I read your blog every day, as do thousands of other people. Thanks for your thought snd the effort you put into it.

I was reading your post about Law School 4.0 and was intrigued by the idea that there is discussion in some circles about the way that attorneys are trained. I think the discussion is long overdue.

I’ve been a cop for thirty years and have spent a tremendous amount of time in court. I’ve known great lawyers and lousy ones and I toyed at one time with the idea of going to law school. It was impossible for a number of reasons, but the main barriers to entry are:

Accessibility. I live in Louisiana and going to law school means moving to Baton Rouge or New Orleans. There aren’t any law schools in central or north Louisiana.

Cost. Law school is expensive, though not exorbitantly more expensive than graduate school. However, when I was researcing law schools (and th is may have changed in the past decade), law school required the student to be unemployed for at least the first year. Families require sustenance and going to law school full-time demands sacrifies from the family that might not be overcome for a long time.

I went to graduate school at nights. My family was young and I was able to juggle a fairly rigorous academic load while taking care of my obligations. My family was aware that Daddy was studying, but they didn’t suffer. Any reasonably intelligent person can enroll in graduate programs in business, the clergy, education, or any number of other disciplines and attain their education on a night-school basis.

Of course, if the mission of a law school is to maintain the income and status of the faculty, you need do nothing.

Thanks again for all your writings.

Well, as the pressure mounts to end night law programs, it sounds like the public-service ideal is fading. In fact, there’s a good argument that changes in the educational system in general tend to favor the children of those who are already high up on the occupational ladder. This somehow made me think of Ross Douthat’s column on Race, Class, Gender, and Sarah Palin:

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is — the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity — then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal — one that extends well outside the Republican Party’s shrinking base.

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard. . . .

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.

What Joel Kotkin calls “the Gentry Faction” has taken over the Democrats completely. Wherever they dominate, you see a lot of talk about equality — and a lot of effort at maintaining inequality and keeping the proles in their place. There are plenty of Gentry in the Republican party, too. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a populist backlash arise, on either the left, or the right, or both, or somewhere in between.

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Walsh writes:

I began a career in information technology (called MIS then) in 1980. Here is the sort of disk drive that was attached to the system I first worked on.

This thing was the size of a large clothes washer. It was connected to the computer by a ribbon cable. The thing used to shake like a
washing machine in times of heavy disk usage. One time when a service tech neglected to secure the leveling feet the drive walked its way,
due to the shaking, so far away from the computer that the connecting cable disconnected (it wasn’t properly secured either).

Fun stories to tell the kids, but I don’t miss those days!

Me neither. Heck, it wasn’t very long ago that I was marveling over the first 1 TB consumer drive, and now they’ve gotten dirt-cheap.

As always, IowaHawk was ahead of the curve. But if you’re bucking the trend, see Virginia Postrel.

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Actually, I’ve got a law review article on this very topic in the works. Of course, the question Are law reviews relevant to the future of law? also arises . . . .

Public employee pension plans are plagued by overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods — which discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected for investments — these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion.

The numbers are worse using market valuation methods (the methods private-sector plans must use), which discount benefit liabilities at lower interest rates to reflect the chance that the expected returns won’t be realized. Using that method, University of Chicago economists Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh calculate that, even prior to the market collapse, public pensions were actually short by nearly $2 trillion. That’s nearly $87,000 per plan participant. With employee benefits guaranteed by law and sometimes even by state constitutions, it’s likely these gargantuan shortfalls will have to be borne by unsuspecting taxpayers.

Some public pension administrators have a strategy, though: Keep taxpayers unsuspecting.

It’s worse than Enron, but nobody will go to jail for it.

He doesn’t seem to have done a lot of sorting since, actually, to judge from the rest of the piece and what’s going on now. But if you want a nuclear-free world, wouldn’t a good start be to stop Iran and North Korea from getting nuclear weapons? Not seeing much action, there . . . .

UPDATE: Robert Mayer reports on Tucson: “They’ve definitely got a hold on it! 4000-5000 turnout — even more than April 15 — and another $7k raised for the next event!”

And here’s a report from Sunnyvale, California: “For several hours, the sidewalks around the intersection at Stevens Creek and Winchester boulevards were clogged with crowds estimated at as many as 1,000 people, about a fifth of whom were part of a counter-demonstration. The ‘tea party’ demonstrators decried plans by the White House and Congress to overhaul the nation’s troubled health care system.” Just scroll down for lots more Tea Party coverage from this weekend.

Plus, news video from DC. It’s from “Russia Today” (via Google News) and the coverage seems fairer than most US networks. It’s a topsy-turvy world . . . .

Paul Krugman, meanwhile, runs this chart, when perhaps he really should be talking about this one.

And Joe Biden says the White House got it wrong. “We ‘Misread the Economy’.”

Related: Stomping on the “green shoots.”

My lawyer’s eye fixates on one word — in that last sentence: will.

You start out with your terrible, suggestive flier. And just when my mind is screaming quit putting all the blame on the damned flier, you’re all let me be clear: The flier was not the only problem.

Okay, so you will confess that you did plan to sell access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at your home?

Then on to the crisp declarative We will not organize such events. You skipped a step!

I know you won’t organize “such events” now — now that you’ve been publicly humiliated. You’re glossing over the key thing you ought to apologize for: that you did organize a series of dinners at your home to make money giving access to Washington power brokers.

Would they be so sorry if they hadn’t been caught out? No.

UPDATE: No, it doesn’t get her off the hook that she’s Tina Weymouth’s niece.