There were dozens of applicants for the inaugural “Anything but Law School” scholarship, which was open to students pursuing an advanced degree in anything but law. Applicants were asked to write an essay explaining why they are doing something other than going to law school. The first recipient of the scholarship was Louise Kelly, a 37-year-old music teacher and performer from Chicago. She plans to use the scholarship to help pay for a course at VanderCook College of Music in Bronzeville, Illinois. According to Kelly, a graduate degree will earn her better pay, which will help her to provide for her two children.

While Willens is confident in his stance, not everyone agrees. There has been significant pushback from other attorneys in response the scholarship. Many are offended by the premise of the scholarship, which is completely understandable. This scholarship is essentially a slap in the face to the creator’s own profession. I personally agree with those attorneys. While law school is certainly not for everyone, those who have done the research and have put a great deal of thought into it should not be discouraged from applying. Willens, however, does not consider the scholarship to be “anti-law school.” Rather, he sees it as a statement about suppy-and-demand.

While Willens is certainly making a point with his “Anything but Law School” campaign, in reality, it is unlikely that this scholarship will have a significant impact on the number of people that apply to law school. It will be interesting to see if this movement can gain any more traction in years to come.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [jridgewayphotography via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Chicago Attorney Continues Scholarship for “Anything But Law School” appeared first on Law Street.

The Texas Access to Justice Foundation, also known as TAJF, has awarded Baylor Law School a $22,000 grant for the purpose of providing civil legal aid to Texas veterans. According to Dr. Bridget Fuselier, who is a professor at Baylor Law School, this grant funds monthly clinics for Waco-area veterans who need legal assistance but are unable to receive it due to their low income levels. For the third year in a row, thousands of local veterans will receive monthly pro bono help at Baylor’s innovative veterans assistance clinics. Dr. Fuselier, expressing her gratitude to the foundation, has stated:

We’re very appreciative and honored that the Texas Access to Justice Foundation continues to support our program, the fact that they’re renewing their commitment to us is proof that we’re being successful in our efforts with the money.

Dr. Fuselier has stated that in order to receive aid from the clinic, the veterans must be at the 200 percent or lower poverty level. According to the Texas Access to Justice Foundation website, the annual income of a veteran can be no more than $14,588 a year in order to be eligible for aid. Over 80 percent of the veterans who receive legal aid from the clinics come from McLennan County, Texas.

The aid that these veterans receive during the monthly clinics is provided by law school faculty, students, and volunteer local attorneys. At these monthly clinics, veterans can receive civil legal advice for problems such as family law matters, denial of benefits or disability, or any other issues that have arisen as a result of the veteran’s deployment. According to Baylor Law School’s website:

Each monthly clinic begins with a 30-minute educational topic ranging from landlord/tenant relationship issues to veterans’ benefits to the importance of having a will. Following the 30-minute session, veterans who have current legal problems can meet with a law student and volunteer attorney for a brief advice and counsel session.

According to Dr. Fuselier, “The veterans are able to at least get some immediate advice, and then sometimes we send their cases to volunteer attorneys in Waco that can do some more work pro bono.”

According to Betty Balli Torres, the executive director for the Texas Access to Justice Foundation, the work that Baylor Law School is doing with the grant is unlike anything that has been done with one of their grants before. According to Torres, it is the only veterans clinic through a law school which the foundation funds. She stated: “the fact that Baylor was starting a program to benefit veterans in this specific model was very appealing to us,” which is why it was chosen for the grant.

The foundation only has a small number of grants that they can give out, so the continued funding of these veteran’s clinics is something new for the foundation. According to Torres, the foundation has “had diminishing resources,” so difficult choices had to have been made about where to put the foundation’s money. She is confident in the decision to give Baylor the $22,000 for the third year in a row.

Not only is this grant beneficial to the veterans who receive the free legal advice, but it is also beneficial to the law school students who are giving it. These clinics allow them to gain valuable legal experience that will overall make them more prepared for their post-law school careers. According to Torres, this is why law schools make the perfect places to award these grants. She said:

Law school is where you start educating young professionals about the services they can provide, give them opportunities to serve and have them help out in programs like the one at Baylor, it’s a perfect place to provide funding.

Hopefully we will see Baylor continue to run veterans assistance clinics for years to come, thanks to the generosity of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [DVIDSHUB]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Baylor Law Receives Grant to Provide Free Veterans Clinics appeared first on Law Street.

On Wednesday, Drexel University announced that it will be renaming its law school after receiving the largest donation in the school’s history. The school will now be known as the Thomas R. Kline School of Law, after Kline made a generous $50 million donation to the university.

Drexel Law School was founded just eight years ago in 2006, and was originally named after Earle Mack after he pledged $15 million to the school. However, he was dropped when University officials decided that the school needed a stronger foundation.

Kline, the new benefactor, is a trustee of Drexel University, and has spent most of his thirty-year long career as a Philadelphia trial attorney focused on medical malpractice, personal injury, and whistleblower cases. Kline made this donation in hopes that the school can work its way to the top ranks of legal education.

In addition to his work as a trial attorney, Klein is chairman of the law school board. He stated that the idea for the trial advocacy center came from a conversation with the law school dean, Roger Dennis. Kline shared:

It is our collective vision to create a law school with national stature, the foundation is there. What we now have is an opportunity to not only build programmatic changes, but we also have a magnificent magnet that is a true gem of the City of Philadelphia.

The large donation includes the former Beneficial Savings Fund Society building in downtown Philadelphia, which will be home to a new trial advocacy center. Drexel President John. A Fry has stated that “This is a major, major moment for the law school”. He believes that this donation gives Drexel “the opportunity to put this relatively new law school on a firm financial footing and, in particular, establish it as a force for the practice of trial advocacy.”

With the new downtown building, which is projected to open in 2017, the law school will have two sites: the main campus in University City and the new campus in Center City surrounded by city and federal courts as well as many law firms. This new location is sure to give students even more opportunities to find jobs and internships while at law school.

In addition to providing a new trial advocacy center in a prime location, the donation will also give Drexel Law the means to increase scholarships and financial aid for students. This comes at a crucial time, when many top law schools are reducing tuition and increasing financial aid to entice more students due to a drop in overall law school applicants. According to recent statistics, enrollment in the nation’s top law schools has dropped 24 percent overall in the last three years. It is the hope that with this donation, more scholarships and financial aid will entice more students to enroll in Drexel Law. Currently, tuition is about $40,000 a year. These new scholarships and aid packages will relieve some of that burden and ultimately increase Drexel’s competitive edge amongst the top law schools in the nation.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Drexel Law Receives $50 Million Donation and New Trial Advocacy Building appeared first on Law Street.

Memes are fun–they’re customizable, shareable, and all over the internet. But they do bring up some important questions about copyright laws and photo ownership. For example, many of you have probably seen the “confused face girl” meme that has gone viral all over social media. While most people find this meme utterly hilarious, a news story spread last week that the “face” of the meme–a girl named Keisha Johnson–wasn’t laughing. In fact, she supposedly tried to sue Instagram for $500 million for copyright infringement and defamation because people keep using a picture of her posted on Instagram as a meme. This story ended up being a fake, created by the satirical news outlet OD Gossip, but news organizations who didn’t know any better still picked it up.

Thanks Hundike

Here were the made-up details of Johnson’s legal battle:

The 16-year-old Alabama native was just hanging out with her friends when one of them took a bad photo of her and uploaded it to Instagram. Almost instantly, the photo went viral and was shared on millions of profiles, including those of celebrities. In addition to turning the photo into a meme, people everywhere have been posing for their own “confused face” photos in apparent attempt to mock Johnson. Clearly embarrassed by the photo, Johnson said, “my face looked ugly like I was about to throw up. I look nothing like that in real life… I’m really a bad b*tch!”

While this made-up girl named Keisha Johnson did not, obviously, sue Instagram for $500 million, the story and resulting press attention got me thinking: what would happen if someone were to actually sue Instagram? Well, according to the Instagram terms and conditions that every user must agree to before they sign up for the social media site, people who use the network are responsible for the content that they choose to share.  Now in fairness, in the hypothetical story, Johnson was not the one who posted the photo. However, according to the terms, her friends would have been 100 percent responsible for choosing to embarrass their friend. So hypothetically, if the girl in the photo were to sue someone, it’s her friends who are responsible for deciding to post a bad photo of her, not Instagram.

The site OD Gossip also released another fake story about another fake lawsuit–this time over a selfie that was turned into a meme. According to OD Gossip, “Makayla Edwards,” known more commonly as the topless boy/girl face a** meme, has also decided to file a defamation lawsuit against Instagram. Just like the story about Johnson, this is a hoax, but there have been millions of photos posted to people’s Instagram accounts making fun of the meme. The photo has also popped up on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Now as previously established, the fake “Makayla Edwards” cannot sue Instagram for people choosing to repost her photo. But, is there anything stopping her from suing the people who reposted her photo? In order to figure this out, I looked into copyright laws and how they apply to social media selfies.

First, it’s important to understand the basic copyright laws for online images. Copyright attaches to a work, in this case an image, as soon as it is created. Unlike with patents and trademarks, people do not need to apply for a copyright, it’s automatic. So once you create an image–by drawing it, creating it on the computer, or by taking a photo–you have the rights to do whatever you want with it. This includes reproducing it, displaying it publicly, altering it, selling it, and distributing it.

But most of us don’t create our own images, we use ones created by others. In order to legally use someone else’s image, you must get express permission from the copyright owner and, once you get permission, give them proper credit for the image. Now, there are ways that you can legally use a copyrighted image without getting permission, such as by using one with a creative commons license, but these likely do not apply to social media photos.

So what are the rules when it comes to social media, where people constantly and publicly post their photos for anyone to see? According to Social Media Today, images posted on social media sites are still bound by copyright. This means that if you want to use or re-post someone else’s photo on Facebook or Instagram, you need their permission.

So these made-up lawsuits are not completely ridiculous–they probably could happen, although for way less money. However, if anyone has a reason to sue, it’s the person who took the picture, not the girl in it. And they wouldn’t be suing Instagram, but the millions of people who re-posted the photo without permission. Still, next time you snap a silly selfie, or take a bad picture of a friend, these rules are something to keep in mind.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Shawn Ahmed via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Memes and Selfies: Internet Trends Bring New Copyright Issues appeared first on Law Street.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl just hired Yale Law School professor Eugene R. Fidell as his attorney. Bergdahl, who was recently returned in a controversial trade after five years as an alleged prisoner of war in Afghanistan, is seeking Fidell’s aid during the investigation into his capture.

Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, has agreed to take on Bergdahl as a client pro bono. In addition to teaching at Yale Law School, Fidell is the co-founder and former president of The National Institute of Military Justice. He stated that he was flattered to be asked to represent Bergdahl, and says that, “it’s a case that resonates with many people and engages their sense of fairness, it’s a very dramatic series of facts.”

Fidell has received many mixed reactions to his decision to represent Bergdahl. He said, “there are people who harbor ill will toward my client,” but at the same time he has received emails “wishing my client well.” Obviously, people are going to have strong opinions about this situation, but Fidell has stressed the importance of getting all of the facts before jumping to conclusions. So little is known about exactly what happened in Afghanistan that a thorough investigation is needed before any action can be taken.  According to Fidell:

The American people have a pretty good sense of fellow feeling and sympathy. It’s no secret that Sgt. Bergdahl went through an astounding and terrifying ordeal … people are fascinated whether they’re sympathetic or in the vilification business.

The Pentagon is investigating the details of Bergdahl’s departure of his post in eastern Afghanistan in 2009. While he has not yet been asked about the circumstances leading up to his capture by the Taliban, if it is determined that he was indeed a prisoner of war, Bergdahl could be eligible for a tax-free $350,000 from the United States government.

The Army has not yet determined whether or not Bergdahl deliberately abandoned his post. Some former members of his unit in Afghanistan have claimed that Bergdahl chose to walk away, and that several unit members were injured or killed looking for him. Last week, former Army Sgt. Evan Buetow told Fox News:

He thought about what he was doing, he mailed some things home, he walked away and we have witnesses who saw him walking away. And if you’re walking away in one of the worst, most dangerous areas of Afghanistan without your weapon and gear, I don’t believe you’re planning on coming back.

An initial military investigation in 2009 ruled that Bergdahl did, in fact, deliberately walk away from his unit, based on the evidence available at the time. However, Fidell has stated that Bergdahl “hasn’t been charged with anything at the moment,” and that, “we’ll deal with the charges when they’re filed”.

Fidell has called the investigators “cordial and professional,” and pointed out that, “it’s not a courtroom. This is an investigation”.

While the investigation is ongoing, Bergdahl has been put back on regular duty at a desk job at his company headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. According to Fidel, Bergdahl will not be returning to combat. He said, “he and I have about the same chance of winding up on the battlefield again, his ordeal I’m sure is unimaginable for the rest of us.” Fidell has not shared any details regarding Bergdahl’s mental state, but stated that his client understands that his life was saved, and is very grateful to President Obama.

No doubt, representing Bergdahl will have its challenges. People have strong opinions on the issue, and many have made those opinions clear to Fidell. However, the facts of what happened in Afghanistan are extremely complicated, and as the investigation continues things will get messy. This is not a case that someone takes on lightly, and Fidell should be applauded for taking on this challenge. It’s a lawyer’s duty to provide legal service when it is needed, however tough, politicized, and contentious the situation may be. No matter what happens with this case, Fidell is certainly doing his job.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Mad African!: (Broken Sword) via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl Hires Yale Law Professor as Attorney appeared first on Law Street.

On Friday, gay and bisexual men participated in the second annual National Gay Blood Drive. The drive’s goal was to call attention to the FDA’s lifetime blood donor deferral for all men who have had sex with another man, in place since 1977. Despite the national attention that it received, the first gay blood drive last summer did little to sway the FDA and the ban remained. Organizations such as the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers, and the American Association of Blood Banks have all spoken out in support of easing blood donor restrictions. They say that they all, “believe the current lifetime deferral for men who have had sex with other men should be modified and that donor deferral criteria should be made comparable with criteria for other behaviors that pose an increased risk for transmission of transfusion-transmitted infections.”

But let’s back up a bit here–why is there a restriction preventing gay men from donating blood in the first place? About three decades ago, when the AIDS crisis was in full swing, there was panic about how the HIV virus was transmitted. The restriction was put in place to prevent gay men from transmitting HIV through blood donations. But the times, and our scientific knowledge, have changed. We have had the ability to perform blood tests for nearly 30 years now, and it’s been nearly that long since we’ve had a single case of HIV via blood transfusion. The laws are also a relic of a time when it was thought that HIV was an exclusively homosexual disease–it’s since been proven that it can be passed on to anyone of any sexual orientation. That’s exactly why every sample is tested for many things, including HIV, after it is donated.

Ryan James Yezak, the drive’s organizer, wrote a passionate plea for lifting the ban this week on behalf of the Human Rights Campaign. He explained how three years ago, he wanted to go with his boss to give blood after a natural disaster. In his plea, he explained:

While I was healthy as could be, I could not donate due to the fact that I was gay. I had to explain the situation to everyone in my department. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was being treated differently solely on the basis of my sexual orientation – it felt alienating, it felt wrong, but above all – it felt unnecessary.

Yezak could not be more correct–it is unnecessary. A simple blood test and waiting period eliminates the need to categorize individual donors as a risk. The exclusion of gay and bisexual men from donating blood only propagates a stigma against which gay rights activists have spent the past 30 years fighting.

In fact, the only thing that this ban really does is cut down the number of potential blood donors, which is not something we should be doing. Blood shortages have been a major issue in the United States over the past several years.  According to the American Red Cross, more than 41,000 blood donations are needed every single day. In times of catastrophes and in the summer months when schools are no longer holding blood drives, there are major shortages of blood due to the lack of donors. ABC News reported that last year that the United States faced one of the worst shortages the Red Cross has ever seen. As Yezak explained, “to continue to exclude people despite the entirely reasonable arguments of the organizations that supply blood themselves is both discriminatory to them and harmful to everybody.” He said, “someone needs a blood donation every two seconds in the U.S., and you never know when that someone is going to be you.”

The bottom line is, we should not be turning away anyone’s blood. So long as it has been tested, there is no reason that everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, should be banned from donating. Hopefully the second annual National Gay Blood drive will prompt the FDA to lift this outdated and discriminatory ban.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Matt Buck via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The National Gay Blood Drive: A Call for Change appeared first on Law Street.

As part of the ongoing debate about the value of law school in the current market, Brittany Alzfan tells you why now is the time to go. For the flip side, check out Matt DeWilde’s take on why you shouldn’t send in that application just yet.

Now is a good time to go to law school, because things are looking up for future lawyers. Now I know most of you are skeptical, especially given the latest job statistics for the class of 2013, but just hear me out here. While the numbers put out by the National Association for Law Placement revealed a lower employment rate for the sixth year running, there was some good news: law school graduates in 2013 found more jobs overall than in 2012. That means that students who enter law school now will probably have more potential jobs at their disposal.

The huge drop in students enrolling in law schools over the past several years leaves graduates looking at a surprisingly strong job market. Let’s use the class of 2016 as an example here–39,700 students enrolled in the fall of 2013. If we take into account that about ten percent of each law school class generally drops out, then we are looking at no more than 36,000 J.D. graduates in 2016.

Compare that number to the 46,776 graduates in 2013, and we see a drop of 23 percent. With significantly less competition amongst the graduating class, graduates are far more likely to secure a decent job.

Does this mean that I’m saying that every law graduate will go on to work in the legal field right out of graduation? No, of course not. Like in every other field, some complete their degrees and pursue other things anyways. Many J.D. graduates end up pursuing careers in finance or business.

But the numbers can’t be ignored here. According to statistics put out by the American Bar Association, 32,755 graduates from last year’s class found full-time, long-term work lasting more than a year. Of those, 26,337 jobs required passing the bar, meaning that they were typical legal jobs that required a law degree. Another 4,714 students secured jobs in fields that did not require a law degree, but preferred to hire J.D.s, such as NGO organizers or congressional staffers. Lastly, 1,724 graduates ended up in jobs that were completely unrelated to the legal field.

If these numbers remain relatively steady, then we can expect that about 91 percent of the class of 2016 will find long-term, full-time employment. This is significantly higher than the 72 percent of graduates that found full-time employment last year. If we break this down further, about 73 percent of graduates will be in full-time legal positions, compared to only 58 percent last year.

This debate is pretty entrenched–some experts agree with me, others say the risk is still not worth the expensive price of a legal education. Kyle McEntee, the founder of the nonprofit Law School Transparency, said, “I do expect that the employment rates are going to improve greatly.” The issue is whether or not these job opportunities are worth the three years, and over $100,000 that it takes to graduate from law school.

Even when they do find jobs, law school graduates have to face the unfortunate fact that while starting salaries have fallen, debt is way up. Median pay right out of law school has dropped to around $62,000 a year from $72,000 in 2008. When you take inflation into account, starting salaries are actually lower than they were in 2000. On top of this, the New America Foundation estimates that the median student who borrows for law school–and most of them do borrow–finishes school with $128,000 in loans to pay back.

Yet, despite the cost of tuition and resulting debt, there is evidence that law school may be a smart financial decision in the long run. Michael Simkovic, a Seton Hall law professor, published a paper last year that showed that even for graduates at the 25th percentile of pay–such as those in jobs at small law firms or as public servants–law school was still a profitable investment, even if they spent $60,000 a year on tuition. In addition, President Obama has just announced a plan designed to alleviate student loan debt. His “Loan Forgiveness” plan is set up so that students with loans who meet certain income eligibility standards will only need to pay back 10 percent of their discretionary income for a maximum of 20 years. In some instances, if you work in public service, such as in a public defender’s job, you only need to pay back loans for 10 years. After that, the rest is forgiven. So if debt is what’s holding you back from law school, loan forgiveness might be an excellent option for you.

Now, of course, law school is not for everyone. It shouldn’t be a fallback if you don’t know what to do with the rest of your life, nor is it something that should be chosen on a whim. It’s hard work, and without passion, you probably won’t succeed. Additionally, some programs are not worth the cost. Most graduates from bottom-tier law schools will continue to have little success in the job market, just like they always have. Employers are more likely to hire a past graduate that has struggled to find a job than hire someone from a failing institution. It is important to do your research when applying, and ultimately deciding whether or not to attend, law school.

However, if you have thought it through and have decided that law school is for you, then your future is looking bright.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Penn State via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post If You Want to Go to Law School, Now’s the Time to Apply appeared first on Law Street.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled last Wednesday that law enforcement officials must obtain warrants in order to search the cell phones of those under arrest. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, “the fact that an arrestee has diminished privacy interests does not mean that the Fourth Amendment falls out of the picture entirely.” This is a definite departure from previous policies, which allowed police officers to collect evidence through warrantless cellphone searches.

The Chief Justice stated:

The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought, our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant.

In this decision, Roberts dismissed law enforcement officials’ claims that searching a cell phone is no different than searching a suspect’s pockets, which has never required a warrant. Roberts addressed this by saying, “that is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon.” Modern cell phones, with their vast capabilities, bring about entirely new privacy concerns that transcend a simple pocket search.

Warrantless searches have been justified, and sometimes are necessary. They are often conducted in order to protect police officers from hidden weapons, and to prevent suspects from destroying evidence. However, the court found that neither of those rationales applied to searching through the data on someone’s cell phone.

Understandably, police officers are concerned with the impact that this ruling will have on fighting crime. If a police officer must take the time to obtain a warrant before they can search someone’s phone, then that person will have the opportunity to erase any incriminating data. Roberts wrote:

We cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime. Cell phones have become important tools in facilitating coordination and communication among members of criminal enterprises, and can provide valuable incriminating information about dangerous criminals. Privacy comes at a cost.

However, according to Roberts, “remote wiping can be fully prevented by disconnecting a phone from the network.” He says that police officers can also remove a phone’s battery or simply turn the phone off.

This ruling was built on several privacy rulings in recent years, particularly the cases of United States v. Wurie and Riley v. California.

Police in Boston arrested Birma Wurie on drug trafficking charges in 2007. Police went through the call log on Wurie’s flip phone without first obtaining a warrant, and found several calls from a number labeled as “my house”. They then used reverse trajectory to trace the address, obtained a warrant, and found illegal drugs and firearms. While they did have a warrant to search the home, they never obtained one to search the phone that led them there.

In 2009, San Diego police detained David Riley for driving with expired tags. In their search of his car, police discovered two concealed firearms and seized Riley’s smartphone without a warrant. Stored text messages, photos, and videos on the phone led the police to believe that Riley had gang connections and was involved in several prior gang-related crimes.

In both of these cases, the defendants sought to suppress the evidence that was obtained without a warrant, and neither succeeded. The evidence was let in and they were both convicted, leading to a series of appeals that eventually reached the Supreme Court. The court addressed the privacy issues in both cases, but seemed less worried about police officers searching limited-capacity flip phones than smart phones that can hold large quantities of personal data. Justice Elena Kagan commented that, “most people now do carry their lives on cell phones,” so it is important that peoples’ Fourth Amendment rights are protected when it comes to personal information on smartphones.

In the age of constantly changing technology, the protections set out by the Fourth Amendment are unwavering. These technological advances raise many questions about one’s right to privacy when information is becoming more accessible. This Supreme Court decision is an important step in assuring that peoples’ rights are protected, despite these rapid changes in technology.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [dalioPhoto via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post SCOTUS Rules Warrantless Cellphone Searches Unconstitutional appeared first on Law Street.

The latest news from Northwestern Law School seems eerily reminiscent of the TV show “Suits.” Just a few months before graduation, Northwestern University Law School discovered that one of its students, Mauricio Celis, was a Texas felon infamous for posing as a lawyer. Celis was expelled in March from the school’s International Law LLM program as soon as they discovered his criminal history. He is now suing Northwestern over the decision.

Northwestern Law argued that the 42-year-old LLM student misled admissions officials by failing to inform them of his criminal history during the admissions process. Celis’ record includes a felony conviction for falsely presenting himself as a lawyer and a misdemeanor conviction for misidentifying himself as a police officer in an incident involving a woman wandering nude from his hot tub to a local convenience store. According to Northwestern Law, Celis’ criminal history makes him an “undesirable candidate” for their program. School officials say he would not have been admitted had they known of his past.

Celis is arguing, however, that they never asked about his criminal history during the admissions process. He was accepted to the prestigious program in 2012, spent about $76 thousand on tuition and fees, and was never once asked about his criminal history in the process.

While Celis has not commented on the lawsuit, he mantains that he is innocent in the Texas cases, despite the fact that both ended in convictions. He told the Chicago Tribune, “I’ve been trying to put this thing behind me for many, many years already”. According to his Northwestern application, Celis holds dual citizenship in the United States and Mexico. He worked in the legal field in Mexico and then co-founded a personal injury law firm in Texas in 2005.

In 2006, Celis made headlines in Chicago. After six children died in an apartment fire, he read a statement outside their wake. The Chicago Tribune picked up the story, and quoted Celis as the family’s attorney. According to Celis, he has no idea how the Tribune got the impression that he was the family’s attorney. He believes that he was brought in to help because he speaks Spanish, like the victims’ family members.  He has also stated that he has “never allowed anyone to have the impression” that he was licensed to practice law in the United States, and that while he was happy to help, he “let the lawyers do the lawyering.”

In 2007, Celis was indicted in Texas on charges that he illegally presented himself as a lawyer. Based on the court records, the argument was over whether or not Celis could technically be considered a lawyer from Mexico, despite the fact that he never obtained a license to practice law in the United States. Celis argued that the legal education that he received in Mexico qualified him to practice certain types of law there, although he was unable to provide any official documentation of his certification. He also maintained that he never actually practiced law in the United States.

However, the jury wasn’t buying it. They found Celis guilty on 14 counts in 2009, and he was sentenced to 10 years of probation. In response to the jury’s verdict, Celis said, “they looked at me as being some shyster faking my credentials, I am a Mexican lawyer.”

Regardless, Celis was convicted, and the issue at stake here is that Northwestern Law really should have caught it. If they were truly concerned about having convicted felons in their program, then that is something that they should ask about on their application. At the very least, they could have googled him. One quick search and you have access to public criminal records. That way, they wouldn’t have had to kick a student out just months before he was set to graduate. Paul Campos, a University of Colorado law professor and frequent critic of law schools put it best, stating,  “the fact that this guy got into Northwestern … it’s, I think, kind of revelatory of how much checking goes on even at a top program.” If a school doesn’t manage to ask its applicants a question that is found on every McDonalds application, then that’s on them.

Northwestern is arguing that Celis should have known that his criminal history was a problem, and should have voluntarily disclosed the information to admissions. However, I would disagree: if you don’t ask, what would stop someone with a criminal history from applying to your program? If someone with a criminal past wants to do something positive in their life, like get an education, why would they voluntarily disclose information that could stand in their way? It’s the school’s responsibility to ask the right questions of their applicants, not the applicants’ responsibility to anticipate possible issues.

According to court records filed in Chicago, Celis and Northwestern both agreed to a voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit. No details of a settlement were disclosed. While they were able to work something out this time, hopefully this situation will make law schools rethink their application processes so something like this does not happen again.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Chris Devers via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Too Much, Too Late: Northwestern Law Expels LLM Student for Former Crimes appeared first on Law Street.

I, for one, find parody accounts on Twitter hilarious; however, it is obvious that Jim Ardis, the mayor of Peoria, Illinois, disagrees. After discovering that someone had created a parody Twitter account in his name, rather than laugh it off, Ardis took extreme measures that ultimately led to a police raid of the creator’s home.

The account used the handle @peoriamayor and portrayed the mayor as a foul-mouthed, frequent drug user who loved going to strip clubs. The creator of the account is 29-year-old Jon Daniel, a writer, line cook, and father of two. Daniel shared with the Associated Press that he started the Twitter account as a joke. He told them, “I thought my friends would find it funny.”

While Daniel’s friends did indeed find the account funny, Ardis did not. Shortly after the account’s creation, the mayor discovered it and immediately started the process of getting it taken down. Just two days after the account’s creation, the city manager contacted the city’s chief information officer, Sam Rivera, and asked for help getting the account taken down. The email, which was sent on March 11, read, “Someone is using the Mayor’s likeness in a twitter account, it’s not him. @Peoriamayor. Can you work to get it shut down today?”

Just an hour later, emails were sent by city manager Patrick Urich to the city’s police chief demanding a police investigation into the account’s creator. While the police were skeptical if a crime had even been committed, Ardis was persistent and demanded that it be looked into further. Eventually, Detective James Feehan dug deep enough and found an obscure Illinois statute that makes it illegal to falsely portray a government official. The police were then able to subpoena Twitter for the IP address behind @Peoriamayor, and then subpoenaed Comcast to trace that IP information back to Daniel’s house.

On April 15, three weeks after the account was suspended, police raided Daniel’s home. Because one of the tweets involved a photo of a “white powdery substance” and a razor blade, the police entered the home armed with a warrant allowing them to search for drugs, paraphernalia, and electronics that could post to Twitter. The police confiscated several electronic devices, but ultimately did not arrest Daniel.

They did, however, arrest his roommate. Police seized a “large gold gift bag with five sandwich bags containing a green leafy substance” and arrested Jacob Elliot, Daniel’s roommate, for possession of marijuana.

Daniel is now fighting back, and suing Ardis and six other city employees for violating his First and Fourth Amendment rights. The account was clearly labeled as a parody account, and therefore should not have been taken down. Typically, spoofs and parodies like this Twitter account are protected by the First Amendment because they are considered a form of political speech and are not intended to deceive anyone.

The 55-year-old mayor is threatening a countersuit for defamation. In an attempt to demonstrate that the tweets were not clearly parody, Ardis “gave a straight-faced reading of Daniel’s most off-color tweets, including messages that voiced enthusiastic support for strippers, tequila and crack pipes.”

Just three days after the raid, Ardis received some detrimental news for his defamation “case” –there may be an internet exception to the impersonating statute. If this is the case, everyone missed it, from the investigators to the State Attorney’s Office to the judges, and it is likely that they will toss his case. In addition, the mayor has received major public criticism for his drastic actions against Daniel. The incident has been labeled “Twittergate” in Illinois, and several other Ardis parody accounts have popped up on social media. It will be interesting to see what, if any, action Ardis takes against these new impersonators. Hopefully he won’t be raiding any more homes.

Ardis has also received many emails from people all over the world mocking him for his actions. One message read: “Just to give you heads up, sir: I will be mocking you at the dinner table this evening, I will await your stormtroopers with some fresh coffee and rolls. Please phone ahead.” While this situation is yet to be resolved, it’s unlikely that things will turn out in Ardis’ favor.

And for your daily laugh, here is a video of Ardis reading some of @peoriamayor’s tweets:

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Glenn Halog via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Peoria Mayor Sends Police to Raid Home of Twitter Parody Account Creator appeared first on Law Street.

“10, 9, 8, 7…” you count back as you begin to drift into an anesthetic haze. Soon you’re completely unconscious, and your surgery is underway. The surgeon begins to open you up for a complicated procedure, and your anesthesiologist is…sexting? Well, that’s not so unfathomable. Last week, Seattle anesthesiologist Dr. Arthur Zilberstein’s medical license was suspended due to allegations that he was sexting during surgery. According to the Medical Quality Assurance Commission, Zilberstein repeatedly sent sexually explicit text messages while acting as the lead anesthesiologist in surgeries. The Washington State Department of Health has reported that the doctor had “compromised patient safety due to his preoccupation with sexual matters while he was on hospital duty between at least April and August 2013.”

This was not just a quick, one time thing. The doctor sent dozens of messages on numerous occasions. On June 17, 2013, Zilberstein sent 64 texts over the course of seven surgeries. Most of these messages were sent minutes apart, including one that read, “I’m hella busy with C sections.” It’s clear he wasn’t “hella busy” enough to put down the phone. During an August 6 surgery Zilberman exchanged 45 sexually explicit text messages.

Swedish Medical Center, the hospital where Zilberstein worked, released a statement shortly after the allegations were made public: “Respondent’s lack of focus on patient care while providing anesthesia services for hospital-based surgical procedures routinely fell below the standard of care and put patients at unreasonable risk of harm.” The statement also read:

The safety of our patients is our number one priority, once we learned that the State had suspended this physician’s medical license, the physician’s Medical Staff membership and privileges were immediately suspended. We just recently learned of these allegations and are conducting our own internal review of the physician, who is not directly employed by Swedish.

While naturally there are going to be distractions in the operating room, they have skyrocketed over the past several years with the increased reliance on technology. We are constantly texting and checking our phones throughout the day. But what place do cell phones have in the operating room where lives are on the line? A panel of surgeons, organized by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, discussed distractions in the operating room and their potential impacts on patient safety. According to Dr. Daniel White, electronic distractions in the operating room are reaching “epidemic levels.” The combination of natural and electronic distractions are making both communication and concentration, which are key for performing a successful surgery, extremely difficult.

In particular, anesthesiologists need to have perfect timing and focus in order to perform their duties correctly, meaning that any small distraction could become a huge problem. The doctors on the panel compared the duties of an anesthesiologist to those of a pilot, and suggest that the “sterile cockpit” rules that pilots use should be followed by surgeons and anesthesiologists. According to Dr. Dwight Burney, “the sterile cockpit means that no tasks are to be undertaken by the flight crew during the critical phases of taxi, takeoff, and landing in any operation below 10,000 feet above ground level other than level flight and cruising.” Essentially, during these “critical phases,” the pilot’s complete focus should be on flying the plane and under no circumstances should he or she be doing anything else. He explains how “several articles in the anesthesia literature talk about the critical phases of anesthesia — induction and emergence — that are analogous to critical phases in aviation — take off and landing.” If these rules were to be adopted by surgeons, there would be no avoidable distraction, like cell phones, allowed during these phases of surgery.

This story has received a lot of buzz on the internet, and many people are wondering the same thing that I am: how was this allowed to go on for so long? Didn’t anyone notice him using his cell phone during surgery? Jan Mannino, in a comment on a Huffington Post article said, “as a long practicing nurse anesthetist, I am here to tell you that you can’t be playing on a cell phone and closely monitoring the patient at the same time. And to think he was billing for his anesthesia.” Joan Lemme commented, “And how long has this been going on? It was not obvious to the surgeon that he was using his cell phone? Sounds like many were ignoring it for some time.”

So why was it ignored? Well, the truth is that there are no laws banning cell phones during surgery. As a result, no one had any reason to speak up. Some individual hospitals, such as Torrence Memorial Medial Center in Los Angeles, have rules regarding cell phones in their hospitals. After an incident in 2009 where a staff member was caught taking pictures of a naked patient, the hospital made a rule prohibiting cell phones in all patient areas. With a higher prevalence of these incidents due to increased cell phone use, one has to wonder why these rules regarding cell phones have not yet been turned into laws. Perhaps this situation will be a wakeup call and we will finally see the necessary changes to these laws. While, thankfully, no patients were injured or killed as a result of Zilberstein’s actions, he compromised their safety and was completely inappropriate. If something had happened, Zilberstein and Swedish Medical Center could have been looking at a huge malpractice suit costing them millions of dollars. Technology is advancing, and the laws need to keep up.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Pro Juventute via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Sexting Anesthesiologist’s License Suspended appeared first on Law Street.

All it takes is one click to create a disaster. That is exactly what happened when Ruth Payne, the University of Virginia School of Law’s Director of Judicial Clerkships, sent out an email attachment last Wednesday containing the personal information of 155 law school students to the school’s clerkship listserv. Payne originally intended to send an email with an attachment of clerkship listings in Maryland. However, after forgetting to attach the clerkship listings in the original email, she hastily sent a followup. Unfortunately for her and the 155 students, she sent the wrong file–instead of sending the clerkship listing, she accidentally sent out a file called the “2015 Applicants Workbook.” It was a spreadsheet containing the students’ GPA’s, class ranks, and other biographical information. Six minutes later, Payne frantically sent a third email ordering the students to delete the previous email and the attached file.

However, the damage had already been done. The entire email listserv now had access to confidential information about themselves and their classmates. While the spreadsheet did not contain any students’ social security numbers or financial information, this incident caused alarm among UVA students–both those affected and those not–that their personal information could so easily be released. According to UVA Law’s Spokeswoman Mary Wood, affected students have been individually contacted and apologized to by the dean and other law school officials. She said, “We are deeply distressed that this mistake occurred, and we are in the process of reviewing our data management procedures to build in more safeguards against unintentional disclosures.” The UVA Law Vice Dean George Geis followed up and sent out another apology email to the affected students. He wrote, “Ruth and I both deeply regret this situation and apologize to all of you, we take the safeguarding of your personal information very seriously and will conduct a full review of our communication practices and our management of confidential student information.”

But how many second chances do they get? This is not the first time that UVA has accidentally released confidential student information to the public. Just last summer, the social security numbers of about 18,700 UVA students were mistakenly included in health insurance brochures that were mailed out nationwide. In December 2012, a handheld device disappeared from UVA’s medical center. It likely contained patients’ personal information and social security numbers. Later that year, about 350 grade transcripts were publicly posted to a UVA website. In 2007, the university discovered that confidential records of about 5,700 current and former faculty members had been hacked. Before that, in 2006, a spreadsheet containing the social security numbers of 632 students was erroneously sent out. While it would be easy to place blame for these security issues on one individual, it is clear that this is a systemic issue that is affecting each of the individual schools at UVA. This seems to be a constant problem for the top university, and it’s clear that major changes need to be made to their security procedures. It’s one thing to say that they’re working on creating safeguards, but it’s another to actually implement them.

In fairness, UVA is not the only school that has had issues like this. In April of 2012, Baylor Law School accidentally sent out admissions information, including names, grades, and LSAT scores, to every single student admitted to the class of 2015. Loyola Law School in Los Angeles sent out an email containing the financial information, including social security numbers and loan amounts, for the entire graduating class in March of 2014.

While there is no guarantee that any real measures will be taken to prevent this type of incident from happening again, hopefully the personnel at UVA will at the very least be a bit more careful when dealing with confidential information.  In his email, George Geis said, “Ruth or I are available if you have any questions or concerns.” I can guarantee you one thing UVA, there will be at least 155 students taking you up on that offer.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Bob Mical via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post UVA Law Leaks Confidential Student Information…Again appeared first on Law Street.

Army dismissal, felony conviction, homelessness, law degree? While certainly unconventional, that is the path that Desmond Meade took to obtain his law degree from Florida International University. After graduating high school in 1985, Meade pursued a career in the United States Army, which ended after he was caught stealing liquor while stationed in Hawaii. He returned to Miami, and was convicted of several drug charges as a result of living the fast-paced life of a celebrity bodyguard. In 1995, his mother passed away and shortly after, his family home was foreclosed. In 2001, Meade was sentenced and served 15 years in prison for possession of a firearm as a felon. After his early release, he found himself homeless on the streets of Miami. According to Mead in an interview The Miami Times, “when you’re homeless, there’s a harsh emotional aspect, no one really cared one way or another if you lived or if you died.” It was at this point that he realized that he needed to do something drastic to make positive changes in his life.

Meade turned his life around and completed the Chapman Partnership drug treatment program, a program specifically designed to help the homeless through their recovery. After he successfully completed the program, he graduated summa cum laude in paralegal studies from Miami-Dade Community College’s North Campus in 2010. He then took the next step, and enrolled in Florida International University Law School, from which he just graduated this past May.

Now, at the age of 46, Meade stands proud and with a newfound purpose in life. He is using his personal experiences to drive him in his work. He said, “I realized all the pain and suffering I went through all my life became worthwhile when I used it to help someone else, I realized that was my purpose — to help those less fortunate.” Meade is now the director of Lifelines to Healing Campaign, a PICO United program that aims to address and end the root causes of violence in cities across the country. In addition, Meade is working with the program to end mass incarceration in Florida.

However, there is still one thing standing in his way: Florida state law prohibits convicted felons from practicing law. So while Meade spent the past three years taking classes to prepare him for practicing law in Florida, he is unable to do so. Rather than move to another state where convicted felons are free to practice law, Meade is prepared to stay and fight for change in his home state. He says, “I’m going to stay here. I’m going to fight. What I went through to get where I am today, I have no choice but to have faith.”

This raises an interesting question–should convicted felons be allowed to practice law? Nearly every state has rules about getting a license to practice law, most of which make it nearly impossible for convicted felons to get their license. According to James Hirby at The Law Dictionary, “the person to be licensed must have objective evidence that he or she is a person of good moral character, complete rehabilitation, and a member of the community” in order to get their license to practice law. Many feel that a felony conviction is a direct contradiction to these qualities, which is why in most states–such as Florida, where Meade resides–convicted felons are barred from getting their license to practice.

While there is certainly a strong argument for this rule, not every convicted felon has bad moral character. States like Florida should have processes that make it possible for convicted felons to redeem themselves in a way and be allowed to practice law so long as they can pass the bar and follow the guidelines like everybody else. For example, in the state of Washington, convicted felons that wish to take the bar exam must go before the state bar’s ethics and morality committee and argue why they are fit to practice law. While there is certainly a high standard when arguing before the committee, this process makes it possible for convicted felons to get a second chance. People do change, and like Meade, they grow and learn from the mistakes that they have made.  While it is too soon to say whether or not Meade’s actions will have any effect on Florida law, he has already been an inspiration to people everywhere. He has shown that no matter where you come from, you can accomplish your goals with hard work and perseverance.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [ACLU of Southern California via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post From Felon to Lawyer: The Inspiring Story of Desmond Meade appeared first on Law Street.

Where is the line between independent contractor and employee? That was the question presented in the case of Coleman vs Pink Poodle Enterprises, where 11 former exotic dancers at the Pink Poodle strip club sued their former employer for failing to pay them minimum wage and overtime or provide them with benefits. The club is located in San Jose, California and has been owned and operated by the Kuzinich family for the past 57 years.

The club got around these provisions in the California Labor Code by classifying the dancers as “independent contractors”, rather than “employees”, despite the fact that dancers had regular work schedules, specific dress codes, and were required to attend employee meetings the way a typical “employee” would.  As independent contractors, the dancers were ineligible for benefits such as Medicare and Social Security. This is the main legal argument that the Kuzinich family is using to counter the dancers’ claims: they are independent contractors, and therefore minimum wage and benefit laws do not apply. This is certainly a stretch, since “independent contractors” are not bound by employer guidelines the way that these dancers were.

Not only were the dancers deprived benefits, but some of them were not even paid for their labor at all. Instead, they were required to pay the club for the opportunity to dance there. This is referred to by many club owners as a “house fee” that the dancers must pay in order to get time on stage, similar to the way that a hairstylist can rent out a chair at a salon. However, hair stylists who do this are usually not bound to salon schedules or meeting times the way that these dancers were.

This is an issue that is being raised in clubs across the country, and it is not the first time that dancers are fighting back against their employers. Another lawsuit, filed in 2013 by Felicia Harmon and others against Foxy Lady, Inc. and Arthur Dillard, raised the same employment issues as the dancers at the Pink Poodle. In addition, dancers at the Foxy Lady were forced to pay a “bar fee” so that they could choose to work any shift and were required to pay a fine if they showed up to work late. Now I don’t know about you, but the idea of paying my employer to work seems outrageous. Regardless of one’s personal opinion towards exotic dancing as a profession, labor is labor.

There is an upside to being labeled as an independent contractor–tips. Since the dancers are not given an hourly wage, they are able to keep all (or the majority) of the tips that they make from their dances. According to an exotic dancer who goes by the name Menagerii, this can be between $500 and $1500 on an average night. In fact, many of the dancers didn’t even realize that they were being taken advantage of because they walked away with a decent amount of cash each night.  However, while $1500 may seem like a lot, when the fee to dance at the club and the cost of medical care are taken into account that number drops fast.

The majority of past cases have ruled in favor of the dancers, rewarding them with settlements of millions of dollars. In 2012, another club in California settled a similar lawsuit for $12.9 million and a third lawsuit settled in 2013 required the Penthouse Executive Club to pay $8 million to its dancers in wages and overtime. While we don’t know explicitly how much compensation the dancers from the Pink Poodle are seeking, past precedent shows that the dancers are likely to be victorious and receive a large settlement.

Featured image courtesy of [401(K) 2012 via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Exotic Dancers Sue Strip Club over Benefits and Wages appeared first on Law Street.