Research and analysis done by Law Street’s Law School Rankings team: Alexis Evans, Hyunjae Ham, Symon Rowlands, and Toni Keddell.

Click here to read more coverage on Law Street’s Law School Specialty Rankings 2015.

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Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Racist chants, hotel trashing, and naked photos of unconscious women. These things have become seemingly synonymous with college fraternities after a slew of scandals in recent weeks thrust Greek Life even further under the nation’s microscope.

First, the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter was caught on tape singing a racist chant referencing lynching. The scandal resulted in the chapter being shut down, and some of their members were even expelled.

Then news of the University of Michigan’s Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity racking up almost half a million dollars worth of damages at a northern Michigan ski resort in January surfaced. That’s one hell of a hotel party that would definitely put most rockers to shame. Their fraternity was also disbanded.

Michigan’s Sigma Alpha Mu frat has been permanently disbanded for ski resort rampage http://t.co/W0RmBkMyFI pic.twitter.com/Tv0E2efHwl

— David Nelson (@DavidNelsonNews) March 18, 2015

Now Penn State’s chapter of Kappa Delta Rho is following suit with its own form of debauchery. A secret “invite only” Facebook group was discovered that served as a hub for photos of naked and passed out women, hazing, and records of drug sales. Not good Penn State, not good.

Nude photo scandal rocks Penn State fraternity: http://t.co/3XVSdei1hI pic.twitter.com/yB79OldNFg — AOL.com (@AOL) March 17, 2015

The page had a total of 144 active members including current fraternity members and some alums. CNN reported,

The former frat member who tipped off police told authorities that a second Facebook page called ‘2.0’ allegedly had been created around April 2014 following complaints from a woman whose photo was posted on it, the affidavit said. The earlier version of the page was titled ‘Covert Business Transactions.’

The frat has been suspended for one year by the Penn State Interfraternity Council, while university officials continue to investigate the incident. Even with its suspension, some are still unhappy with the way Penn State is dealing with the scandal.

According to CNN, David Clohessy, director of the St. Louis-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said in a statement the latest allegations call into question the university’s handling of sex crime reports. Clohessy said,

For years now, Penn State enthusiasts have repeatedly reassured everyone who’d listen that the university’s problematic culture about sex crimes had been reformed. The latest allegations — that a fraternity members posted nude pictures of women on Facebook, some of whom appeared to be sleeping or passed out — raise serious doubts about those claims

…The Kappa Delta Rho is a wake up call. But the Sandusky case should have been a wake up call too.

These scandals have Greek Life members nationwide worried what will be next. Organizations have even begun investigating their own chapters just to be safe. It is unfortunate to see the reputations of these organizations being tarnished by the actions of a few, especially when they were created to be pillars of leadership and philanthropy within the community. Instead fraternities are being referred to as offensive, discriminatory, and sexually abusive, or in other words, a PR consultant’s worst nightmare. Cleaning up this image won’t be easy, especially if more scandals continue to surface, but holding these boys responsible is a good first step.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Greek Fraternities’ Swift Fall From Grace: What’s Next? 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.

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Shame on me. I only just stumbled upon the paper published in the Journal of Legal Education by University of Michigan law professor Sherman J. Clark last month, arguing that one of the perks of law school is that it helps each student “to thrive, to live a full and satisfying and meaningful life.” Through the Socratic method of lecturing, by training students to look at legal issues from the viewpoints of both parties in each case, by forcing them to confront the reality of uncertainty in both legal doctrines and empirical knowledge, and by teaching students certain ethics, law school helps students “explore the range of possible ways in which one might find meaning in or give meaning to life.”

I agree with Professor Sherman’s basic point, but I would have made the case for it rather differently. An otherwise well-written piece is riddled with highfalutin’, mealymouthed abstractions like, “Thinking well about what people care about and what things mean to them calls upon us to imagine more broadly what might matter and what it is possible for things to mean.” Upon closer inspection, these passages actually do seem to mean something, but they’ll probably strike the average prospective law school student as pretentious gobbledygook.

Nonetheless, I do find that my legal education comes in handy, and not only in, say, knowing my constitutional rights in case I get hassled by the police or knowing that oral contracts are legally binding, too. Mind you, I actually learned that last tidbit on TV when I was a child:

I think that doctrinal and practical legal knowledge proves useful in philosophical contexts, such as in discussions about what is the morally right thing to do in a particular situation. Certainly, the ability to navigate these often treacherous waters — the better to inform one’s ethical choices— is a skill that can help people to live life more meaningfully.

For example, among the basic doctrines that all first-year law students learn are the four elements of a negligence tort. In order to sue someone who’s harmed you through careless behavior, you, the plaintiff, have to prove that the defendant had a “duty of care” — i.e. that the defendant was legally required to take steps to avoid harming others. You also have to prove that the defendant breached that legal duty; that you suffered some form of harm that the law can correct; and that the defendant’s carelessness caused that harm. In later conversations and arguments with my fellow politics and philosophy geeks, the knowledge of those elements has served me in good stead. It’s a very philosophically sound way for the legal system to provide redress for people’s private grievances against each other.

Consider, for example, the duty of care requirement. It makes sense for the courts to require a plaintiff to establish that the defendant had such a responsibility before even proceeding with the lawsuit. Not every situation in life in which your behavior could affect others adversely should require you to spend resources guarding against such harm. Some situations in which people can get hurt are unforeseeable to everyone involved; sometimes it’s not within the alleged wrongdoer’s power to prevent them; sometimes the wrongdoer’s carelessness was only one factor that helped do the damage. The breach of duty criterion makes sense, too; if you’ve done everything the law requires you to do to avoiding hurting anyone, and someone gets hurt anyway, you arguably shouldn’t be liable. Similarly, if you’ve breached your duty of care, but there was miraculously no harm done, or if some harm occurred, but it isn’t clear that your carelessness actually made it happen, then the government shouldn’t force you to compensate the defendant.

The same can be said for the doctrine of “consideration,” which helps determine whether a contract will hold up in court. It basically means that courts can generally enforce agreements that involve some exchange of favors or benefits. Each party to the deal has to give up something of value to the other(s), be it money, products, services or what have you, or the court may not provide satisfaction in the event that one party doesn’t hold up his/her end. This general rule makes sense in light of nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” which essentially holds that the government should only restrict personal freedom when it’s necessary to prevent individuals from harming others. In the contractual context, if I make a deal with you that doesn’t require me to sacrifice anything to you in order for you to fulfill your obligations, you probably won’t make me any worse off if you break the agreement. In that case, the government has no business forcing you to pay me back.

These underpinnings of legal doctrines can be helpful in larger philosophical exchanges. In arguments over when government intervention can and cannot be justified, I often refer to certain aspects of tort law to bolster my position that Mill’s harm principle, as I understand it, is a better general rule than the more dogmatically libertarian non-aggression principle. Aggression, as I understand it, involves inflicting harm on others on purpose, whereas negligence entails mere carelessness rather than intentional harm. Yet people can do a world of damage to each other without going out of their way in order to do it. In my view, government has a role to play in trying to prevent negligent as well as deliberate harm.

It’s not only legal rules and doctrines that can serve useful purposes outside of a purely legal context. The nitty-gritty realities of legal practice offer their own useful insights to non-lawyers. My 1L Civil Procedure professor had the whole class read the novel A Civil Action, about a 1980s toxic tort lawsuit in Massachusetts gone tragically awry. One point that the novel drove home for me was the fact that personal-injury lawyers like the protagonist in the book are not charity workers. They’re profit-seeking businesspeople who earn their bread and butter by suing defendants with deep pockets, ones who can actually afford to cough up large sums of money in damages. This issue came up in a recent Facebook discussion, when I threw cold water on an intriguing proposal to abolish criminal law and leave the righting of interpersonal wrongs to civil courts. I pointed out that many heinous acts are perpetrated by low-income people whom ambulance chasers are not exactly in a hurry to sue. And anyway, what restitution could even willing lawyers hope to extract from poor defendants?

Of course, it’s no secret that legal knowledge and training can be helpful in any number of obvious public policy-related ways; Professor Sherman seems to have had a different set of advantages in mind. Nonetheless, although lawyers aren’t exactly known to the general public for being great philosophers, legal education does teach certain ways of thinking that should be appealing to anyone seeking to live a rational as well as a moral life.

Featured image courtesy of [Pedro Szekely via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

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This week, the Supreme Court is dealing with the second case to challenge affirmative action in two years—Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. Last session, Fisher v. University of Texas made headlines when the Supreme Court did not decide on the merits of the case, but rather determined that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had not applied the standard of strict scrutiny that the precedents of Grutter v. Bollinger and Regents of the Univ of Cal. v. Bakke required. The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the Fifth Circuit, and in doing so, chose not to take up the constitutionality of using race as a factor in admissions. Affirmative action remained constitutional.

This new case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action also deals with affirmative action, but from a completely different angle. In 2006, Michigan voters passed a ballot initiative that banned state-funded schools from using affirmative action policies. They argued that affirmative action policies are discriminatory because they treat people of different races differently, and that striking down such a policy removed that potential for discrimination. They are not the only state to make this choice—Washington, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, California, and Florida also ban racial preferences in admissions. The US Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit struck down this ballot initiative, basing their precedents on other cases in which changes to a political process were deemed discriminatory.

There are a few obvious questions that arise from this case. First, what effect has this ban on affirmative action yielded? Does the Supreme-Court-approved constitutionality of affirmative action make it an option or a requirement for states? And finally, what will the justices decide?

Let’s start with the easiest of those three questions: what effect can we see in Michigan from the affirmative action ban? The answer: African-American and Latino enrollment at the University of Michigan has dropped since the 2006 ban. But something significantly more interesting is occurring in some of the other states that have banned affirmative action. Richard D. Kahlenberg found that many of these states adopted race-neutral policies, such as banning legacies, admitting students at the top of their high school class all across a given state, and programs for better financial aid. These states with race neutral strategies had the same levels, or higher, of minority enrollment as they did before banning affirmative action. Proponents of these policies argue that we need to focus on differences in socioeconomic class disparity, not just race. They cite the fact that poor white students only score marginally better on SATs than poor minority students as proof.

Next, does the Supreme-Court-approved constitutionality of affirmative action make it an option or a requirement? There’s no easy answer to this question, because any argument becomes somewhat cyclical. In the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, also focused on Michigan, the Supreme Court stated that certain affirmative action policies that aimed to promote class diversity and evaluated numerous factors for every candidate were not unconstitutional as they did not take the form of a quota system outlawed by Regents of the Univ. of Cal. Vs. Bakke. However that does not mean that states must allow affirmative action, just that they may.

Affirmative action is a good thing. It allows greater opportunities, greater diversity, and helps thousands of students each year get into great schools where they are able to thrive. And we do know it is constitutional—the Supreme Court has affirmed as much. But will the Supreme Court strike down Michigan’s ban? Probably not. Despite recent liberal wins, this is still a conservative Court. The plaintiff, Attorney General of Michigan Bill Schuette is arguing that Michigan is being nondiscriminatory by banning policies that do not treat all races the same. The defense, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is proposing that affirmative action is a mechanism in which to further equal protection and equal treatment. For this court, particularly for constant swing justice Anthony Kennedy, that argument probably won’t hold up.

There’s more work to be done in ensuring that every child, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, or any other criteria that has been marginalized in our society can receive the higher education that they deserve. Whether it is accomplished through affirmative action, race-neutral policies, or something else entirely, that is a laudable goal that will take time and effort, but will ultimately benefit us all.

[Slate]

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Featured image courtesy of [Adam Fagen via Flickr]

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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