CALI Lesson: Louisiana Primary Legal Resources

My CALI Lesson Louisiana Primary Legal Resources (membership required, and you have to be logged in to access the lesson), is now on-line at CALI.Org.


The lesson will also be on the forthcoming 2009-2010 CALI DVD-Rom.

This was pretty quick - I turned in my final draft with revisions based on the two reviewers' comment about three weeks ago. But it was the first CALI lesson I wrote directly for the flash interface that CALI now prefers to use for all their lessons. The older lessons converted to the flash format don't look so great, but I took into consideration the layout of the flash lessons' display when I made the graphics for this one and it turned out pretty good.
CALI's Legal Research and Writing advisory group started soliciting state lesson a few years ago. I guess the main appeal for these are to students at law schools in a particular state, or who know they are going to be practicing in a state and want to learn about that state's legal resources. We have enough unique stuff in Louisiana to make for a decent lesson, and I hope students at the four law schools here get some use out of it.

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Is the Obama Administration Browsing Blogs for Policy Ideas?

I was belatedly reading at a discussion on Money Law, about the AIG bailout/bonus brouhaha. One of the comments linked to another blog, ButAsForMe.Com, with a posting about the car rental industry jockeying for TARP money. A clause in some legislation in January that amended TARP apparently makes car rental companies eligible for these loans (and, yes, as many commentators have pointed out, much of these “bailouts” are, as I understand it, loans that will eventually have to be paid back by these companies).

This piece at ButAsForMe.Com, posted on February 25, mainly discusses whether Enterprise Rental actually laid off the 2000 employees they said they did when they went begging for their share of the TARP pie. I didn’t read it until this weekend, but what stood out in my mind was this line:

Enterprise successfully argued you can help Detroit by giving loans to end-users. They said they deserve a bailout because they buy a lot of cars and will help the automakers through their own purchases. By following that flow of logic, everyone in the United States should be eligible for a government backed loan to buy a car. (Emphasis added)

The “[b]y following that flow of logic” line is, I guess, meant to be a bit of reductio ad absurdum, the absurd bit being “government backed loan[s] to buy a car”! Hahaha - how ridiculous!!! Even the Obama administration wouldn’t go THAT far, would they?

The reason that line stood out is I had just watched the Leno/Obama gabfest on our DVR. I had to check the transcript, but this story reminded me of something the President said:

In the meantime, we're taking a lot of steps to, for example, opening up -- open up separate credit lines outside of banks for small businesses so that they can get credit -- because there are a lot of small businesses out here who are just barely hanging on. Their credit lines are starting to be cut.

We're trying to set up a securitized market for student loans and auto loans outside of the banking system. (Emphasis added)

I guess its not so ridiculous because the President said it less than three weeks after the ButAsForMe.Com blogger used this as a theoretical absurdity to argue against allowing any company that has to buy cars as part of its business to use TARP money to do so. So the President says that they’re trying to set up a system under which we can all be eligible for a government backed loan to buy a car: good-bye, auto financing industry, or at least a big chunk of it, right? There goes another large segment of our economy usurped by the feds. But its early in the Obama administration and a lot of what they’re throwing up against the wall is not going to stick.

The moral of this story is: be careful what you blog about, for it might come true. Or don’t be careful if you have a wishlist of government entitlements - the administration may be trolling the blogosphere for ideas they hadn’t thought of already. Government-backed car loans! Ha - that is as absurd as the federal government setting up its own chain of check-cashing payday-loan stores! (Posted March 22, 2009; I’m hoping it becomes an official government proposal by mid-April - those 30% fees at Check-N-Go are killing me! Please, President Obama - cap all payday loans at 1% over prime! That’s fair, right?)

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Missing ABA Legal Education Statistics

I got obsessed with the “200 law schools” issue in my previous posting because I let myself get sidetracked while looking for some ABA statistics. Back in the Summer of 2007, several folks noted (Paul Caron here and Tom Bell here) that the ABA had finally put all the data from the ABA/LSAC Official Guide on the ABA web page in Excel spreadsheets so that the data-obsessed among us could crunch and sort the numbers however we wanted. It’s the same numbers published in the print edition of the Official Guide, and the ABA’s legal education page has some slices of the data in PDF, and other sites have other chunks of the data, but these were the raw numbers, in totality, in a format that you could use to do just about anything.

For example, I’ve been on the self-study committees for both of the ABA/AALS re-accreditation visits that we’ve been though since I came here in 1999, and I like to do things like compare the ratios of library books per student and per faculty, library square footage per student, etc., between us and our “peer group” law schools. Some of those turned out to be worthwhile comparisons and we actually used a few in the self-study reports. Back in 2001 I had to manually enter the data, but in 2007 I used the Excel spreadsheets and it saved me a lot of time. The spreadsheet also make it easy to sort all the data and see where your school falls among all 198 law schools when ranked according to all sorts of factors - percentage of minority students and faculty is one popular parlor game to play with those statistics around here.

Back in 2007, I think everyone presumed that the ABA was going to make new data available in a fresh set of spreadsheets each year thereafter. We had our site visit in April 2008, and I was only too glad to forget about law school statistics for a while, so I didn’t check back to get the following year’s spreadsheets until recently. The ABA statistics page is here:

http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/stats.html

and all they have are STILL the statistics that were there in the Summer of 2007, the “2008” data. (This is a confusing point - the ABA Official Guide is published the summer before the calendar year that is indicated by its “edition year”, and its data is from the questionnaire conducted in the previous Fall; so data from the Fall 2006 questionnaire was published as the “2008 Edition” of the Official Guide, which came out in the summer of 2007; the introduction to the print edition of the Guide explains this, more or less.)

So seeing that the expected 2009 data wasn’t there, I contacted the ABA statistics person. He said they were hard at work on the data collected last semester (Fall 2008) for the forthcoming “2010 Edition” of the Official Guide, which will be published this summer. When I clarified that I wanted the data from the 2009 edition, which was published last summer, and that all the web page had was the data from the previous edition, he told me that he had started working at the ABA last summer and so in the transition from his predecessor the data just didn’t get posted. He said that both sets of data, from the 2009 and 2010 editions of the Official Guide, might be released in the future, but that the decision to do so would be up to the ABA legal ed consultant.

So I’m going to gently prod our Dean to bring this up whenever he deals with the consultant or anyone else at the ABA, as well as when he talks to his fellow law school Deans at their various get-togethers, and anyone else interested in the law school accreditation process and comparisons and rankings and such should also gently prod the ABA legal education folks to release this data in those handy-dandy Excel spreadsheets and to do so routinely each year.

Full blog post...

200 Law Schools? Well, not quite...

Last week we got the 2007-2008 Annual Report of the ABA Legal Education Consultant. (Yes, we JUST got it - why it took that long to get the 07-08 annual report out, and why its not available on the ABA web site, I don’t know). It trumpets “Marking a Milestone: 200 Law Accredited Law Schools”. I must have missed this last summer when it was a news item in legal circles. I track law schools for ALL-SIS survey on Continuing Status and Tenure, and I knew we were getting close to have 200 ABA-approved schools, but I only had 198 schools on my list, including the three new schools that were provisionally approved last year (Drexel, Elon, and Charlotte).

I compared my list with the ABA’s list in the annual report and the first thing I noticed was that the ABA’s 200 schools includes the Army Judge Advocate General School, which I didn’t think the ABA really “approved” as its not a J.D. - granting institution. I may be wrong, but searching the school’s web page, I couldn’t find any mention of the ABA.

The other discrepancy I found between my list and the ABA’s is that they count the two Wideners separately, and I had it only once. I knew the two Rutgers (Camden and Newark) are administratively separate law schools, but I thought Widener was more like Thomas Cooley, which has three campuses but is just one school and is listed as such by the ABA.

Then I checked the ABA/LSAC Official Guide listings. There, Widener seems to occupy a middle ground between Thomas Cooley, which has just one listing, and the two Rutgers, which have separate listings: Widener has separate data pages for each campus, but it has just one “information page”, the page with all the stuff provided by each law school, along with the school’s applicant profile.

Next I looked on the web page for the ABA Legal Ed section and the master list of law schools there:

http://www.abanet.org/legaled/approvedlawschools/alpha.html

The two Rutgers are listed separately, but Widener is only listed once, as is Thomas Cooley.

So what’s the determining factor? A single Dean? Separate administrations? What?
Widener only has one Dean for the two campuses, while each Rutgers has its own Dean (well, one dean and a dean search getting underway at Rutgers Newark). There’s also just one web page for Widener, but two for Rutgers.

Then I checked our catalog and grabbed last year’s ABA Legal Education annual report. In the 06-07 report’s master list of approved law schools, the ABA does NOT list Widener as two separate schools. Also, the text of the report (at page 25), gives a brief summary of how many schools there was that year and notes that “[t]wo of the approved law schools, Thomas Cooley and Widener, have branch campuses” and also says “Penn State University operates a second location”. Cooley, both last year and this year, is only listed once by the ABA, but why is Widener now listed twice? I don’t think they changed the way they operate or how they’re organized.

Maybe the ABA legal ed folks were just a little over-eager to pass the “200 law schools” milestone. But even with quibbling about the JAG school and Widener, in another year or two, we’ll definitely have over 200 ABA-approved law schools. The 2006-2007 report noted that two other new schools had applied for provisional approval, though one of them - American Justice School of Law/aka “Alben W. Barkley School of Law” is now closed. And I don’t know much about the “Eugenio Mara de Hostos Law School”, in Puerto Rico, but there are others in the wings working on approval.

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Two points on "Tales from Torture's Dark World" by Mark Danner

"Tales from Torture's Dark World" by Mark Danner, from Sunday's New York Times is generating a good bit of press across the blogosphere. Danner, a journalism professor at Berkeley, has a book coming out, "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror", so this op-ed/essay and the longer article flogged in the byline notes coming out soon in the New York Review of Books are all helping to publicize the book.

The piece itself is mostly extended excerpts from a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, "clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials", referenced earlier as CIA officials. He was provided a copy by unnamed sources, and after a cursory check, I didn't see the full thing anywhere on-line, but it may be out there. Just curious about that - there's no reason to think he's being selected in his excerpting.

Danner notes several times in his introductory remarks that because the report, and the statements made by the prisoners, were not intended for public distribution, that this lends them a strong aura of authenticity. But as several former officials of the Bush administration have noted in response to this report and earlier accounts on mis-treatment, members of the Taliban and other combatants have been trained to relay stories of torture if captured. They wouldn't be completely ignorant of what the ICRC's purpose was in conducting those interviews, and if well-trained they would relate such stories any time they were asked about their detention and their interrogations.

Two details from this story jumped out at me:

"A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe."

If a black cloth was over his face, then how did he know it was a mineral water bottle being used to pour the water? Did his interrogators show him the bottle before they covered his face and told him "here's the bottle we're going to use to pour the water on you after we cover up your face"? And what is a mineral water bottle, how is it different from any other water bottle? That struck me as a strange detail to include. If you're being water boarded, the specific vessel used to pour the water would seem to be one of the more inconsequential details.

The second detail is from one a detainee who had lost a leg from a combat injury. He notes that:

I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell.

And then that:

After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists

He removed his artificial leg while his arms were fixed with handcuffs above his head? OK, maybe his interrogators uncuffed him so he could remove his leg, but if the stump of his missing leg was hurting, isn't that all the more in keeping with the intent of all these proceedings? Or was he able to shake off his prosthesis without using his hands?

These both sounded like the sort of statement a decent defense attorney would seize upon when cross-examining a witness.

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