Massachusetts adding cameras to courtrooms

The Boston Globe reports today that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced proposed new rules about cameras in courtrooms at all levels of the judicial system. The rules are not final yet, and comments are encouraged; the article tells interested readers where to send comments. The rule was crafted by the Supreme Court's Judicial Media Committee with input from journalists over the course of this year.

The rules are designed to increase citizen access to courts and trials, including blogger access. There is already a rule allowing 2 cameras in every court: one for television and one for newspapers. The new rule would allow 3 cameras, designating the new camera for Web access. The Court is clearly paying attention to the new role that citizen journalists have been playing in coverage of local news. As newspapers find it difficult to fund investigative reporters, these volunteer bloggers have often filled an important gap in coverage. While I certainly hope that professional journalists will continue to be available to cover important state trials, it's nice to think that a case of local interest could be covered by a blogger even when the papers decide it's not "big enough."

In a summary released yesterday, the court said “the news media would be defined as those who are regularly engaged in the reporting and publishing of news or information about matters of public interest.’’

The rules would allow journalists to use laptop computers and other electronic devices while court is in session, provided it is not disruptive.

Even with the new rules, judges still have the authority to ban cameras in certain circumstances. Also, journalists would still be barred from recording jurors at all times during a trial, whether it is a civil or criminal matter.

(from the Globe article by John R. Ellement, a staffer from the Globe who has shared in the Globe's 2003 Pulitzer prize. I was curious because of the rule, who was reporting.) This is the Court that pioneered webcasts (and archives of them) of oral arguments in their court. The Court really is seeking public feedback before making the rule final. Comments can be sent:

Christine P. Burak,
Secretary, Supreme Judicial Court Rules Committee,
Supreme Judicial Court,
John Adams Courthouse,
One Pemberton Square,
Boston MA 02108 on or before Jan. 28, 2011

The photo of the Court listening to arguments is from the Suffolk Law School website that houses the webcasts and archives.

Digitization at the Kennedy Library

Perhaps because I was born and raised in Boston, I have always been very interested in President John F. Kennedy. His election is the first I remember--I will never forget it. We watched every minute of the Inauguration on television, and were moved by the inaugural address. It was a time of hope and promise. Who could have predicted it would all end in tragedy when Kennedy was assassinated? We watched every minute of the coverage of the assassination, and were shocked when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, seemingly in front of our very eyes.

These memories came rushing over me when I read an article in the Boston Globe about a massive digitization project under way at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "A four-year, $10 million effort to digitize the JFK Library and Museum's archives, making hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, and recordings available online, is nearing completion of its first phase." Although this represents just a "small portion of the collection," the project "marks the first time a presidential library established in the paper age has fully committed itself to the digital era." None of the other presidential libraries have begun to undertake digitization projects on such a massive scale, but the National Archives, which oversees the presidential libraries, hopes the Kennedy archives will be a model for other projects.

The article discusses the behind-the-scene efforts to make the digitization project and the redesign of the library website successful. I was interested to read that all the scanning was done by hand to protect the increasingly fragile originals as well as to ensure that "even pencil notes would be legible." I was also glad to know that a great deal of attention is being paid to the addition of metadata so that the documents will be accessible. For instance, the phrase "Cuban Missile Crisis" "must be embedded retroactively to make the relevant documents searchable" because that term was not used in the White House at the time.

Iceland rewrites its constitution: radical democracy

Iceland has a current Constitution conveniently posted to the Internet in English by its government. It is a pretty good looking document to my untutored eye, with 79 Articles in seven roman numeral sections. The Constitution sets Iceland up as a Republic, with a democratically elected government. It lays out the powers, duties and limits of power for the President, the judiciary and the Althingi, the world's oldest elective legislative body which has roots in ancient Icelandic history, founded in 930 AD. Section VI sets up the Evangelical Lutheran Church as the official state church, entitled to state support (surprise!), but also provides in Article 63:

...the right to form religious associations and to practice their religion in conformity with their individual convictions. Nothing may however be preached or practised which is prejudicial to good morals or public order.

(Article 64) ... Everyone shall be free to remain outside religious associations. No one shall be obliged to pay any personal dues to any religious association of which he is not a member.

A person who is not a member of any religious association shall pay to the University of Iceland the dues that he would have had to pay to such an association, if he had been a member. This may be amended by law.

In section VII, there are a list of human rights guaranteed by the Icelandic Constitution. I don't know what (if anything) in the Constitution has caused the Icelanders to decide, but they are rewriting this document. I found a very nice statement from the Icelandic government webpage describing the history of constitutions and rewriting them, amending them, in Iceland:

Icelanders were given their first constitution in 1874 when Iceland was still part of the Danish kingdom. Though it may be said that it is still valid in some respects, it has since been significantly amended. The first important change was in 1903, when Iceland was granted Home Rule, which went into effect in 1904. Considerable changes were made in 1915 when voting rights were expanded and women were granted the right to vote for seats in Althingi, the Icelandic parliament. A new constitution went into effect in 1920 following the recognition in 1918 of Iceland as independent of Denmark, though still in a personal union with the Danish king. This version of the constitution remained in force virtually unchanged until 1944 when the Republic of Iceland was founded.

The present constitution dates from 17 June 1944, and has been amended six times since. These amendments have especially concerned setting constituency boundaries and guaranteeing equal voting rights, but the most important change was made in 1995 when the human rights section was reviewed and reworded to conform to the international agreements of which Iceland is a signatory.

(the government website credits: Iceland - The New Millenium Series, Carol Nord ehf. Text by Professor Sigurður Líndal.

Iceland has gotten a lot of notice in the blogosphere (and this Irish Constitution thread), and the Seattle Times) because their new Constitutional Assembly to rewrite the Constitution is open to all citizens, with many non-politicians, "plain" folk entering their names. When I looked for news stories more recent, and maybe straight from Iceland, I discovered that they have just held the elections for the Constitutional Assembly, and had a disappointingly low turnout. Iceland Review Online reports that it was the lowest turnout in their history, with only 36% of voter turnout, countrywide. The short article includes quotes from various experts who analyze the possible reasons for the poor turnout. They consider everything from voter fatigue to lack of political campaigning or coherent campaigns by candidates, to perceived lack of need for a new Constitution. From the Yahoo News piece,

(snip) Pressure mounted for action after the nation's economic collapse in 2008, an event punctuated by ordinary citizens gathering outside the Althingi, the parliament, banging pots, pans and barrels — a loud, clanging expression of fury. The meltdown was seen not only as a failure of the economy but of the system of government and regulatory agencies. Many came to believe a tighter constitutional framework — including a clearer division of powers — might have been able to minimize that damage, or even prevent it.

"It is very important for ordinary citizens, who have no direct interest in maintaining the status quo, to take part in a constitutional review," said Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir. "We are hoping this new constitution will be a new social covenant leading to reconstruction and reconciliation, and for that to happen, the entire nation needs to be involved." (snip)

Icelanders debated their values and turned to questioning the foundations of their society, including those that had facilitated the boom. Anger grew as more instances of misdeeds and incompetence in the private and public sector were exposed. Icelanders woke up to the harsh fact that their country, which had consistently been at or near the top of the Transparency International anti-corruption index, was, in fact, steeped in corruption.

That was ultimately confirmed in a 2,000-page report following a special parliamentary investigation. That report showed that the foundations of Icelandic society were decayed and that a sweeping revision of the social framework was needed.

Sigurdardottir says a new social covenant can at least assist in "restoring the public's faith in the government."

The constitutional assembly will be made up of 25 to 31 delegates, the final number to be determined by a gender and equality ratio. It will be made up of regular citizens elected by direct personal voting. Anyone is eligible to stand for election, with the exceptions of the president, lawmakers and the committee appointed to organize the assembly.

The assembly will draft a proposed new constitution next year. They will use material from another extraordinary project earlier this year in which 1,000 randomly chosen Icelanders — aged 18-89 — offered their views on what should be in the constitution.

Now the race is on to be among the charter's authors, with 523 people in the running. Truck drivers, university professors, lawyers, journalists and computer geeks are all among the candidates. All have been given equal air time on Icelandic radio to make their platforms known.

Those elected will receive a salary equal to that of Iceland's lawmakers while the constitutional review takes place, and Icelandic employers are legally obliged to grant leave to any employees elected to the assembly.

The Yahoo News story goes on to interview 3 different candidates on their views, which ranged from enthusiastic, to a candidate who is running to prevent the Assembly. This last guy says it's not needed, and is a ridiculous expense at a time when the country is in economic crisis. He says the constitution had nothing to do with Iceland's bank collapse in 2008, which precipitated the country's complete economic meltdown. According to the article which is pretty much repeated in every Internet posting, Iceland has never written its own constitution until now, having previously just adopted Denmark's constitution pretty much wholesale and then tinkered on it. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to follow. Iceland is pioneering again in democratic actions.

Tip of the OOTJ hat to our colleague & former OOTJ blogger, Jim Milles, who also introduced me to Allthing history many years ago. The image is the Law Rock, at Thingvellir, (where the Allthingi met originally), showing the Law Speaker, another bit of Icelandic legal history, and (frankly) much more colorful than the photos of the current Allthingi building. Courtesy of Wikipedia article on the Allthingi, and credited as W.G. Collingwood "19th century Alþing in session."

Information Overload -- possible ways forward

The Boston Globe had an article today, "Information Overload, the early years," by Ann Blair. I have to say I began to read it with some reluctance. We have all seen a number of articles along similar lines, where they go back in history and pull up fascinating quotes that prove that Erasmus was disheartened by the sudden plethora of books, and thought it was all just too much. This article does exactly that, of course, showing that when the printing press emerged, yes indeedy, people began to feel swamped in books. Ms. Blair also provides the stunning statistics about how much data is being produced each year, along with quotes from Nicholas Carr worrying (as I do, in fact) that we are changing the way we read.

But the article goes beyond the usual run of the mill descriptions of how they felt the same kind of overload we do. Blair does a wonderful job of noticing that after the first shock of the outpouring of publishing, that various players began devising methods to deal with the wash of data. This is fascinating and gives us actual helpful pointers about how to cope now. I did not know, for instance, that this was the moment when bibliographies, indexes and tables of contents really developed and blossomed. Reference books of all types began to be invented under the pressure of "too many books to read." Collections of quotations, called "florilegia" originally came out. Then selecting, collecting and digesting all kinds of information emerged. I did not realize that this was when note-taking became a skill, or that it had to be taught. And I was fascinated to learn that the roots of library card catalogs are here, at this point in history:

Compilers cut and pasted, very literally, with scissors and glue, from manuscript notes they had already taken — or, even more efficiently, by exploiting a new, cheap source of printed information: older editions of books. These slips were cut from a full page and soon glued onto a new sheet, but in the mid-17th century for the first time one scholar advocated using the slips themselves as an information-storage system. Crucial to this method was a specially designed piece of furniture: a note closet comprising slats studded with hooks on which the slips could be stored and labeled. Probably only a handful of such closets were built, but the slip — and the idea of the filing system — had a long career ahead. In the 18th century the political theorist Montesquieu took notes on the backs of playing cards, which were blank in those days. His younger contemporary Carl Linnaeus made his own slips for recording the characteristics of plants, from which he created a taxonomic system that we still use today. The slips, ordered and sorted, would eventually inspire both the index card and the library card catalog.

There were also some failed experiments. There was a sort of "family tree" design of hierarchies and brackets to show the contents and their relationships. There were various efforts to use squiggles and indentations and other signals to show the subcategories of topics before the indented alphabetical indexes and outline-format tables of contents that we see today. This is important to understand. None of the forms we use today were pre-determined, and there had to be experiments to discover what would work the best. There had to be trial and error to find the best methods of dealing with that original information overload, from Johann Gutenberg's printing press. And that means we can and must do the same thing now. In fact, it is happening already, in ways I am not sure we can recognize yet. But it is happening all the same. We are already beginning to cope and adjust. Improved search engines, better search techniques, more ruthless culling of results. I suppose the "cloud tags" are another example of a technique of dealing with labeling.

Librarians' skills are more useful than ever in sorting information. I suspect we will have useful things to offer in the development of these new tools and techniques.

The image is of the library at the University of Leyden from the Globe article and is credited to Getty Archives. The caption in the print edition said the image was from 1610. I hope the image is clear enough for you to see the books chained to the shelves, and the reading racks below the shelf. There are 2 women visiting the library as well as two dogs, which I hope was not an equivalent visit. The books are shelved by topic, with, if you can read the labels along the top of the shelves, "Iuris Consultis," "Medici," "Historici," and other topics listed. Wonderful image with globes having adorable little individual covers, and set up high on shelf tops when not in use. You can see the readers stood at the shelves to read the books, resting their foot on a foot rail, to rest their backs. The table is not for sitting to read, but to set the globes on for measuring distance.

Thanksgiving Day - counter traditions

At Plymouth yesterday, a varied group of Native Americans gathered for the 41st National Day of Mourning. The Boston Globe has a nice article by Erin Ailworth. Each Thanksgiving Day since 1970, they have been gathering to commemorate the day in a different ceremony. From the perspective of the Wampanoag and other native peoples, the arrival of pilgrims which we celebrate at the Plymouth living museum and with the Thanksgiving holiday, was really the beginning of a catastrophe. The tribal peoples lost their lands and their traditional ways of living as European settlers moved to the Americas in greater numbers.

Not all the people attending the ceremony were Native Americans. Although it was not a large turnout, the article reported on several people who attended to show solidarity or to widen their perspective. But for the native participants, they said it felt empowering.

Other New England fall traditions for this time of year: rescuing sea turtles that have become lost and disoriented as the water cools in the fall. They ride the Gulf Stream up to Cape Cod area for feeding, I suppose. But as the water cools, they can't find their way back into the warm stream to ride back down south to safety. New Englanders make regular sweeps of the beaches and haul the chilled turtles off to the New England Aquarium. The staff there have made a fine science of how to bring the turtles back safely to normal temperatures. The turtles' body temperatures can be as low as the 40's Farenheit when brought in. The normal temperature should be something in the low to mid- 70's according to the Globe article. If the turtles' body temperatures are raised too quickly, they will become ill as dormant pathogens are stirred up. Apparently, they rescued a record 17 turtles the day before Thanksgiving, making a total of 41 since October 20. That's a lot this year! And of that total, 90% have been the rarest kind, Kemp's Ridley. The article by Jeffrey Fish (charming name for somebody writing about Aquarium type matters) reports that they expect to release the turtles next summer, and can hope for 80-90% survival rate after they are released.

* As of Thanksgiving, 2013, I have been contacted by several people who say that the Globe's photograph was taken of a sacred ceremony where people were specifically requested NOT to take photographs.  I have been asked to remove the image from this blog post.  For those curious, it showed a man not so much kindling a fire under the statue of Massasoit, as blessing it with smoke. (Betsy McKenzie)

The image is from the Globe article on the Plymouth Rock protest, the National Day of Mourning. The caption reads, Juan Gonzalez of Boston kindled a fire under the statue of Massasoit in a prayer ritual during the 41st National Day of Mourning in Plymouth yesterday. credit to Yoon S. Byun of the Globe Staff.

2-L Book Thief at OSU Moritz Law Library

The story about the 2-L law student at Ohio State who was stealing books from the campus library and selling them online, allegedly netting more than $10,000, has got me steaming. There are also links at Above the Law and local news outlets: Columbus Dispatch. As of late October, campus police had discovered 1,351 books listed online for sale by the individual, whose name has not been released because he has not (yet) been charged. The police were alerted by a Brazilian lawyer who bought one of the books from "Orion Bookstore" through Amazon.com, and wondered about a library stamp which had been marked through with black marker. She contacted the university by e-mail. They checked and found the volume missing from the shelf. And things rolled on from there, apparently.

The police investigators found that some of the items listed for sale were still on the library shelves! This student was offering merchandise to be stolen on spec. The detectives arranged a sting operation. They marked a volume with invisible ink that would only show up under ultraviolet light. Then, they asked an out-of-state relative to order the text from Orion Bookstore. They set up a hidden camera, aimed at the shelves where the book was shelved, and monitored the area. Soon, they had on tape the individual they think to be the student entrepreneur removing the requested book. And in a few days, the requested book arrived by mail at the relative's address, with the ultra-violet-sensitive mark.

The Columbus Dispatch article mentions "court documents," and yet all the reports agree that the name is not released because the student has not been charged. I suppose that the student has been arraigned before a grand jury, since the amount mentioned in all the reports, $10,000, easily moves the theft into felony range.

I don't know about your library, but I have a budget line for "lost and stolen" items. The line is used up every single year. Some years, we exceed the budget by a shocking amount. There was a year when we suspected one of our reserve students of being a major book thief. I wanted to do a sting with a hidden camera, but my associates really just wanted to get the year over and the student graduated. I allowed myself to be overruled. But I still think it was the wrong thing to do. That money is tuition dollars that the individual stole from his fellow students, damn it. Why should he be specially entitled to either steal for himself, or as my colleagues suspected in our case, for his friends? They thought he might be handing out the copies of required textbooks and study aids to pals just as the library was closing each night, and allowing them to walk out with their new personal copy.

That is just so wrong.

Updating an old post: Typography for Lawyers

Dear OOTJers: In August, 2009, we featured a post about a website, Typography for Lawyers. Matthew Butterick, a civil litigator from L.A., runs the website. But before his life in the law, Butterick got a fine arts degree focusing on typography and graphic design. So this is something the man thinks about. The post at OOTJ, for instance, was looking at ballot design. But there are lots of other applications for lawyers to think about as well: pleadings, memos, contracts and other legal documents would all be easier (or maybe harder!) to understand when laid out thoughtfully. I think statutes and regulations should be published with consultations from this guy or somebody like him.

At any rate, he has a new book out that I think law libraries might like to know about:

Typography for Lawyers

Well, he's into clarity, I suppose. It's based on his website. The link above will show you can order it from the publisher or from Amazon. He even has a foreward from Bryan Garner, who wittily shows you how to use the book to make your life easier by handing it to your associate to show them how to lay out their memos in future in a more readable way. I think my profs will be delighted if the students will use it to lay out their papers in a more readable way. But I also buy things with an eye to my alumni who regularly use my library and I know they will be delighted.

Librarians Add Value in Law Firms

Helane Davis passed along this ABA Journal news item, Does It Pay to HIre a Law Firm Librarian?. Patrick Lamb of the Valorem Law Group writes in the New Normal series his take on this question. Few firms now would need the physical space of a library since so much of what they use is online. (My firm friends actually say they are keeping a small number of print titles, usually a careful selection of secondary resources). But, Lamb doesn't know about this. So, then, he asks, if you don't have books, and you therefore don't have a library, do you need a librarian? I was very happy to watch him work this one out:

We generate as much data every 2 days as all of humankind had created until 2003, and the pace is picking up. (credit to Google general counsel Kent Walker at the ACC annual meeting, 2010). Thus, Lamb reasons, librarians are information professionals in this time when it is increasingly vital to filter and sort the overflow of information that is available. (Actually, he doesn't get to the filter idea; Lamb is still speaking in terms of finding.) But he realizes that the associates who do the research at law firms are NOT information professionals and are floundering:

They may become good at analyzing information, but that is somewhat of a crapshoot, and they certainly are not trained at finding the “stuff’” that we frequently need every day. When you live in a value-fee world, someone who finds the right information efficiently is really valuable.

If you have someone who is really good at finding the right information, why would a firm need, or even want, to draw a line between where that information came from? But firms do precisely this when they have a "knowledge officer" (internally created information) and a "head librarian" (externally created information). Frankly, information is information regardless of its origin, and one person should manage it.

Lamb goes on to think about how librarians should be working closely with the marketing department and with accounting, making the information they can find "supercharge" those two departments in law firms for business development and pricing models. (Actually, I believe there are a lot of firm librarians who are doing these things. Knowledge management is one of the code words that means researching companies to help build your firm's business. I think it also has been used to help firms set pricing, though I am less certain about this.)

So far, this is a very cheering article. Lamb certainly has a grasp on what librarians can do for law firms. But then, he cites to an unidentified "recent survey."

A small group of librarians was asked to describe the value they bring to the organization. No one described anything similar to what is described above. In fact, several responses were along these lines: “loyal accurate, friendly and smart”; “intelligent, hard-working, very efficient”; “cataloging skills and knowledge”; “hard worker, always willing to help.”

He does not identify either the survey or its source, and we cannot tell what sort of librarians or the kind of organization to which they belong. This is horribly frustrating and I cannot believe that this was a survey of law firm librarians. I cannot think they would self identify with such terms to explain their value to their firms. Lamb, n all honesty, explains his post as a "head fake" to get all his readers thinking about what value THEY add to their organization, lest THEY become irrelevant, as these librarians are made to look. This is an infuriating trick and really quite unfair.

What an A**hole. I hope somebody misfiles his most expensive looseleaf and then maybe mis-shepardizes an important case for him.

Why the Job Market is Changing - Full Version

National Jurist Magazine for Nov. 2010 features a really interesting article by William D. Henderson, professor at I.U., Bloomington, "Why the job market is changing." If you follow the link to the online version of the free magazine that is likely sitting in your law school lobbies right now, you can read it free by registering. They are pretty good about not flooding your mailbox, if you are careful about how you register. Unfortunately, the blog posts I see around the internet only feature the short version of the article that is all you get without registering. There is more and it's worth reading the whole article.

Henderson not only reviews the recent (big) law firm hiring model, which relied on pedigree and grades, and concludes that it has never done a particularly good job of predicting who would be a really good lawyer. He observes that the current economic climate is encouraging in-house counsel and other cost-conscious clients to incentivize (great word!) the large firms to rethink this model. That is, they are forcing them to lay off massive numbers of less-productive associates and even partners, and to radically re-think how they hire and bring along the next generation in their firms. They can no longer hire large numbers of associates each year with the expectation that they could train them and winnow them at client expense. And finally, Henderson notes that traditional law school is particularly poor at teaching the skills and behaviors needed to form a lawyer who is going to rise to the top of the current scrum: "...indeed, your typical law professor is completely unqualified to serve as your jungle guide."

You nailed it, Prof. Henderson! But the rest of the article is well worth reading and that is what all the excited blawgers missed with their short posts. Henderson reviews the history and notes that what we have recently thought of as "traditional" is really post- WWII. After putting our period into a bit of historical perspective, he does a terrific job of reviewing the big picture version of what happened with the economic melt-down and its effect on the legal job market. But then he offers some actual data, from his own research:

In 2007 and 2008, 46 percent of all entry-level associates at an AmLaw 100 law firm were graduates of a Top 14 law school (the composition of the top 14 law schools in the U.S. News rankings has not changed in 20 years). Yet, during this same period, 30 percent of lawyers promoted to partner were from Top 14 schools. Further, as of 2009, only 35 percent of general counsels for a Fortune 500 company had graduated from a Top 14 school. This suggests that the advantage of higher test scores and academic pedigree diminishes rather than compounds over time -- at least for partnership or general counsel positions.

He explains a study by Professors Marjorie Schultz and Shelton Zedeck of the University of California-Berkeley, who applied 26 factors needed to be a successful attorney to create an assessment tool. They offered the tool to peers and supervisors to assess a large sample of students and lawyers who graduated either from U.C. Berkeley or from U.C. Hastings. They then compared the results to the individuals' LSAT, undergraduate GPA and first year grades, to see what sort of correlation they found between these usual measures of academic ability and the new measures of lawyering aptitude.

Depending upon the sample, between two and eight of the 26 factors were meaningfully correlated with the academic credentials. The best positive predictions were for skills taught in law schools, such as Analysis and Reasoning, Researching Law, Writing and Problem Solving.

Yet, some of the correlations were negative. For the lawyers in the study, LSAT and first-year grades were negatively correlated with Networking and Community Service. For law students, undergraduate GPA was negatively correlated with Practical Judgment, Ability to See the World through the Eyes of Others, and Developing Relationships. In contrast, the vast majority of the 26 success factors correlated with personality and situational judgment tools that are commonly used in business.

Professor Henderson suggests that large law firms, along with other employers will be moving away from this current/most recent model of "law school hierarchy." He notes that findings from the After the JD study show that large firm associates hired from Top 10 law schools report high levels of dissatisfaction, and are more likely to leave. Associates at the same firms hired from "regional" law schools are more satisfied and more likely to stay in their positions. He also notes that firms are becoming more and more pressured to develop their business markets, and that requires hiring "...intelligent, creative, adaptable, highly motivated graduates who have a passion for client service." Law firms will increasingly move to using the sorts of behavioral interviews, personality tests, and simulated group work that other businesses have used successfully for some time to hire successful management candidates.

Law schools need to start treating the practice of law as a business. They need to take the ABA reports that call for more practical skills seriously. The major bars to this change have been faculty reluctance to change from podium/substantive classes which have dominated law school since Dean Langdell's day, and the bar exams which really do govern what law schools decide to teach. It's very difficulty for a board of bar examiners to devise a realistic and objective test of a skill like drafting or research, and so they have left it very much with the legal analysis in the form of the essay exams based on the law school classes, and writing based on those same essays, not on filings or drafting that a practicing lawyer would do. It means that our students graduate without knowing how to draft wills, or write a complaint or answer one. They have to learn all that after they pass the bar. Which always seemed pretty crazy to me. And that's what the economy is forcing to change. The law schools that can change with it will be at the forefront of a new era, and their students will be very lucky, indeed.

Building a Path to a Dream: Martinez

The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday in Martinez v. Regents of the University of California that California law could provide in-state tuition to any student who proved residency in the state by attending a California high school for three years, and graduating. The state statute did not violate federal immigration law. Martinez reverses a 2008 lower court decision finding the statute violated federal law which prohibits providing postsecondary benefits to aliens, based on state residency if the same benefits are not available to non-resident citizens.

Justice Ming W. Chin, writing for the Court, points out that the benefits are not, in fact, based on California residence. Instead, this statute bases the benefit on attendance at, and graduation from, a California high school. The decision cites statistics showing that the majority of those using the benefit are not illegal immigrants, but instead, are legal U.S. residents who graduated from a California high school and then moved elsewhere.