Brown Boy Blog

           I think about titles and the names people give things every time the editors of Legalese change the title of the humor columns I’ve submitted so far. The

Law
Center is reinvigorating its strategic program in its pursuit of excellence. The initiative they called “Project Magellan.” I, for one, am quite pleased. After some in our hallowed halls screamed “bloody murder!” this past spring, our former Dean, Nancy Rapoport, comes armed with two working manuscripts as a rejoinder: “Managing by Ambush: Why Universities Can’t Keep Pace With the Real World” and “Lemmings: How Legal Education Fails Law Students.”  Yes, those are the real titles she’s given them and methinks she wasn’t too happy with the whole situation. There I was, just starting school in the summer, thinking our strategic program should have been called “Project Ray Charles Teaches Defensive Driving.”

For all the full-time 1Ls that missed it; the whole brouhaha stemmed from our slip (down that ubiquitous ‘slippery slope’ no doubt) in rankings over the past few years. Our gentle glide down the scale was exacerbated by other law schools having statistics on their side with regards to bar passage rates and better employment-after-graduation numbers. With all the talk about bar passage, it makes the uninitiated think the

Law
Center has a gastro-intestinal problem.  This we know, not to be true, since our sandwich salvation station in the commons keeps the stalls in the nearby men’s restroom seeing more occupation than
Beirut & the Gaza Strip. Though, with just over 90% passing rates, higher even than that giant burnt-orange bovine in
Austin, we really have done alright.

So perhaps it’s about the jobs, then. Is it really that hard to get a job when we’re done with all of this? I hope not. I think guys have it made. You could be that guy in class that just discovered deodorant yesterday and still slap on a ‘two-fer’ suit from SuitMart, get a crew cut, wear your grandpa’s pair of black penny loafers and you’re ready to rock the interview. Our female counterparts aren’t quite so lucky. God forbid they dare to wear their hair down or—can I even utter it?—dare to not wear hose to an interview!…Those infidels! Who knew that the Taliban ran the legal system in
Texas? Whenever did the Southern District of Texas include
Kandahar? Even I know that the asininely-sexist ‘skirts are more formal than pants’ argument has got as much credibility as the Warren Commission’s Single-Bullet-Theory. You would only hope that employers would have better things to think about than “that girl from U of H that was simply showing too much earring.” Next, I guess Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is going to be taking care of the Texas Bar’s annual spring gala. I can see the flyer for it now: “Join us for an evening of talk and non co-ed dining. Khomeini! Come all!!”

Maybe the problem isn’t us; it’s those in the legal machine that are victims of their own inertia. Why is it that no other academic field, or at least none that I know of, seeks to give many of its students, for the first time in their lives, grades that wouldn’t get them a job working the fries at the local burger shack? Why no feedback at all until the very end of their course, courtesy a mammoth final? Is the mandate of the law brigade that, ours is not to reason why, ours is to just to do and cry? (All apologies to Lord Tennyson). Yale’s school of law doesn’t seem to think much of grades and a GPA. Rumor has it that their lawyers do alright. Some argue that this is how it has always been done. I seem to recollect from an early Torts lesson (and I better, because my final is right around the corner) that just because something is customary doesn’t make it right: it could be customarily wrong.

            Perchance it’s time to seek out the new world for law students and the

Law
Center. Maybe then the powers that be were right in calling the initiative “Project Magellan.” Sure as heck beats my suggestion to our current Dean that he could try interacting with students on a more informal basis, like starting a student-faculty cooking class. Somehow “Simmer with Nimmer” never really took off the ground.