In 2014, Law Street Media set out to redefine law school specialty rankings. We wanted to provide a mix of qualitative and quantitive information to prospective law school students who are interested in pursuing a particular specialty program while in law school, and we’re pretty happy to say we succeeded with our first cycle. We covered a number of different specialties–from the hugely popular and common criminal and tax programs, to smaller and more specialized fields like entertainment and real estate law. As our first three-year cycle of specialty rankings comes to a close, we wanted to take a few minutes to recognize the schools that consistently ranked at the top of our lists. Click on the schools below to see their highlights:

Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law,Georgetown University Law Center, University of Virginia School of Law , Fordham University School of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, University of Pennsylvania School of Law, University of California – Los Angeles School of Law, and Honorable Mentions.

Columbia Law School

Harvard Law School

New York University School of Law

Georgetown University Law Center

University of Virginia School of Law

Fordham University School of Law

Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

University of Pennsylvania Law School

University of California – Los Angeles School of Law

Honorable Mentions

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post 2016 Law School Specialty Rankings: Who Came Out on Top? appeared first on Law Street.

NYUInfographic

Research and analysis done by Law Street’s Law School Rankings team: Alexis Evans, Anneliese Mahoney, Julia Bryant, Sean Simon, Alex Simone, Inez Nicholson, Ashlee Smith, Sam Reilly.

Click here for detailed ranking information for each of the Top 10 Law Schools for Immigration Law.

Click here to see all the 2016 specialty rankings.

Click here for information on rankings methodology.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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College students around the U.S. and Canada have been seeing “White Student Union” pages pop up for their respective schools–as of this morning there were more than 30 around the country. But is this a new trend–are random college students really trying to create “white student communities,” or just a bunch of annoying trolls?

I’m happy to announce it appears to be the latter–The Daily Beast has reported that the Facebook pages for the white student unions are being created by a bunch of racist trolls.

Those white-student-union Facebook pages are probably fake: https://t.co/O6npzWSFQG pic.twitter.com/dpXm0FRx2x

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) November 24, 2015

The message boards 4Chan and 8Chan as well as the white supremacist site Daily Stormer appear to be propelling the creation of the pages. Gotta love the internet, and its amazing power to connect assholes regardless of location.

According to The Daily Beast, the goals of these idiots are pretty straightforward:

These trolls’ strategy is to mimic the black student activist groups whose campus protests have made headlines this month. They purport to highlight racial double-standards, asking why white students should not be allowed to organize the way minority students do. The answer is relatively straightforward (American universities are often majority white, with curricula and administrative systems that privilege white students), but 8channers are counting on some students to fall for their rhetoric.

The pages have all essentially been created within the last week, lending credence to the theory that there’s a concentrated and new effort to create them. Additionally, many of the pages use similar language, for example introducing the pages as “a safe space to support and promote the interests of students of European descent at [relevant university name]!” The following description has also been found on a number of pages:

We affirm the dignity and ancestry of our proud people who have gifted the world with countless works of beauty, science, and wisdom, and are committed to promoting a dialogue and political resistance that will secure a future for our posterity and spirit. … At the same time, we do not wish to denigrate or harm any other group or ethnicity.

After their creation, the pages have been posting a variety of articles, including those about high profile racial controversies at schools like Mizzou and Yale, or articles that are critical of the Black Lives Matter movement and the concept of white privilege.

Schools that have been affected have, for the most part, issued statements that they’re trying to get the pages taken down, and that they’re not supported by the administration. Many schools have also indicated their support for students of color on their campuses. Additionally, NYU–one of the highest profile schools to get targeted–threatened legal action against the trolls for using NYU’s logo without permission and breaking copyright law.

So no, there’s not suddenly a ton of students across the country making “White Student Union” pages, or trying to start “White Student Union” organizations. But thanks, trolls, for making sure my faith in humanity is, as per usual, very low.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post What’s Up With All the “White Student Unions?” appeared first on Law Street.

Research and analysis done by Law Street’s Law School Rankings team: Anneliese Mahoney, Brittany Alzfan, Erika Bethmann, Matt DeWilde, and Natasha Paulmeno.

Click here to read more coverage on Law Street’s Law School Specialty Rankings 2014.

Click here for information on rankings methodology.

Featured image courtesy of: [Jonathan71 via WikiMedia]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Top 10 Law Schools for Environmental and Energy Law: #2 New York University School of Law appeared first on Law Street.

Research and analysis done by Law Street’s Law School Rankings team: Anneliese Mahoney, Brittany Alzfan, Erika Bethmann, Matt DeWilde, and Natasha Paulmeno.

Click here to read more coverage on Law Street’s Law School Specialty Rankings 2014.

Click here for information on rankings methodology.

Featured image courtesy of: [Jonathan71 via WikiMedia]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Top 10 Law Schools for Business Law: #1 New York University School of Law appeared first on Law Street.

Currently on view at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, “Energy That is All Around: Mission School,” features a group of subversive San Francisco street artists from the late-1990s. Emanating from San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), the Mission School was a direct reaction to gentrification in the Bay Area spurred by the dot-com boom that brought an influx of young professionals, upscale boutiques, restaurants, inflated rents, and threats of eviction to the primarily working-class Latino families of San Francisco’s Mission District.

“A lot of people were displaced,” said artist Chris Johnson, “everybody got fucked over.” The art of the Mission School focused on the social, political, cultural and economic aspects of everyday life in the Bay Area during this period, embodying a radical activism railing against gentrification and rampant consumerism. “They were part of a community that responded acidly to the social and aesthetic values associated with ’80s consumer culture and corporate hegemony in the dawning of the age of the internet,” said Natasha Boas, a San Francisco-based independent curator. “With their raw, immediate, and gritty street and studio practices, these post-punk, key artists of the Mission School would soon [become] international icons for new generations of art students and makers.”

The artists — Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri — share a similar aesthetic, described by McCarthy as “urban decay,” “graffiti-based,” and “Do-it-yourself.” The art is informed by lowbrow visual culture including cartoons, billboard advertisements, graffiti, and folk art. According to Lynn Gumpert, director of NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, the artworks critique society “literally standing our culture’s notion of ‘high art’ on its head.” Often employing found objects and dumpster diving for materials, their art is bound by an “anti-establishment” and “anti-capitalist” ethos, according to art critic and curator Dian Pugh whose essay ”Off The Tracks: Ethics and Aesthetics of Recent San Francisco Art” is featured in the exhibit catalogue. “Juxtaposed against the dot-com boom culture, these artists represented the moral and political voice of our cultural community — a community that was being threatened by gentrification.”

Like a modern-day John Sloan or George Bellows, Chris Johanson refers to his art as “documentary painting;” streetscapes chronicling everyday life at the dawn of the digital age. The Survivalists (1999) is a jarring installation among the pieces in the show. Flimsy wooden beams painted yellow protrude from panels on the wall, forming catwalks on which lonely consumers push shopping carts toward the viewer, perhaps conveying the alienation of labor in capitalist society. Speech bubbles from multiple figures in the panels read: “Get out of the Mission,” “Yuppies Out Now,” “Turn the building into condos,” “For Sale: Cozy One Bedroom Basement Condo, $300,000,” “Theres [sic.] no place to stay…keep on moving.”  As a whole, the scene is too much to take in at once; only after reading each panel does the larger picture come into focus. “When people see this piece, they see the social anxiety,” said Chris Johanson. “I wanted to share the complexities of the socio-economic situation that everyone just had to deal with.” Voices are illustrated in a cacophonous and vexing exchange. It’s a “celebration of multiplicity,” said Dina Pugh, “that earnestly comments on existential issues of human identity comprised by consumer culture.”

Graffiti is a galvanizing force in each piece of this show. Barry McGee, also known by his tag “Twist,” presents a more cartoon-inspired aesthetic than Johansen, which is nonetheless political. “Growing up I used to see a group of activists, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who would spray-paint aggressive statements on Bank of America, government buildings, and freeway underpasses,” McGee recalled in a 2004 interview. “They shed light on atrocities being committed by the Reagan Administration’s policies in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba and so on. I like that — the rawness of it.” McGee’s squat, droopy-eyed cartoon and seemingly depressed cartoon figures reflect the underside of inequitable urban change; not only the exasperated slaving masses, but also perhaps homeless, downtrodden vagabonds.

At Grey Art Gallery, the first East Coast venue to showcase the Mission School, this show is not only historically significant; it’s also relevant, according to Hi-Fructose citing “siliconvalleyization” of the Bay Area. Yet what is so striking is that the same process is currently taking place in New York City; rapid gentrification, from the city center to the periphery. Looking at the Mission District of the late-1990s, one cannot help but think of Bushwick, Brooklyn today. Both neighborhoods were inhabited by primarily working-class Latino families who, over time, have been priced out of their homes; factory buildings have been converted into artists’ lofts, and bodegas have become high-end boutiques. Public art can exacerbate the rate of gentrification, transforming working-class communities into trendy neighborhoods to which hipsters flock. But it has the potential to counter this affect as well, as Art Practical mentioned in its review of the NYU show, “there are still lessons to be learned here.”

According to Barry McGee, the landscape of contemporary public art is politically benign. “The stuff people do now doesn’t antagonize anyone at all. It has become like the mural art, which is fine in its own right but doesn’t anger people when they see it…[T]here was a time in graffiti when it was fun to do images. In hindsight, it opened the floodgates to tons of terrible art school graffiti and non-abrasive images.” McGee now advocates illicit “fundamental graffiti acts” such as tags and throw-ups, which, precisely because of their illegality, have the potential to affect social change. In such a way, the Mission School teaches us to produce graffiti as a “social practice” based on “radical pessimism” about the social environment.

The takeaway message from “Energy That is All Around: Mission School” is that art not only documents, but also has the potential it change society. And that power is open to the people.

You can see the exhibit “Energy That is All Around: Mission School” featuring artwork by Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, and Ruby Neri at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003. The exhibit is open until July 13, 2014.

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Ryan D. Purcell (@RyanDPurcell) holds an MA in American History from Rutgers University where he explored the intersection between hip hop graffiti writers and art collectives on the Lower East Side. His research is based on experience working with the Newark Public Arts Project and from tagging independently throughout New Jersey and New York.

Featured image courtesy of [victorgrigas via wikipedia] 

Ryan Purcell

Ryan D. Purcell holds an MA in American History from Rutgers University where he explored the intersection between hip hop graffiti writers and art collectives on the Lower East Side. His research is based on experience working with the Newark Public Arts Project and from tagging independently throughout New Jersey and New York. Contact Ryan at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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